Week 13

Advantages and Disadvantages of CALL in Language Learning
Computer assisted language learning (CALL) is a good tool which can be use to support the learning language process, especially English language teaching. CALL is a powerful medium for teaching and learning. The beginning of CALL started in the 1950S, which is called Behavioristic CALL. Then become Communicative CALL in the late 1970S. And the last phase of CALL is Integrative CALL, started in the 1990S untill present. In this phase,CALL is integrate to the teaching of four skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing into tasks to provide direction and coherence and the development of multimedia technology. Computer nowadays, serves as tool which is empowers users to actually use language.

        There are many advantages of CALL including; provide an opportunities to students to have interact in four English skills, The students can improve their self-concept and learning of basic language skills. moreover, it provides them to have more confidence to learn English language. There are many activities for students to learn depend on their difference individual styles.
        However, there are some disadvantages of CALL including; the teacher who has low skills they will take a long time to set the gadgets. Some teacher, on the other hands, use CALL as a big role to teach students than teacher. The student thus  pay a lot attention to the technology instead of teacher. Moreover, the school in rural area might not have opportunities to use CALL because the school have no budget to support all equipment such as internet wifi and computer. Maybe they have to spend a lot of money for all equipment. 
    To sum up, CALL has the advantages and the disadvantages. However, CALL is a good tool that most of teachers use to be a media for teaching and learning.

Week 12

3 Phrases of CALL

Behavioristic CALL
    The first phase of CALL, conceived in the 1950s and implemented in the 1960s and '70s, was based on the then-dominant behaviorist theories of learning. Programs of this phase entailed repetitive language drills and can be referred to as "drill and practice" (or, more pejoratively, as "drill and kill").

     Drill and practice courseware is based on the model of computer as tutor (Taylor 1980). In other words the computer serves as a vehicle for delivering instructional materials to the student. The rationale behind drill and practice was not totally spurious, which explains in part the fact that CALL drills are still used today. Briefly put, that rationale is as follows:
Repeated exposure to the same material is beneficial or even essential to learning
A computer is ideal for carrying out repeated drills, since the machine does not get bored with presenting the same material and since it can provide immediate non-judgmental feedback
A computer can present such material on an individualized basis, allowing students to proceed at their own pace and freeing up class time for other activities

Communicative CALL
  
     The second phase of CALL was based on the communicative approach to teaching which became prominent in the 1970s and 80s. Proponents of this approach felt that the drill and practice programs of the previous decade did not allow enough authentic communication to be of much value.
     One of the main advocates of this new approach was John Underwood, who in 1984 proposed a series of "Premises for 'Communicative' CALL" (Underwood 1984:52). According to Underwood, communicative CALL:

focuses more on using forms rather than on the forms themselves.
teaches grammar implicitly rather than explicitly.
allows and encourages students to generate original utterances rather than just manipulate prefabricated language.
does not judge and evaluate everything the students nor reward them with congratulatory messages, lights, or bells.
avoids telling students they are wrong and is flexible to a variety of student responses.
uses the target language exclusively and creates an environment in which using the target language feels natural, both on and off the screen.
will never try to do anything that a book can do just as well.

Integrative CALL
     The third phase of CALL, started in the 1990s. It was developed in an effort to address some criticisms of the communicative approach by both integrating the teaching of four language skills into tasks to provide direction and coherence and the development of multimedia technology.

Week 11

The Development of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
                
          As for the development of CALL, Warschauer & Healey (1998) suggest that CALL can be generally categorized based on three teaching methodologies dominant in ELT: behavioristic CALL, communicative CALL, and integrative CALL. 
￫ Behavioristic CALL is recognized as the first phase of CALL. Most of CALL programs in this phase entailed repetitive language drills-and-practice activities. 
￫ Communicative CALL,The focus of CALL in this phase is placed on using the language or functions rather than analysis of language forms. But not in a drill format like in the first phase.
￫ Integrative CALL,In this phase, the computer serves as tool, in which the computer does not provide learning material, but empowers users to actually use language. CALL in this period is regarded as a shift from the use of the computer for drill and tutorial purposed into a medium for extending education beyond the language classroom. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of CALL in Language Learning
￫ The use of CALL to support in language learning provides students with the authenticity of the input. 
￫ CALL, especially computer mediated communication or CMC, helps encourage foreign language learners to produce comprehensible output.
￫ CALL is able to provide learners with the kinds of information and support that they require to complete individual tasks and to respond to the diversity of learner needs even within a single classroom structure.
￫ Learner-centered classes can be promoted by CALL.

Educational CALL Programs and ELT in Thailand
￫ Tutorial programs are responsible for collecting, presenting and guiding information, teaching rules. Students can learn content through questions. When the students answer, they receive immediate feedback.
￫ Drill and Practice is to review the content background knowledge.The questions will be repeated many times.
￫ Demonstration is very helpful with selfdirected learning. students will be encouraged to learn by themselves.
￫ Simulation or so-called problem solving is used, aiming to raise students’ critical thinking, discussion skills and writing abilities
￫ Games are used to provide a rich learning and teaching environment.
￫ Testing is a tool for assessment and a method to determine what students know and do not know.

Week 10

Components of CAI include: message, the sound, slide, animation and interaction. In addition, there are 8 Components that need to have it inside containing
1.       Title is the first part of the lesson. It stimulates the attention of the learner.
2.       Instruction will explain the lesson.
3.       Objective provides the expectation of the lesson.
4.       Main Menu shows the title of the lesson.
5.       Pre-Test will assess basic knowledge.
6.       Information  is the most important part or the lesson.
7.       Post Test  will assess the knowledge when they  finished
8.      Summary- Application

Week 9

Corpus-based Activities and Ideas for Material Design written by Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly

Elementary student : Collocations: make/do

- Verb pairing game
   The teacher highlights some collocations to the students then students divided into two groups. Group 1 will have corpus-derived sentences without the verb make anddo. Group 2 will have the verb make and do
Student stand in lines facing each other the ones carrying verb will take turns trying to pair their verb with the sentence to other group.
-Computer cloze activity
Examples : The little boy, Zohair, was sent to______coffee.
-Screen shot analysis

Intermediate students: Modal verbs
-Contextual Analysis
-Cloze activities
-Spot the error activity
-Multiple-choices

Upper intermediate students: Phrasal verbs
-Cloze activity

Advanced students: Idiomatic Expression:
-Concordance Analysis
-Pragmatics: Situation analysis
             Certain point of designing corpus-based  tasks include the ability level of the students, cultural and educational backgrounds. In class a specialized corpus is needed, EFL instructors and researchers need to make sure it is available at their institutions.

Week 8

Digital Writing: Enhancing Ways of Teaching and Learning Writing

Problems in Writing Class: Struggling Writers
This group of struggling writers is often less motivated to write and fails to organize their ideas. These learners usually have poor handwriting.

Digital Writing
Digital Writing is becoming a standard way of life for young learners within Generation M.
Digital writing as the medium to communicate with each other.

Types of Digital Writing             
- Blogs
- Instant Messaging (IM)
- Social network site (SNS)


Characteristics of Digital Writing: Features that Support Struggling Writers

            Digital writing has distinctive characteristics and strengths. Many researchers report positive findings of digital communication application on various aspects related to language learning. First, many digital writing provide opportunities for users to use nicknames or pseudonyms. Second, learners want to communicate to the group or readers.The learners can view their language message as they produce them So, learners or those who have problems with spelling and low command of vocabulary. Finally, digital is  flexible for teachers to modify contexts to suit learner's language needs and interests.


Activities for Teaching Writing with Digital Writing

- Affiliate Group Chat
- Guess Who
- Scavenger
- Little Reporter
- Secret Admirer
- Role Play
- Peer Feedback
- Closed Group Community

Digital Writing: Some Concerns on Academic Writing
Many English teachers are still concerned that its specific register such as shorthand and emoticons.

Week 7

Corpus for classroom: Ideas for Material Design 

Neveen Al Saeed & Salma Waly

       In this paper, two researchers aim at highlighting several ways through which corpora can be integrated in language classrooms to teach students of various levels.

Verb pairing game

Computer cloze activity

Screen shot analysis

Intermediate students: Modal verbsv

Contextual Analysis

Cloze activities

Spot the error activity

Multiple-choices

Express yourself

Upper intermediate students: Phrasal verbs
Cloze activity

Advanced students: Idiomatic Expression:
Concordance Analysis

Pragmatics: Situation analysis



     Although using corpora in language teaching is challenging, it has a big potential in EFL classroom.

Week 6

Modal Auxiliary in British English: 

A Corpus-Based Study of Modality Through British National Corpus

- BNCweb is the concordance software that accesses this copy of the BNC. With BNCweb, you can search the entire BNC, or limit yourself to just part of it.

- Objectives

         BNCweb will e specifically applied through chosen modal verbs in order to:

        1. shed some light on modal verbs of which meanings are difficult to make distinction on theoretical background.

        2. affirm that modalities can be interchangeable due to different contexts, such as gender, type of data, perceived level of difficulty and etc.

- Method Three modal verbs ("should", "have to" and "must") will be scrutinized by available functions ("distribution", "collocation" and "concordance") via BNCweb in order to offer empirical information, such as grammatical usage and discursive practice, of modalities in British context. Details of methodology in each function will be subsequently explained in results and discussion section. 

Week 5

Using Corpus Analysis Software to Analyse Specialized Texts

1. What is a corpus?

 In corpus linguistics, a corpus can be generally defined as… ‘a collection of naturally-occurring texts in a computer-readable format which can be retrieved and analyzed using corpus analysis software’ (Kennedy, 1998; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, R. , 2007; Teubert & Cermakova, 2007)

2.Sources of language corpora

- http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ ·  

- http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/protected/query.html 

- http://corpus.byu.edu/

- http://lextutor.ca/conc/eng/ 

- Antconc’ (http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html) (http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/) 

- ‘Paraconc’ (http://www.athel.com/para.html) 

3. Designing a specialized corpus

           Corpus size

-          There are no fixed ruled; depending on research purposes, availability of data and time.

-          Large, general corpora may be less useful than small, focused corpora if searches are made on context-specific terms.

-          There are limitations of ‘too small’ corpora e.g. not enough concepts, terms, or patterns under investigation.

-          It is preferable to create a ‘monitor’ or ‘open’ corpus because specialized words/usage are dynamic.

Text extracts vs. full texts

-          Depends on the aim of corpus compilation.

-          Whole text offers more coverage because words or terms to be looked at may be randomly distributed throughout the text.

-          Specific sections may be helpful if we are looking for words or phrase under particular content areas or want to create purposeful sub-corpora.

Number of texts

-          Choices can be made between collect few texts of large size or a number of texts with smaller sizes.

-          Choices can also be made between selecting texts written by one or two key writers or sources, or texts retrieved from different sources or written by different authors.

-          Depends on your research focus e.g. to study overall language use or to study idiosyncrasy or linguistic choices preferred by particular writers.

Medium

-          Can be spoken or written texts or mixed.

-          Depends on research questions.

-          Some practical factors should also be considered e.g.compiling spoken corpora can be time-consuming and needs special types of tagging.

Subject and text type

-          Should mainly focus on the specialized text under investigation, although this is less clear-cut in multidisciplinary subjects.

-          Texts may come from different subject if the research focus is on the study of particular language features rather than term extraction.

-          Text types within a specialized subject field may vary from‘expert-to-expert’ texts to ‘expert-to-non-expert’ texts, or in other words, from technical to popular texts.

Other considerations

-          Authorship: Texts written by experts in a field tend to present more reliable and authentic examples of specialized language.

-          Language: Specialized texts can be stored and retrieved in the form of monolingual, comparable, or parallel corpora.

-          Publication date: Texts should come from recent publications unless queries are made in relation to particular periods of time.

      4. Sources of specialized texts

-          Printed materials

-          Word document

-          CD-ROMs

-          Texts on the Web

-          Online databases

     5. Getting started with Antconc

Download the latest version of Antconc watch YouTube tutorials from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html

1.Run the program.      

               2. Open Files (browse and select targeted files) or Open Dir (to select targeted folders)      

                3.Choose the function.     

                4.Clear All Tools and Files before selecting opening new files.      

                5. Save Output to Text File to save output e.g.concordance lines.