The End

Hi,

I can't believe this is the end. I got used to being a part of this online class so much now that it seems weird. It was a great opportunity for me to interact with other language teachers around the world and learn from them. I hope that the friendships we formed here continues.

Thanks everyone for their contributions.

Abdullah   

Week 09: Reflections

Hi,

Another week is almost over. As you look around and focus on other people, you notice that everyone is unique and has their own way of doing things. However, unfortunately for a long time education was based on the idea that everyone learned in the same way and the same teaching methods should work for everyone. Poor students couldn't learn because they weren't meant to learn, they were less intelligent than necessary. I was less intelligent than necessary in my Chemistry classes at high school. Or, I thought so until I watched a BBC documentary "the wonders of the universe". The visualizations of how "elements" were formed, along with the explanations helped me grasp the idea in an instant. I wish my teacher at high school would have used a similar visual other than mere text and speech to teach my chemistry! Now it seems that I was actually no less intelligent. I am a visual learner. Now with the help of technology, web technologies in particular, it is much easier to enrich our courses with various multimedia resources, both inside and outside the class.

Other sources on learning styles and technology:
http://time2learn.wikispaces.com/Pedagogy+2.0+re-shaping+assessments

          

Week 08: Reflections

Another busy week is almost over now and we are nearing the end of our course. This week has been as fruitful as the previous ones. In addition to creating online exercises and revisiting my old friend, HotPotatoes, I was introduced to a terrific LMS designed especially for language learning and teaching: ANVILL. Thanks to guidance by its creator Jeff Magoto, I learned about some cool tools integrated withing ANVILL, which are Voiceboard and TCast features that makes developing speaking skills a possibility in a collaborative environment. This week was a big step in my project because I prepared the draft project plan and my partner, Boris Cadena, has already commented on it. Now I am off to comment on his project plan.

Week 07

Hello there,

This week (7th) we talked about a topic that I value greatly: learner autonomy. Learning how to learn, what to learn, when to learn, and whom or where to learn from is an important  skill in today's world. In today's world, there is information abundance, and unfortunately not all information is reliable information. So, it becomes even more important to guide learners to safe environments and eventually teach them how they can themselves find secure environments where they can access reliable information. In language learning in particular freedom from teacher dependence is a must because even the perfect teacher cannot teach everything about a language so learners will have to walk without holding a teacher's hand and start running all by themselves. 

Week 05

Hi,

Another busy week went by. I learned about very useful ideas and tools this week too. Firstly, alternative assessment: it is something we have already been doing at our school. We give performance grades each week depending on student participation in class activities. Rubricstar, however, is a new tool for me and I found it very helpful in creating alternative assessment tools. I will use it for student oral presentations next semester.

Secondly, I would like to write about Project Based Learning (PBL). Everything needs a purpose and meaning, so do the language learners. As teachers we need to provide our learners with purpose and meaning. Otherwise, as far as I have experienced, students memorize some vocabulary and grammar rules only to pass some exams. I think it is not real learning. PBL activities could be helpful in providing students with purpose and meaning for learning a foreign language. I had two different group of students last year. In the coursebook, students were required to write an email to a language course asking for price, date and accommodation. With the first group, I tried the traditional way. They wrote an email on paper and gave that to me. With the second group I asked them to find a language course on the Web and send an email. The second group were much more excited about the experience and talked about how they wrote it, how they felt and they told me that they were excited to see that they can actually communicate with real English speaking people by email. So, I say PBL activities rocks :)        

Week 04: Reflections

Another busy week is almost gone now. Every weeks adds another perspective towards how I could view the Internet to exploit it for my teaching and learning opportunities. This week I had the chance to have further ideas about how to exploit www for purposes of improving reading and writing skills. Moreover, I wrote a technology enhanced lesson plan. The discussions on Nicenet were very fruitful for me as usual. I also learn more about my classmates' teaching environments. I see that we share common issues, problems and concern no matter what part of the we are in.    

Teacher Mr. Osman's CALL for student Abdullah

The use of computers in educational settings have always been appealing to both students and teachers due to their potential in providing various media such as graphics, audio, video, text and pictures, and due to their potential in enabling interaction with both these multimedia resources and other people connected to each other through computers using a network. Not surprisingly, computers have been used to teach and learn languages and that journey for me began long ago.

I remember when I started learning English as a foreign language about 15 years ago, our teacher, Mr. Osman, used to take us to computer lab and we used to work on computer software which provided mechanical grammar practices. What I liked most about that experience was that I had the chance to engage with computers I was fascinated by and that the computer gave spontaneous feedback and when I gave a wrong answer there was no one to judge me (not that anyone judged me in class). The computer just said “try again” or “well-done”. However, the software was primarily text based and the visuals were poorly sketched. What’s more, because of the repetitive nature of the software, the responses it gave were very predictable and you got bored hearing the same sound or seeing activities very similar to each other and unfortunately the software got to lose the appeal it once had, so we switched to playing games when Mr. Osman wasn’t looking.

That was more than 15 years ago and I wasn’t aware that I was dealing with one of the first examples of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) class.

So, What is Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)?

CALL is defined as ‘the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning’ (Levy 1997: 1).

Computers are now everywhere. I remember that the first computer we bought cost the same as a car. Now, I have three computers (one desktop, one laptop and a netbook – not to mention that I can do most of what I can do on computers with my mobile). It’s not that I became a millionaire in 15 years but the cost of computers went down so drastically that almost every household owns more than one now in Turkey. The result: people spending more and more of their daily time on computers either for entertainment, work or education.

When we get back to the journey CALL has made so for, we could see that computers have been used extensively to develop language learners’ grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing and listening skills. One particular skill that has often been neglected when using computers is speaking. As Gong (2002) states:

“compared with how computers are used to enhance the learners’ writing skills, reading skills and listening skills, the application associated with the improvement of the learners’ speaking skills is rather weak”               

Still, the use of computers to develop speaking skills is not without effort. According to Pennington (1995) spoken language competence covers two aspects:

Considerable CALL effort has been put into dealing with mechanical aspect of spoken language. Pronunciation training is the mostly worked on aspect. There are text-to-speech (TTS) applications that turn text into human speech and applications learners can use to record their own voices and compare it to original target voice on computer. These applications enable learners to work on their pronunciation skills without feeling anxious or embarrassed about incorrect pronunciation.

However, because of the complicated nature of human communication, it is almost impossible for a computer to imitate real meaningful human interaction. Yet, considerable work is being done in artificial intelligence and in the future computers might be able to understand and respond to authentic human communication. For now, learners can make use of verbal command recognition applications to command machines. The learners will need to improve the accuracy and fluency of their speech to an acceptable degree so that machines can understand and act on their command. Yet another way learners and teachers make use of computers to develop speaking skills is to use computers a tool to carry out audio or video conferences over the Internet to access native speakers or speakers of the target language to provide authentic speaking opportunities.   

Pros and Cons

The use of computers to develop spoken language competence provides learners with a safe, motivating and interactive environment. Besides, it has great potentials to enrich the learning environment with various resources, spontaneous feedback, exposure to target language, addressing different needs and controllability. However, CALL efforts are not without disadvantages. At present, computers cannot understand real human communication and have verbal interaction with learners. In addition, the cost of complex software that can generate spoken language close to humans is often too high for average learner to afford. Yet, the quality of computer generated speech differs greatly and to what extend the incorrect pronunciation/intonation in a learner’s utterance can be acceptable is a controversial issue. What I mean is that, the pronunciation of a particular learner might not be 100% correct but it could still be comprehensible. However, it might be impossible for a computer to discriminate between acceptable speech and unacceptable.   

              

The future holds great potential for CALL to turn itself into a concept embracing more interactive and meaningful language learning processes. This meaningful interaction with either computers or with real people using computers will probably be made easier and learners will have a lot more opportunities to involve computer technologies into their language learning activities.