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.