Reflection: Synchronous CMC

Synchronous CMC can provide a lot of opportunities in language learning.  From a very practical perspective, CMC can allow real-time spoken or written communication with native (or highly proficient) speakers of the target language.  I've had this experience with sites like LiveMocha, which has a text chat function that you can use with friends who are learning your language (and vice-versa).  Another interesting avenue for SCMC is computer games.  Although many of them aren't very suitable for language teaching, I think lots of games have great potential for extensive conversing.  In games that have international servers, there is often a mix of languages present but during overlapping prime playtimes, English often emerges as lingua franca.  In my younger, nerdier, more enjoyable years, I remember playing cooperative games with players from Brazil, Costa Rica, Germany, and Japan.

As far as using CMC in a traditional classroom setting, I think a lot of careful considerations need to be made.  Choosing to use a text based SCMC over simply putting students in groups for f2f interaction should be a conscious, principled decision.  If you are aiming to develop fluency in CMC, which could be useful for students who might take an online course in university or work in tech support, then SCMC tasks would probably be appropriate in a traditional classroom, for example.  Text SCMC has also been shown to lead to more balanced output, so that may be another reason to occasionally use it- give your less outgoing or less confident students a chance to be heard.

One issue that came up during our in-class experiments with CMC is ease of use.  Some applications were very intuitive and weren't much trouble to get up and running.  Blackboard Collaborate and the suite of Google apps that offer CMC (chat, hangouts, drive) worked really well, and they are part of established, accessible suites of apps.  Tokbox, on the other hand, required fairly complicated embedding processes to get up and running.  Other sites like oovoo, while functioning well, still represent another app to register for and install.  I'm beginning to think that an important key for successfully using Web 2.0 tech and CALL tools in general is having a sort of base of operations- one main portal or hub that ties together most of the tools you use in your teaching setting.  If your students all have institutional Google mail accounts, it's incredibly easy to use a variety of Google apps that can function in a variety of learning tasks just about as well as an eclectic set of more specialized apps, and the former only requires one login and zero downloads/installs.

Materials 1: Academic Email Writing

Materials Development 1:  Academic Email Writing

            This lesson is situated in a university IEP class, ideally at the highest or second highest level.  This particular class session takes place in a room with plenty of computers for students to use as well as a computer and projector for the teacher.  The class has 12-16 students, and the course is designed to prepare them for writing in academic contexts.  The purpose of this lesson is to raise student awareness of how emails to professors are different than casual emails, and to develop students’ ability to write polite, properly formatted academic emails that meet the expectations of the genre. 

            In this lesson, two main technologies are used:  an email client (Google-powered) and GoogleDrive (specifically, a GoogleDocument).  Using an email client allows students to gain authentic experience with a necessary medium and genre of written communication (Levy, 2009).  GoogleDrive is a technology that allows for the shared construction of knowledge, and in some ways functions as computer mediated communication (CMC), which has been shown to elicit more balanced output from a class of students (DuBravac, 2013; Lai & Li, 2011).  When used with a projector, it also allows for effective use of a whiteboard/display that allows students easily visible reference while completing a writing task. 

            This lesson also employs formative assessment.  In the warm-up activity, the teacher receives short emails from the students, which allows the instructor to quickly assess student strengths and weaknesses in terms of formatting and use of appropriate language, which can inform the rest of the lesson.  The teacher shares some of these insights and then students get the opportunity to reflect on the various linguistic options they could use during the brainstorm activity.  Finally, after completing the main email writing tasks, students engage in an informal, email-based peer review, in which they provide feedback to a classmate.

View the Lesson Plan:  Academic Email Writing LP
Access the GoogleDocument: GoogleDoc Brainstorm

Reflection: Using Corpora for Instruction

Over the past week, our topic of discussion has been using corpora for second language instruction.  The Reppen chapter provided a general overview of corpus linguistics and corpus applications for teaching while the Flowerdew article addressed common critiques of corpus uses for language teaching.

One thing that really stuck out in my mind, especially when reading the Flowerdew article, was that all of the activities and courses being described in examples of corpus use in the classroom involved extremely high-level students.  Legal writing courses, business letters for prospective MBA students, biochemistry report writing- all of which are types of courses that typically won't be offered in a conventional IEP.  Flowerdew does address this, citing a nice Gardner quote about how just to be able to fully benefit from examining concordance lines, students will need to know every word on either side of the key word in context.  However, I feel that in teacher training, this disclaimer for using corpus-based instruction should be made a bit more forward.  Having beginner and intermediate students (and maybe even low-advanced students) interact with corpora would seem to largely be folly.

That being said, I do feel that the Flowerdew article did make compelling cases for the use of corpora in some of those very advanced, highly-specialized contexts.  I liked the idea of taking a more top down approach and then examining useful words, phrases, or features in specific parts of the discourse (e.g., methods section, invitation in a business letter, etc.).  Still, I have reservations about the time needed for learners to learn how to use the corpus tool and then to investigate and analyze.  As a native speaker graduate student who has had to investigate corpora as part of my coursework, I am confident in saying that it's not always quick, easy, or intuitive.

Flowerdew mentioned that certain resources may be more appropriate than others, noting that corpora may not be the most efficient or effect means for students to acquire specific types of knowledge about English.  Some well-crafted dictionaries can more quickly and directly highlight how words with similar meanings are used differently (Flowerdew used tall and high) as examples.  Additionally, learner errors might not show up in authentic corpora, so the use of reference grammars that highlight common learner errors may be more useful for some forms.  This brings me to the idea of corpus-driven instruction, that is, instructional materials or activities that are driven by corpus data (I suppose this is also referred to as Data Driven Learning (DDL)) rather than having students interface directly with corpus software.  I think this, largely, is the way to go with anything but those high-level, highly specialized courses described earlier, and in some cases may even be more efficient in those courses as well.

Reflection: Tasks with CALL

I'll be up front about this week's topic:  I liked it quite a bit.  I think tasks are a good approach for language teaching in general, and also a good approach for deciding whether or not to incorporate technology and if so, which technology.  So you found a potentially super cool CALL resource?  Ok, does it fit into a task that addresses student language needs?  If yes, proceed.  If no, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  File it away for later.

I thought DuBravac did a very nice job summarizing task based instruction (TBI), especially bringing activity theory into the discussion.  Framework for that theory is as follows:

1. Hierarchical structure:  there should be a clear structure of actions to accomplish a goal
2. Object-oriented:  there should be a meaningful goal
3. Internalization/Externalization:  the task should provide opportunities to internalize language features (e.g. grammatical forms, vocabulary) and externalize language (producing a podcast, discussing procedure in a group activity, etc)
4. Development:  tasks drive assessment, and frequent formative assessments help learners evaluate their progress toward a goal
5.  Mediation:  tasks should require mediation via the tool, which is language

Number 5 really struck a chord with me, especially in the context of CALL.  Language is always the primary tool, not the technology.  If technology overshadows language to complete the task, there's a problem with your task.  Just for a hypothetical example, let's say you design a really poor task where students must individually create a Flash animation of their last vacation.  Aside from listening to your directions and possibly navigating English menus in the Flash software, the object of the task could end up requiring very little language use compared to the time spent tweaking keyframes, drawing characters and objects, and so on.  This sort of task would aslo fail criteria 3 and 4 as well.  Making it a group project and requiring voice narration for the animation would be a major step in the right direction.

Test Reflection using Socrative

This semester, I'm not actually teaching a class of my own, but instead I am working on assessment for four different courses (covering 6 individual classes). So in the spirit of assessment and having meaningful follow ups, I put together a Socrative (socrative.com)Quiz that could be used in class. The Quiz is available for other teachers to use by searching for the SOC# SOC-844762 in the teacher control panel. This particular quiz would be suitable for a Reading/Writing class, but could easily be modified.

 Here's what it looks like from the student side (mobile phone browser):


The first row of pictures show questions that are ways of ensuring students understand the whole-class score reports distributed as part of the test review activity.  The next few questions have the student focus on their own results and devise a strategy for improvement.  The final question deals with test fairness (face validity), giving students a chance to voice any concerns they had about the test.

The really handy part of this activity, from a teacher's standpoint, comes after the results are in... Socrative generates a nice Excel spreadsheet for you:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AiV5S7bwDyy0dHlxa0pPc3NQRE1fbGpzaUtjNHJWWlE&output=html

This saves a lot of back-end work of sorting through stacks of paper, illegible handwriting, and tabulation.  Ideally this speeds things up when it comes to acting on student reflections- you can see what most students want to do in order to improve their performance before the next class, and you can also quickly get a consensus on fairness/test issues before your next assessment meeting.  And given how easy it is to create the quiz, and for students to access it, I would argue that Socrative has a clear efficiency advantage compared to pencil and paper versions of the same activity.  It also might allow more privacy for students; no one else in the class can peep their paper, which is important because a student's grades are quite personal and might be a sensitive subject, especially for struggling students.

Reflection: Teaching with Technology

Technology is exciting. A good chunk of our world today seems to revolve around it, or at least move through it. Facebook and Apple are now major features of finance and economics, not just things that college kids used (as it was a mere 5 years ago). Skype and similar videocalling technologies are looming over traditional telecommunication, and are relied on not just by business executives but also many of the international students we teach. My point is that technology is here. It's in all of our lives, in some major ways. As language teachers, I feel that we must address it. As the DuBravac chapter points out, students now belong to the Net generation- whether they are native or non-native speakers, they are using technology in some capacity, and certainly would benefit from being able to use it in their desired contexts, such as at an English-medium university. Achieving competence in technologically-mediated genres, like e-mail, message boards, and social networks is just as necessary as having good phone skills (which is distinct from standard face-to-face conversation). As language teaching should strive for authenticity and student needs, teaching the genres/registers of CMC while using CMC is valuable. SLA theory also offers some support for teaching with technology. Theoretically, CMC that allows for real-time interaction (audio and/or visual) provides comprehensible input, modified output, and/or an opportunity for the negotiation of meaning, all of which is thought to lead to language development. Independent learning opportunities that involve interaction are vast, especially compared to a decade or two ago when homework was almost completely limited to individually completed reading/listening and answering questions or solving grammar exercises. Empirically, there's still a great deal of work to be done in validating the use of many forms of technology for general learning, but one reporting from the Wang and Vasquez article that I found promising was that blogging yields higher output volume than pen and paper writing. I also believe there's a strong argument to be made for technology when it improves classroom practice in terms of efficiency and flexibility. LMS are useful to reduce grading time as well as eliminating time spent collecting and returning paper assignments (and in a shorter class period, this can really matter!). Digital textbooks and padcams allow flexibility in displaying material and allowing more dynamic visual illustration of concepts, and compared with a multi-page handout, are much more efficient in that sense. When technology doesn't intersect with the criteria of real-world use, SLA, or improved classroom practice, then it shouldn't be used.

Mind Mapping with GoogleDrive

A Digital Storytelling-assisted Activity: Making Requests

This activity is designed with a speaking/listening class in mind, or perhaps a social life component of an EAP integrated course.  It would fit in well with a functional syllabus.  The focus of the activity is recognizing poor strategies for making a request and then generating more effective ones.  The site goanimate.com is utilized for the following reasons:

1. Ease in quickly producing a short video (can use text-to-speech or audio recordings)
2. Ability to provide some visual context for the situation
3. Allows for repeated playbacks, pausing, etc. (compare with a teacher-read dialogue)

Pre-Listening (10 minutes)

1. Place Ss into groups of 4-5.  Ask them to think about the last time they made a request- it could be as simple as borrowing a pencil, asking for tutoring, or borrowing a car.

2.  Direct groups to share their most recent request with each other.

3.  Assign one group member to be the Scribe.  He/She will write down what the group decides is the ranking of most to least valuable requests (e.g. borrowing a car > borrowing a pencil)

4.  Each group can share their ranking with the class, time allowing.

5.  As a class, discuss if you should ask to borrow a car the same way as you ask for a pencil.

6.  Announce that they will watch a scene where a boy makes a request to his friend.

During Listening (10 minutes)

1.  Pass out a worksheet/have students prepare to answer the following questions on a piece of paper:

• What is the boy's problem?
• What request does he make?
• Is he successful?
• How do you think the girl feels?

2.  Play the following video A Friendly Request, students answer questions while listening.

3.  Question students to confirm comprehension.  

4.  Play the video once again, this time directing students to take notes and identify what the boy said that caused him to fail.

5.  In groups again, members should discuss and come to agreement on what caused the boy to fail.  Review these findings as a class.

Post Listening (20 minutes)

1.  Recap why the boy was unsuccessful.  As a class, brainstorm some strategies or things the the boy could say to be successful in making his request.  Direct the discussion towards the following ideas if students miss any of them:  

• hedges (e.g. "Could you loan me 5 bucks?" v "You must give me money") 
• offering reasons ("I forgot my wallet at home!"  or "I don't get paid until tomorrow.")
•  a promise of repayment ("I'll pay you back tomorrow before class")
•  expressing future gratitude ("I'd really appreciate it...")

2.  Break off students into pairs or small groups.  Their task is to create a successful version of the story where the boy uses some of the strategies brainstormed by the class.  

3.  If available, students can create these on goanimate.com.  Voice recording can be used if microphones are available.  Otherwise, students can create roleplays with notecards.

4.  Pairs/Groups can share their stories.  Audience members can vote whether or not they would let the boy borrow some money.

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Overall, I think GoAnimate has some good potential for use in the language classroom.  It is quick and easy to use, able to create video files that can be manipulated (repeat, pause, etc) for intensive listening instruction.  Though the suprasegmental features of the text-to-speech leave something to be desired, one does have the ability to record and insert audio in the scenes, adding to authenticity to the input that students will hear.  Since the content creation is so easy, and users can simply register and login with their Google or Facebook accounts, students could also easily create content to share and save, which is hard to do with conventional roleplays.  Grouping students adds interaction and negotiation of meaning to the video creation process, too.