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