“We thus commit ourselves to teaching what is often untaught and may, indeed, be unteachable in terms of conventional language teaching methodology.”
This seems like a common theme in CALL research, the concept of going beyond conventional language teaching methodology. I think this is one of the bonuses of CALL in that it can make use of conventional and unconventional methods. Most conventions started off as unconventional, so I think CALL helps ease the process when necessary.
In response to Johns (1991) and Richards & Rogers (2001) articles, I think that data-driven learning was a big step in language education and provides a rich resource of examples and usage of countless words and phrases. It also serves to give concrete data to a subject that almost everyone has an opinion of, “[d]ata-driven learning aims to contextualize and demythologize language. It is a result of technology and the ability to organize words and language features quickly and easily.”
The idea of teaching students to use the corpus databases and encourage learner autonomy is, as both articles suggested, very beneficial, especially for more advanced learners that are able to find and pick out collocations themselves. I think the internet has opened up huge and navigable corpora for many students to have immediate access to. Social networking is one aspect of web 2.0 that provides a rich, accessible, and easily navigable corpus of real-world language use. The interactive aspects available allow the student to interact with the author immediately, something that the authors of these articles probably did not foresee. This type of interaction can allow for further understanding of the usage and meaning behind the language in question. This is very helpful for motivated, high level students such as those described in the University of Birmingham, but I am interested to find ways in which lower level students can also benefit from these resources. Overall, I think corpus based learning can effectively build confidence for students, particularly in the skills of reading and writing.
I have never used any methods, as far as I was aware, that made explicit use of a lexical syllabus or the most used English words. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has, and how the experience was.
Michael, I like your introduction about CALL's privileges (is this the word for this context?)in language teaching methods. That is why I am interested in CALL :)I agree with you that corpus based language learning may be beneficial. But, until I practice it with my students, who are university students, that I can really say it is indeed beneficial. As you noticed from my blog, I don't have any experience with corpus based language learning either.
ReplyDeleteMichael, your mention of social networking sites brought be back to a point that I debate with myself over (if that makes any sense!): how important is it that learners look at examples of "proper" English? Certainly, there's no debating the value in general of having a ton of informal English out there and available via the internet, but I still feel a bit leery about having learners look at too much of it. There's bunches of extremely informal and sometimes just plain bad usage out there that you wouldn't want anyone using as a model.
ReplyDeleteCatherine -
ReplyDeleteIt is important for English language learners to learn academic English, but social English can be just as important. Native speakers are generally able to do both via code-switching. This skill is extremely useful to both native speakers and language learners. I think you are right, that students should know the differences between English used on Facebook and English used in Academic papers, but I am not sure it is a good idea to try and 'shield' students from English that is used frequently, though not 'properly.'
-Michael