Reflection on the use of CALL and Social Bookmarking in ESL/EFL teaching and learning

Reflection on Module 3 of Internet in Language   

                            Teaching Course

 

   CALL (Computer-Assisted Language learning)

and Social Bookmarking

 

Generally, it is noteworthy to state that module 3 reading/discussion and task is both challenging and interesting. This is because it centers on exploring and learning strategies that can aid both language teachers and learners in teaching and learning communicative skills of pronunciation, speaking and conversation effectively through CALL – Computer-Assisted Language Learning which is technologically-based.

In the development of speaking skills, it is advantageous that CALL aids language learners in developing spoken language competence with a motivative, interactive environment. It provides language learners with a wide range of information and formats to set up models and helps to put communication in their appropriate context. It gives language learners to learn at their own space while teachers adjust their teaching modules to meet their different needs. 

Nevertheless, CALL has its own shortcomings. Recently, some computer cannot produce a required result because they are still unable to understand natural language, hence, these computers cannot produce a real communication with the language users. Also, the difference in quality and cost of available software is a challenging problem. In CALL, there is still inappropriate and ineffective employment of resources which constitute a problem for this tech-based language teaching technique. Additionally, the demand of computer memory is a problem. Speech analysis programs with graphics and the storage of the highest quality digitized speeches or video clips consumes a lot of memory.   

However, as regards Social bookmarking services, I learnt the meaning and intricacies of this concept as thus, “Social bookmarking means storing your bookmarks online, tagging them to remember why you wanted to save them and what you might want them for in the future. You can also share them with others who might value your web surfing experiences. And don’t worry - you can always choose to keep some or even all of your bookmarks private if, for some reason, you don’t want to share”

http://www.pandia.com/articles/social-bookmarking.

In the employment of social bookmarking tools to research for articles online, there are bugs and spam, hence, to sort out the genuine articles, few important criteria in the article entitled “The Top 5 Social Bookmarking Services” should be considered such as 

·       A decent amount of users is necessary. Otherwise the whole social aspect looses relevance.

·       The service has to have quite extensive documentation, FAQ and/or help pages, to guide users.

·       More advanced users will want good import and export possibilities. Import is necessary for bringing old bookmarks from your browser or from another online bookmarking service, export is important for backup copies and to ensure that your bookmarks can go with you to another service if you decide to switch.

·       A good bookmarking service should have feeds (RSS and/or Atom) of tags or groups of tags.

·       I would want my bookmarking service to have a blog so I can be kept up to date about new features, bugs, bug fixes and more. (http://www.pandia.com/articles/social-bookmarking)

       Among all the top 5 Social Bookmarking Services, Diigo is quite interesting, easy and effectively coordinated. This is because, it provides the users with varieties of tools and features. It provides more than a bookmarking service for it serves as a tool for online research resources. I prefer to use Diigo in bookmarking services because it is quite easy to navigate, sort, edit and bookmarks and tags for online researches. 

Diigo bookmarks provides users with the bookmark tools that allows users to add sticky notes and highlights texts on any web page as you could do on a paper thereby, putting information on highlighted format on web pages for easy reference, scanning. In Diigo social bookmarking, “snippets of information can be saved for sharing, editing and reference” for private use of the user or for sharing with Diigo friends. Diigo bookmarking services is the favorite and best in the field of Social Bookmarking because of its collaborative interests and functions. 

Having performed the task of opening a Diigo bookmarking online account/page in this module, I discovered the assertion that “Diigo has a group tool for collaborative research that allows groups of people to pool their findings through shared bookmarks, highlights, sticky notes, and forum discussions” as stated on the online article entitled “The Top 5 Social Bookmarking Services” as practical and feasible.

Also, it is noteworthy to state that aside learning and enhancing communicative skills in English language teaching and learning among language users, the CALL – Computer-Assisted Language Learning can be applied in other fields such as electronic dictionary, verbal command recognition and analysis for assessment purposes, and the integration of speaking with other language skills.

In conclusion, this module is an eye opener to both language teachers and learners towards the new effective development of CALL in the area of effective language-related tools and strategies of acquiring communicative skills (listening, pronunciation, speaking, conversation, etc) in the target language. This can be achieved through the use of some useful websites such as ThoughtCo. with the link https://www.thoughtco.com/resources-for-esl-teachers-4133087 which primarily serves as resources for ESL teachers. Randall's cyber listening lab website with the link https://www.esl-lab.com/   is useful to my English language class of Grade 6 to 9 because it is effectively designed to provide online English listening comprehension activities for ESL and EFL on topics such as General ESL listening quizzes. The website prə-nŭn'sē-ā'shən with the link   https://sites.google.com/site/pronunciationstuff/links is quite recommendable for my English language class and even for every other classes of language learners. This is because this website practically encourages the language learners towards learning the correct and standard pronunciation patterns and development of better accent in the target language. Also, the use of Diigo as a social bookmarking service in saving, editing, sharing and storing web pages of research resources online is both useful and helpful in teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language.

      Critical Discussion/Review of relevant articles and 

                                           websites

 

In the current and modern language learning dispensation, CALL known as Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) gives both language learners a learning space as regards study topics, lesson reviews, lesson repeats etc. It is both flexible and creative with regards to communicative language learning because it goes beyond the traditional language classroom fixed techniques. As Maria Gracia Busa in “New perspective in teaching pronunciation” said “Some of these applications for enhancement and practice of oral skills consist in applications for pronunciation teaching. The goal of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems is to provide learners with private, stress-free practice with individualized and instantaneous feedback on pronunciation”. 

According to Julia (2002), “The introduction of computers in language classroom has opened a new door to both teachers and learners. Computers, accompanying software packages and networks can be used in a number of ways to assist language learning. The computer environment is highly motivating and less threatening psychologically. The emergence of the web broadens interaction to a great extent and enables learners’ to be exposed to a real audience… Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), defined as ‘the search for and study of applications of the computer in language teaching and learning’”.  The computer-based learning of L2 has been proven effective through computer-Assisted language (CALL) which Levy (1999:1) in Julia (2002) agrees that it has been used in pronunciation training, speech recognition and analysis, “voiced” dictionary, and as a stimulus to provide a speaking environment. 

However, “In second/foreign language classroom, the CALL environment creates situations that stimulate interest, allows dialogue and communication, enhances reactivity, fosters a sense of personal worth, facilitates collaboration among students working together, permits rich learning experiences for all students and strengthens communication skills” (Borras 1993; Pennington 1995; Cameron 1996; Inoue 1999; Kohn et al. 1997; Powell 1998). Here, there is an underscore of the linguistic services CALL provides in ESL/EFL classrooms ranging from interesting communicative lessons, speech dialogues and corresponding responses, team spirit and work among language learners, promotion of wide range of experiences and enhancement of communicative skills. Julia (2002) believes that CALL speaking activities are still in the developing stages compared with those in reading, writing and listening. She maintained that in fact, application of CALL in teaching and learning speaking is mainly decided by the nature of speaking itself. According to Pennington (1995) in Julia (2002), spoken language competence covers two aspects, i.e the mechanical aspect and the meaningful aspect.

The major impact of technological applications in speech communication as regards pronunciation teaching is ‘Speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition’. Both speech analysis/synthesis and speech recognition aids in measuring, checking and teaching correct speech patterns of sounds, morphemes, words and sentences/sentence structures.  While speech synthesis, i.e., computer-generated speech production is greatly concerned with fundamental listening comprehension and for learning sound-symbol (phoneme-grapheme) correspondence according to Chun (2006:279) in Maria’s “New perspective in teaching pronunciation”. On the other hand, despite its imperfections, automatic speech recognition promotes effective learning of pronunciation skills in the target language such as English language. Maria agrees that “Automatic speech recognition constitutes the basis for a large number of applications for pronunciation improvement, in spite of the fact that speech recognition has not reached the same level of performance as speech synthesis (speech recognition application work better when either the number of users or vocabulary items is restricted)”. Julia (2002) in “The employment of CALL in teaching second/foreign language speaking skills” asserts that the speech recognition and analysis technologies can provide spontaneous feedback to learners. These technologies can be in oral proficiency assessment programs. Witt and Young (2000) in Julia (2002) explains a system focused on measuring pronunciation quality of non-native speech at the phone level which aims to locate pronunciation errors, assess how close the pronunciation is to that of a native speaker and to identify systematic differences when compared to a pronunciation dictionary.  Their research results show that a computer-based pronunciation scoring system is likely to be capable of providing similar feedback to a student as a human judge with regards to which phenetic segments in an utterance can be accepted as correct or not. They suggest that future work should concentrate on expanding the algorithm to inform the learners which mistakes he or she has made.

Besides, it is a linguistic relief that “Talking Heads” serves as a technological-language teaching aid with the use practical human features of gestures and body movements to make the language learners internalize the lesson and substitute for the activities of a human language teacher. Maria acknowledges this when she said that a to pronunciation teaching classes may come from the development of so-called Talking Heads, i.e., computer-animated heads (conversational agents) which combine speech technology with studies on gestures and heads and face movements.

For the purpose of effective result in this assignment, I explored all the websites and found some websites useful and effective in teaching and learning of English with tech-based computer-assisted technique. As regards conversation lesson plans (teacher resource), I found conversation lesson plans at esl.about.com useful for my English language learners in Grade 6 to 9 classroom. The website ThoughtCo. with the link https://www.thoughtco.com/resources-for-esl-teachers-4133087 primarily serves as resources for ESL teachers. This site helps to enhance students with different English levels in all grades because it covers topics and practical activities on pronunciation and conversation, vocabulary, writing skills, reading comprehension, grammar and business English which is a familiar topic among English language learners.

Among the explored websites designed for English language learning, Randall's cyber listening lab website with the link https://www.esl-lab.com/   is useful to my English language class of Grade 6 to 9 because it is effectively designed to provide online English listening comprehension activities for ESL and EFL on topics such as General ESL listening quizzes on “…everyday English comprehension skills at the three levels based on content, voices, vocabulary and natural speed. A combination of adults, teenage, and children’s voices are included” just as asserted on the front page of the website. It is as true in practice as it is claimed. 

Also, this website provides listening activities for Easy (listening for high-beginning ESL Students), intermediate (for intermediate level ESL learners), Difficult (for advanced-level ESL learners), Basic Listening quizzes (short listening activities for beginning and intermediate ESL students), Listening quizzes for academic purposes (more advanced academic topic and lectures), culture videos (short culture videos covering a wide range of topics that introduces learners to various experiences of everyday lives.

However, as regards pronunciation websites, I found prə-nŭn'sē-ā'shənwith the link   https://sites.google.com/site/pronunciationstuff/links quite recommendable for my English language class and even for every other classes because this Robert’s websites of useful resources for teachers and students for pronunciation covers pronunciation topics on important strategies to learning effective pronunciation skills such as Segmentals, Supra-segmentals, Speech and Accent, Pronunciation-related videos, Recording on-line and Software such as Speech Analyzer http://www.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm and Wavesurfer http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer/ This website practically encourages the language learners towards learning the correct and standard pronunciation patterns and development of better accent in the target language  

In terms of speaking, Larry Ferlazzo’s websites Of The Day with the link https://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/   is labeled and characterized as ‘The best sites to practice speaking English’. This website contains enormous good sites with high use of tech for practicing speaking English. For example, one of the sites that teaches key strategies for developing oral language is from the teaching channel such as Get ’em talking from Dannielle89 with the linkhttps://www2.slideshare.net/Dannielle89  accompanied with Web 2.0 Tools For Beginning English Language Learners – “Clyp.it”  There are range of speaking activities from “The British Council” online resource center as a guide for teaching Primary, Secondary and adult language learners, hence, it enhances primarily the speaking and pronunciation skills across every level of language learner.

In conclusion, it is linguistically appropriate to state that CALL and its related websites are language teaching tools that are both communicative-oriented and skill-oriented. Despite its new development in the field of teaching and learning English as a Second/Foreign language and its inherent imperfections, it serves as an effective tool and medium towards developing listening, pronunciation, speaking and conversation skills, thereby enhancing the communicative competence of the language learners that employ them.

  

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