Final CALL thoughts

CALL tools are only as good as the task or focus of the activity that employs them. In the right situation, I think CALL tools can be useful tools that allow students to use English in new environments or ways. When not used in a focused and controlled way, however, they can become distracting or lead to little language practice or production. To illustrate both the good and the bad of using CALL tools, let’s examine a tool like Second Life. I could see Second Life being very useful in an EFL environment for students who would like to speak to native speakers of English. However, a teacher would have to give students very specific parameters for the students that would lead to language production. For example, perhaps the teacher could set up an “appointment” with another teacher for each class to go online Second Life and do an “intercambio” where they speak English half of the time and Spanish half of the time and need to get specific information from each other. Without some sort of guided exercise like this, though, CALL tools can become simply toys that offer little pedagogical or learning value. Again, they can offer new ways of interacting and new opportunities for interaction or they can lead to aimless “wandering” if there is no central, organizing task.


I also think that CALL can be a useful tool in helping students collaborate and provided feedback for each other with writing assignments. Google Docs is a fantastic tool in that it allows people to share, review, and revise a document with other classmates in a way that is both intuitive and simple. I personally prefer it to something like Wikispaces though I also feel that with enough training and for the right task, Wikispaces could also be a good way to collaborate on something. One of the features that Wikispaces has that Google Docs doesn't is the ability to have an asynchronous discussion with other teammates about the document they are working on. It also allows for the students to revert to earlier forms of the document if they deem a revision incorrect or (perhaps) inappropriate. Of course, perhaps the best tool for providing actual feedback in writing is simple Microsoft Word. By using Track Changes or Insert Comment, you can either edit the document or provide feedback without changing the text which is very helpful in the revision process.

One thing that I would like to learn more about in regards to CALL is how it fits in to distance learning. I think tools such as Blackboard, chat, or even Second Life could all fit into the curriculum of a distance language school, but I would be interested to find out more about how they manage the dispersal of information since there isn't a central meeting place for a lecture or seminar discussion to take place. Additionally, I would like to learn how they manage documents and feedback. Is it through one of the tools I've mentioned above? Is there another, more effective tool that is still lurking out there for me to discover? These are questions for future exploration within the field as I feel that distance learning could become more and more relevant to language learning.

Second Life

Second Life seems to be a great tool for students in an EFL environment as it would give them the opportunity to chat (text or voice) with native English speakers. The input would therefore be totally authentic, synchronous, and could quite possibly come with its own set of internally motivating factors (e.g.--interest in other cultures, ways of live, etc. or simply just getting to know a new person). While I am a novice myself at using Second Life, I have thought about using it in the course I am designing for the Materials and Curriculum development class as my class takes place in an EFL setting and it could be a good way to get those students some opportunities to speak with native English speakers that they might not have.

I think a "downside" to Second Life might simply be trying to convince adults to see it as an educational tool and not as simply time wasting. For example, it might be tough to get a business executive to buy into using it as they might perceive it as being a "game." If seen in this light, there is even the (remote) chance that the student could feel infantilized and be offended due to this. Even so, it could be a great tool for real-time interaction and provide many learning experiences for intermediate to advanced learners.

Meebo and Videoconferencing

I think that videoconferencing is a potentially useful tool in the ESL classroom. Particularly, it could be useful in EFL contexts where the students generally don't have access to speaking with a native speaker in their everyday lives. Meebo could, with enough planning, allow students to even have a conversation with native speakers from different regions of the U.S. or from different countries where English is spoken (obviously the U.K., Australia/New Zealand, but also places like India or Scandanavia where a large number of people speak it fluently) so that they can get exposure to different accents. There could be a ton of applications for this kind of thing and I know from my own experience that students in EFL contexts are often hungry for that kind of opportunity.

There are a couple of things that are potential pitfalls for Meebo and videoconferencing in general. The first is something that I experience firsthand on Tuesday in that Meebo or any videoconferencing tool might be frustrating in getting it set up. While I got it to work in some cases, I'm still baffled as to why it didn't work in certain instances. If students were doing this remotely, helping them troubleshoot their problems might be difficult. Another potential pitfall in using Meebo in the way I've suggested above is that it could expose some cultural differences that might cause social rifts such as the ones that we read about in this week's reading ("Toward an Intercultural Stance: Teaching German and English through Telecollaboration" by Ware and Kramsch). It might be useful to have very specific tasks for students to work on and also be available to monitor these conversations to help steer students away from "trouble spots."

E-Journaling and Oral Language Skills

The article "A Web-Based Approach to Strategic Learning of Speech Acts" by Cohen and Ishihara discuss their students' use of e-journaling in their study as a way of reflecting on their learning experience about the speech acts they had studied. They gave these students some structure so that there was a way of making comparisons between each student's journal and had them reflect on six different areas such as "Issues and confusions they had about the material" (10) and "Their experience using the speech acts in authentic out-of-class contexts" (ibid). Overall, most of the students seemed to feel like the e-journaling was beneficial and allowed them the chance to think through these speech acts in more depth and understand their cultural importance in ways they hadn't considered before.

As far as using e-journaling in a classroom to help develop oral language skills, I think a similar "awareness raising" purpose could be incorporated into an ESL classroom. For instance, in an intermediate or advanced class, students could use an e-journal to write down vocabulary or expressions they have overheard and then try to analyize or discuss the context in which they heard the word to get a better idea of how and when the word might be used. They could even write a short dialog or example sentences to process that vocabulary item. If it were a blog type environment, other students could provide feedback or other examples of sentences with that vocabulary item or they could help each other if said student didn't understand the word and simply wanted feedback/help about its definition.

Honestly, though, I'm not sure how or if e-journaling could actually tackle the pronunciation of these words. Any thoughts on this?

Reflections on wikis

I have some mixed feeling about using wikis in an ESL classroom. Some of my main concerns revolve around the fact that wikis are collaborative and like any collaborative project, it's possible that students won't pull their own weight. While it's possible to monitor who has contributed what to the project, that doesn't necessarily mean that some student might not at least feel that they won't be monitored. Admittedly, the teacher could explain how they might monitor the wiki and this could help mitigate this concern, but it might be difficult to totally dissuade a student from pulling his/her own weight. Another concern would also be related to Klunder's article in that students may not enjoy working with wikis and/or feel like they are helpful or useful at all (though clearly that study's results were skewed by the fact that many of them had never used them). Finally, students can add inappropriate material or (more likely) they can add incorrect material and so there needs to be time-intensive monitoring of the wiki to ensure that the information contained within it is not crude or incorrect.

I do like the idea of using wikis for distance learning because it could be a way for students to work together at a distance. There's the possibility that it could be a time-saver for the students and a way from students to learn from each other about a given topic and create meaning together. Additionally, wikis could be used by teachers as a way to collaborate on a teaching idea or just in sharing information.

Negotiation of Meaning in Network Based Communication

I agree, by and large, with Pellettieri that NBC can be a useful activity that "fosters the negotiation of meaning" (83). It puts the students into a synchronous communication environment yet unlike speaking, it slows down the time sequence which allows students to respond at their own pace or at least allows them time to process what is being said and select their vocabulary/grammar structures. Due to the fact that the students have this slight lag, Pellettieri suggests that students actually spend more time processing their grammar then they might in oral production.

I also agree with Pellettieri that this type of activity could devolve into a rather chaotic process if it is not guided in some way and have some specific end or goal in mind. For instance, giving students a topic to debate or discuss or (better yet) a specific end they need to achieve will help guide their discussions and keep them from: a) talking about whatever they might think of and b) require some kind of accountability for their discussion.

Perhaps one of the best things about it is that "NBC" is authentic input and output and let's students practice a variety of strategies as well as discourse markers that might not come up in more "stilted" classroom practice.

Project Proposal (Bill Harris and Sabah Khan)

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips: Project Proposal

The intended audience of the instructional activities is a four-skills English for Academic Purposes class. The intended level is intermediate.

The purpose of the instructional activities is to review and reinforce comparative and superlative structure formation through practice and production of these structures.

We plan to incorporate two CALL tools into our lesson. As one of the practice activities, we would be using a self-monitored multiple-choice activity, such as the following website:
http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/compsup2.html. We also plan to incorporate YouTube into the lesson as part of a production activity, in which each of the students will be recorded while giving a presentation comparing/contrasting two local restaurants. There will be a minimum requirement of comparative and superlative structures that will have to be used in each presentation. Once the recorded video clips have been uploaded to YouTube, the videos could be used for teacher-to-student and student-to-student feedback in the form of comments posted under each video. The site will be set to 'private' so that the videos will only be accessible to students in that class.

We believe that the CALL tools that we have selected will enhance language acquisition for the targeted students. The online practice activity will give students the opportunity to self-monitor their understanding of comparatives and superlatives, promoting independent learning and consciousness raising of their own mastery of their ability to form the structures. The YouTube activity will give students (and the instructor) the opportunity to provide feedback about the students' use of the structures as well as any additional errors that they might encounter, all in an asynchronous manner.


The lesson will follow the following sequence (for two 2-hour class sessions):
DAY 1
1. Warm-up activity
2. Schema activation
3. Paired practice activity
4. Online practice activity (As described above)
5. Debriefing session
6. Explanation of presentation with model (Check, Please! clip on YouTube)
7. Preparation for recorded presentations
8. Record presentations

DAY 2
1. Warm-up activity
2. View presentations as a class
3. Students' and instructors' comments to be posted individually on computers as presentations are viewed as a class
4. Debriefing/feedback session


Links to sites that we will be using:
Comparative/Superlative Online Multiple-Choice Exercise
http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/compsup2.html
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com

Podcast #2: ESL Reading Lessons

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips, Episode #2

Our podcast contains some suggestions of how to conduct an ESL reading lesson. We will provide activity ideas to help students to improve their reading comprehension skills. We hope that you find our podcast helpful.

The intended audience is ESL instructors, but we welcome all listeners.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when listening to the podcast:
1. In the podcast, we talk about activity ideas for all three stages of a reading lesson: pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading.
2. We recommend sequencing the during-reading activities from general to more specific comprehension tasks.
3. In order to guarentee 3-5 during-reading comprehension activities, we recommend using an authentic reading text of 1-2 pages.

Link to Podcast:
http://billharris.podbean.com/bill-and-sabahs-esl-podcast-2-reading/

Useful links:
http://esl-programs-lessons.suite101.com/article.cfm/improving_esl_reading_skills (pre-reading)

http://departments.weber.edu/teachall/reading/prereading.html (pre-reading academic)

http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/reading.html (reading activities)

http://iteslj.org/Lessons/ (more reading activities)

http://esl.about.com/library/lessons/bl_baker2.htm (sample lesson plan with pre-, during-, and post-reading activities)

http://home.earthlink.net/~cnew/research.htm (copyright laws and education)

Response to Tuesday's readings

The Chiu/Savignon article advocates the question-form of commenting on students' texts rather than comments that focus on form and point out that "The question-form comment fosters this process of meaning making with the essential attention to form that this implies" (110). What I take from this is that comments that question the writer about the content of their writing both helps them making their writing clearer and more "meaningful" when they revise, but it can also help direct them towards form as well. I would generally agree with this point of view based on my experience with responding to students' writing (both in an ESL context and with L1 writers). Asking a question that pushes the student to expand, explore and refine in general seems more powerful to me that "merely" pointing out surface problems with morphology or syntax (with the understanding that these obviously contribute to our ability to understand content).

The Gaskell/Cobb article suggests that concordances for grammar and not only vocabulary can help students explore language on their own and discover the language. Specifically, they say that using concordances can help them edit and revise their own writing by discovering patterns and rules within concordances. I have never used concordances in the classroom and can't speak to it effectiveness from experience but it seems like potentially a good tool to help learners take control of their own learning and research their own answers to questions that the teacher may pose or when the teacher highlights grammar errors without giving them explicit directions of how to fix them. The only thing that "troubles" me about this approach is getting students motivated to use them. I can see students potentially seeing it as a chore and an extra step between them and revising their essay. I wonder if any of you has any thoughts on this? Would you (as a language student) be willing and able to use condordances to help discover grammar and revise your own writing without explicit direction from a teacher or would you feel frustrated by that process? Or is my read of this totally off?

Teaching Tips Podcast: Using music in the classroom

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips, Episode #1

Our podcast contains some suggestions of how to use music in the ESL classroom. Using music in the classroom can make learning fun while using an authentic listening input. In our podcast, we talk about some of the activities that an instructor can design to address not only listening comprehension, but also grammar, vocabulary, reading, and speaking.

The intended audience is ESL instructors, but we welcome all listeners.

Link to Podcast:
http://billharris.podbean.com/bill-and-sabahs-esl-teaching-tips-episode-1/

Useful Links:

http://www.ericdigests.org/2002-3/music.htm

http://www.caslt.org/resources/english-sl/classroom-resource-links-music-teaching2_en.php

http://www.lingolex.com/userpages/music.html

Instructional Value of Voicethread

Based on the Chapter 6 reading from our CALL textbook, I feel like Voicethread could be a valuable tool in a language classroom. The first criteria that Chapelle and Jamieson use for deciding if a CALL tool is useful for speaking is if the sounds/accents are relevant for the students. Due to the fact that the teacher and presumably the other students in the class would be making contributions to Voicethread, this would necessarily mean that the accents are relevant (it would obviously be important for the students to understand the teacher as well as each other).

Another criteria that Chapelle and Jamieson use for judging usefulness is that the tool can "provide opportunities for oral practice through interaction with the computer" (159). Obviously, Voicethread provides students the opportunity to providing this opportunity though this must be qualified by the (perhaps large) assumption that the video that the students interact with/comment on provides them some kind of "meaningful context" (159) with which to practice expressions or formulaic phrases so that they might become ingrained.

Perhaps the criteria that Voicethread most fulfills, though, is the 4th one which "evaluate(s) learners' performance and provide(s) feedback" (162). I think it could be a good way for teachers and/or students to ask for clarification of something that was said or for more explication or even direct correction of pronunciation.

The main point I got out of the Robinson article is that there is more uptake and more "lexical and syntactic complexity" the more complex the task. The teacher could presumably use Voicethread for relatively simple tasks or could make the interaction more complex so this would have to be judged on a case by case basis. However, the nature of Voicethread is more interactive and engages more skills (listening, speaking, and potentially reading and writing though these seem admittedly used in a less complex way) than something like Youtube which only engages listening. In other words, the tool itself integrates different skill sets and is inherently more complex than other tools which, according to Robinson, would make it more effective or at least generate more uptake and ask the students to produce more complex speech.

Language Podcasts

The first podcast I reviewed was: http://www.codyscuentos.com/2009/11/los-musicos-de-bremen/ from the Cody's Cuentos website. The idea for the website itself (stories in Spanish) was great to me since I love books and storytelling and the selection I listened to was a Grimm's faerie tale (also a favorite) so my own "listener motivation" was high. I liked the fact that the interface was very user friendly: choose a story, click the play button and you're rolling. The transcript for each story was provided on the same page and I had some mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it was nice to have on the first listen and it also gives the listener a chance to see/hear alternate ways of saying something on the number of occasions where the narrator diverged slightly from the script. On the other hand, it also felt like a crutch that the listener could (and probably would) be tempted to use since it was staring you right in the face. I think I might have liked it better if there were another link to click on to get the transcript and/or a way to hide the text so that it could be a pure listening experience. Overall, I thought it was good though and I may even use it in the future for my own personal use.

The second podcast I reviewed was: http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=8189978#. I think that the podcasts in general on the eslpod site are too long and boring thus lowering learner motivation. They tend to have a script that is "acted" out in a slow pace and then the narrator reviews the vocabulary within it. As a teacher, I feel like there are other ways to get the students to review or understand the vocabulary. There is no real deep processing needed and therefore retention is unlikely. After this vocabulary review, the "actors" go through the dialog again at a faster rate. I might be tempted to use the slower version and then the faster version and play them back to back (maybe the fast version first to see what they understand and then the slower version to let them hear words they missed at a slower rate) but I would definitely skip the middle section completely. One thing I do like about the site though is that they cover a broad range of topics and some vocabulary associated with it so if you supplemented this podcast with some other material it might not be a bad way to introduce a topic.

Vocabulary website review

The first site I have reviewed is http://www.vocabulary.com/.

This site is fairly extensive and has four different sections that you can use. The first is root word lesson plans which are divided into 3 levels of difficulty. In their words: "These free interactive vocabulary puzzle and activity sessions use Latin and Greek "roots and cells" to help unlock word meanings. There are eight exercises into each session and include: Interactive Puzzle, Fill-in-the-Blanks, Definition Match, Synonym & Antonym Encounters, Crosswords, Word Finds, True/False and Word Stories."

In addition to the root word lesson plans, there are thematic puzzles (which groups vocabulary into different subject matters/topics); word lists (which contains "alphabary" lists [not sure what "alphabery" means to be honest] in different subject matters like "Animals" or "Fine-Arts"); and test preparatory/assessment (which contains random lists of words that might be found on the SAT or ACT in particular but I'm imagining could be adapted to perhaps TESOL testing).

I found the site fairly easy to navigate and also pretty extensive in terms of the types of vocabulary available. It seems like a good resource when you are working with people who have a specific interest (say sports or literature) and you want to teach them vocabulary that deals with that interest. There are also business terms and so it could be used as a vocabulary resource for an ESP class.

A couple of negatives though are that this website doesn't seem geared specifically for ESL learners and is more general in nature. There also aren't any real opportunities for deep processing or making concordances. In short, it's a good site for general vocabulary use, but you would have to do some planning yourself on how best to introduce the vocabulary and/or use it in a class. It could simply be a website you give to students as a resource for their own personal use and outside study.

My Teaching Portfolio Site

This is my teaching portfolio site: http://tinyurl.com/yh8d6hw

CALL reading resource

After poking around a bit, I found the following website: http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/stories/stories.html

There are a number of short reading exercises on the website that are geared for level 1 or perhaps level 2 students and many of them have quiz questions afterwards. There doesn't seem to be much difference between those reading activities to the activities that you might find in a regular text book though I do think they might be useful with that caveat in mind.

The exercises I would most likely use (or modify for use) in my own class would be some of the ones found under the heading "Other Readings." For instance, there is one that talks about finding an apartment and reviews some of the relevant vocabulary for finding an apartment. There are also links to Craig's List (in this case for San Francisco) where students can put their newly "learned" vocabulary through the paces. I think that kind of authentic activity is a good example of how CALL can be used to find authentic texts.

Blog #1: Prior CALL experience and (some) of my interests in the course

One prior experience I had with using computers in the classroom was when I used Youtube last semester while teaching my ITA course here at UIC. I recorded student presentations and posted them to a private Youtube channel so that they could see their progress over the course of the semester.
I am interested in using podcasts and also interested in learning more about what distance language learning might look like using the internet. Does anyone have experience doing either? If so, what was your experience like?