My reflection on CALL tools

This past semester I had the opprortunity to become familiar with the use and benefits of a variety of CALL tools. I came to realize that some CALL tools are maybe better suited for the instruction of specific skills than others. For example blogs could be used for writing and reading practice whereas voiceboards for listening and speaking. I also came to appreciate the opportunities that CALL tools provide for communicative activities such as peer review or collaboration on assignments which raises learners awareness. In addition students' develop a sense of ownership and initiative since most of the times their work is shared or reviewed by others.

I will definitely consider using CALL tools in my teaching. Before using any of the CALL tools I will collect information regarding the literacy and computer skills of my students. Even in the case of students who have limitted experience with technology, I will consider beneficial that they become exposed to simple CALL tools, so that they can develop a sense of exposure and familiarity with the new technology which they can apply in different areas of their life. I will try to introduce the new technology in a way that is not overwhelming or challenging to them and raise regarding their awareness of the benefits of this process.

Using Voiceboards for practicing oral skills

Voiveboards on blackboard are online discussion boards that use voice rather than text for communication. With voiceboards students and teachers can create threaded oral discussions, practice their oral communication skills such as pronunciation and record oral presentations. Voiceboards can be used for both teacher and peer feedback. Students can also use voiceboards to post their soundwork and teachers or peers can respond with voice messages accompanied with the corresponding transcript. For students who have a hard time pronuncing words, they can sumbit their soundwork and teachers can make oral comments and submit a written transcript with spaces for the parts that were not easily understood.

Another beneficial aspect of choosing voiceboards is the limitted knowledge or experience with technology required. Voiceboards do not require a high level of technological literacy on behalf of the teachers and students with minimum computer skills and/or literacy level can easily use them.

Meebo

Meebo is a great video-conferencing tool that can prove beneficial in a language learning environment. Students can be exposed to both native and non-native speakers and become familiar with different accents and ways of pronunciation. Students also have the opportunity to become aware with the corresponding facial expressions, gestures and/or body postures that are involved in oral communication and vary among speakers of different linguistic backgrounds. Meebo provides students also with authentic input and promotes language learning in a fun and interactive way.

E-Journaling

In the article the authors describe how students used e-journals to respond to a speech acts assignment in Japanese. In this study students experienced different types of speech acts with CALL tools and provided feedback by using e-journals. The researchers used the present study in order to collect information and draw some conclusions regarding the learners' perception of the new technology including its benefits and challenges, the urgency of timing feedback, the drawbacks related to non-individualized feedback and the effectiveness of assessment tools.

I think that e-journaling could prove to be a powerful tool in writing courses. E-journals could be used by students in order to give peer feedback to each other. Students could be assigned in groups of three and asked to review each others work and provide feedback through e-journals. Students could leave comments and make suggestions for improvement. One benefit of using e-journals for peer feedback is that the comments are written and students at any point can go back, read their peer's comments and make the appropriate changes. In addition some international students who still lack the advantage of oral fluency that peer workshops require and/or who come from societies where interdependent views of the individual are emphasized may feel uncomfortable to express their opinions orally and feel better with giving written feedback.

Wikis / Advantages and Challenges

Wiki is a CALL tool that offers the opportunity of collaborative communication for developing projects. Wikis are internet based and their content can be accessed and edited by students from different places and times. Students can access and participate from any location without having to work at a particular time. Wikis can be used a means for developing writing assignments which require group collaboration. The collaboration that wikis provide is further promoted by the 'history' tool which gives access to all previous versions of a particular project. Students as well as instructors can easily identify who made a change on the page and the time and date that the specific change was made. Students can therefore ensure a sort of an equal participation of all group members on the project and instructors are also able to to monitor student progress and participation.

From the study of a wiki writing assignment in an Engineering major class the results show that even though wikis are flexible and collaborative they can cause confussion and difficulties if they are not applied in the appropriate way. The students of the specific study reported negative attitudes toward the use of the wiki and they felt furstrated from its use. Students reported a lack of understanding of the various advantages of wikis and their practical uses and a low desire for collaboration on any group project regardless of the use of wikis.

The results of the study reflect the need for introducing wikis in an appropriate way that will explicitly explain all the technical aspects of wikis and the advantages wikis can have. It is also important that students who are not used to collaborating with their peers on group projects develop an awareness of the positive outcomes that collaboration has and the ways that group collaboration emphasizes different aspects of their learning process. Collaborations issues should also be addressed in order to encourage students to participate and maximize equal participation. In addition before introducing any CALL tool as the means for an assignment, a good idea would be for the teachers to find out the level of students'experience with CALL tools, so that they can set the task difficulty at the appropriate level. Students with minimum experience using CALL tools may feel discouraged if they have to carry out a difficult and complicated task.

Negotiation of meaning through NBC chatting

The article addresses the similiraties between oral and computer based discource through the use of task-based sychronous NBC such as chatting and the way that NBC mediated interaction can promote and foster the negotiation of meaning. The study presented in this article confirms NBC's potential for promoting the negotiation of meaning in task based interaction. When communication problems arose speakers chose to negotiate and resolve the problems by means of clarification requests, confirmation checks, echo questions or explicit statements of that showed lack of understanding. The results of the study show that learners involved in NBC chats negotiate over all aspects of discourse and pay specific attention to form focused language. The negotiation of meaning through task based NBC interaction also facilitates mutual comprehension and effective communication among learners. The time that the NBC medium provides students to process and manage the interlanguage, the focus on form and negotiation of meaning and the mutual comphrehension that results from this form of interaction show that NBC chatting can play a significant role in the developments of grammatical competence.

The study also shows that factors such as the quantity and type of negotiation should also be taken into consideration. NBC language tasks should be goal oriented and they should provide equal opportunities for all participants to request and obtain infromation in order to succesfully complete a task. Language tasks should also be designed with a level of difficulty that is beyond the grammatical or vocabulary experience of students and provide ideas or concepts that are ouside the experiences students have. A task difficulty level a little above the level of student's familiarity with grammar, vocabulary or ideas will increase the quantitiy of negotiation produced.

This article focuses on using NBC chatting for improving grammatical competence. What about vocabulary though? Do you think NBC chatting would be the same beneficial in promoting vocabulary?

Project Proposal (Bailey and Maria)

The CALL tool we will be using is Photo Story 3. The purpose is to give students an outlet to be creative with their language skills. They will be using the program to create a digital story. The program allows students to post pictures in a strip and each one can be accompanied with text and audio. The students will have to find the photos online. This will give the added benefit of practicing their web browsing skills. This tool could potentially be used at any level because they are producing the dialogue. For advanced students, the stories would be very complex, but students at that level may be looking for more academic or real world learning experiences. For beginners, the stories would be simple, but they would still benefit from the activity. For the purpose of this lesson proposal, we are going to focus on younger EFL intermediate students. They have enough knowledge of the language to really play around and be creative with it, but they can still learn a lot from their peers while creating a fictional story.

The students will begin by working in pairs or groups of three. This will give them a chance to collaborate with others and hopefully learn new vocabulary from their peers. They will create a fictional story about five pages in length. They will then have to find pictures to accompany their pages. It will be Ok if they cannot find pictures that directly correspond. They will, however, have to explain why they chose the picture they did. After they have posted their pictures into the program and included the text, they will record themselves reading the pages and the voice link will be embedded into the online book. The students will present their stories to the class when they are finished. I think this tool will enhance the students’ investment into the project and improve their computer skills at the same time. Many of us have probably produced a fictional story at some point where we drew the pictures and wrote the text. The difference with this tool is that the students’ photo books will be blown up on the projector for everyone to see. Plus, they will have to use English to search for their pictures online. Additionally, they will record their reading instead of reading it out loud to the class. This will give them the chance to listen to their recording and hear their own pronunciation problems. They can redo the recordings as many times as they want. This will lower their affect because they will not have the pressure of pronouncing everything on the spot in front of the class.

There is no online site link because we are using a program, which will need to be downloaded onto the computers. It is a free program. The students will use the Internet to search for their photos but obviously they would use many different sites for that. One helpful site link is google image listed below.

http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi