xLingo Review 4-29-2013

There are many e-penpal sites out there. Here's a review of one:

xLingo Review

xLingo allows users to create a profile in order to connect with speakers of other languages. You can present the languages that you speak and the types of communicative activities in which you’re interested in participating like email penpal, skype partner, etc. The website matches users up with people who have reciprocal language learning goals. That is, you can say you want to learn Arabic and you speak English, and the site will find someone who speaks Arabic and wants to learn English. Users can select their proficiency level. The site is free, but there is a premium account for $20/year.

Advantages

• Site has built-in messaging abilities, chatrooms, blogs, avatars, and flashcards.
• There appear to be speakers of a wide variety of languages beyond English.
• You can select communication partners that fit a specific profile (i.e., if you want to talk to a woman, you can specify that criteria.)
• You can select whether or not you want to communicate with a teacher or a learner.

Disadvantages.

• Site seems to have fake profiles created by commercial companies for spamming.
• There seem to be few users online.
• The site may be trying to do too much (see the first advantage).
• It might be difficult to learn a language; that is, the site may be better for general communication in a conversation partner capacity.
• The platform language is only in English.

Tips

• If a person says they speak all the languages that start with A and are from, say, Berlin, it might be a spammer.
  If you were planning on moving to another language, you might use this site to learn the language beforehand.

Electronic Portfolio

Here is a link to my Electronic Portfolio.

Assessment and CALL

This week, we focused on using CALL for assessment purposes. After taking Dr. Jamieson's course in ESL Assessment, I think many an MA-TESLer falls in love with assessment in some ways. The connection between objectives, daily lesson planning, and designing summative assessments becomes clear and takes on new importance. Personally, I gained a lot of respect for assessments because of the profound impact they have on students' lives. Making good tests is so important for our students. Part of good teaching is choosing/making the right test. I found that assessment reoriented me to teaching. Developing and achieving course objectives was suddenly something measurable, and something that I really needed to spend time thinking about and working hard to teach in my lessons.

Regarding technology, DuBravac's (2013) chapter provided an excellent review of key assessment terms and concepts, as well as a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of CALL in assessment. From our discussion with Geoff, we came up with some key points regarding the big three in assessment: practicality, reliability, and validity. If computers are available, this kind of assessment can be very practical for test administrators, as data is collected immediately. In terms of reliability, CALL tests can more easily provide the exact same experience for test takers than a human proctor. On the other hand, if the test isn't given in a language lab, questions of security and identity pose a serious threat to the reliability of the test. Finally, whether a CALL assessment is valid depends, as always, on the intended and actual use of test results; and also on the the constructs tested. If, for example, only true/false or multiple-choice questions are asked on a writing test, how much of the writing assessment construct is being tested? Does it match with the test-maker's expectations? What are stakeholders expecting to know based on these test results. Recent improvements to the e-rater technology used in the TOEFL test are changing the landscape of writing assessment. Ed White, a renowned scholar in the writing assessment field, suggested that computerized assessment is the 300-pound gorilla in the room for any discussion of writing assessment. While I can't really wrap my head around how this technology might assess my essay, I am trying to heed Dr. White's advice and get hip to the new trends.

Cultured CALL

The teaching of culture begins with a complex definition of the concept of culture. Somehow everything that a group of people do, make, or believe; but somehow not.

In my own teaching, I often avoid explicitly "teaching" culture. As an undergrad, I studied Sociology, and often got tangled up in the idiosyncratic aspects of culture. How representative of a culture is any one person? Anyway, this isn't the venue for that discussion. In ESL, pragmatics and cultural expectations seem important. The concept of what is negotiable is familiar to PIE teachers, as our Saudi students often want to negotiate things that, in typical American interactions, would be non-negotiable. I think these lessons are hard because they aren't necessarily only linguistic. They involve understanding what your interlocutor expects, and knowing how to show respect for that person.

I think that technology offers several useful ways to teach culture through collaboration and exchange. CMC speeds up the process of interacting with what would've been pen pals generations ago. The tricky part of teaching culture is finding out what is culture. Whose culture? The activity that Alan, Karen and I made was about food in Phoenix. Students' explorations of the menus and the resulting inferences about culture suggest that they are "learning" Phoenix food culture.

Clearly, culture is something that we ought to teach students, or at least provide avenues for discovery. The how, and the WHAT remain lingering questions for me. I'll have to keep thinking about this.

Culture and CALL

Jena, Alan, and Karen's Activity

Week 11 Reflection

In class on Wednesday, we were discussing how some efforts to prevent plagiarism (i.e., having students write drafts by hand in class) are no longer totally authentic to the changes in the writing process brought on by increased use of word processing software. I'm feeling about 30 years behind the curve in writing that statement; yet, the point of the discussion--changes in how we write--is an important consideration. With word processing software, we may edit more as we go, using the curser to add, subtract and move chunks of text in the blink of an eye. A word-processed draft is different from a hand-written draft in many ways. In CALL this week, we discussed the teaching of writing and grammar, and it's clear that technology has enhanced these areas of our teaching.

Teaching grammar through technology isn't a new idea. Certainly the language laboratories of the 1960s were working on grammar, if in a somewhat non-communicative way. Current applications have more to offer in terms of contextualized activities, or in the case of programs like Criterion, advanced text analysis capabilities that can offer students individualized feedback on their written work.

The teaching of writing has been altered by trends in technology. Arguably, collaborative projects have never been more easily facilitated than by wikis or Google Docs. Blogs provide a space for students to post written assignments for a larger audience than traditional hard copies turned in to the teacher. As Katie described, using blogs for simple assignments like ENG 105 Reading Logs helped her students take the assignments more seriously, and maybe think more deeply about the ideas brought up by their classmates. The next time I teach a writing class, I want to make more use of these technologies in my classroom.

Materials Development #2: Podcast Vocabulary

For the second materials development assignment, I kept the top level of an EFL IEP (adult students) as the context. I wanted to use the idea that I had during Bek's AWL Important Words presentation for including more listening skills in vocabulary logs. I think that the use of technology in this lesson would facilitate skill and strategy development in a meaningful way. Happy reading!

Link to the Lesson Plan

Link to the appended Vocabulary Log worksheet