How cool is this? Speak into your Iphone in English and get a spoken translation in Arabic (and vice versa). I actually saw a device that did this (I think by the same company) but it was a dedicated piece of (expensive) hardware. Having this available on your Iphone (it’s not public yet), would be amazing.
I gave a talk today at Oxford University. You can find the abstract below as well as the presentation. Try using ‘full screen’ mode to best view the presentation.
The effects of Enhanced input on intake and acquisition of implicit and explicit knowledge The importance of ample input for second language acquisition is uncontroversial. At the same time, evidence exists (for example from studies in immersion settings) to show that even with massive exposure certain aspects of the language develop slowly or not at all. This appears to apply especially to formal features that are semantically redundant and/or that are difficult to notice. It appears that such aspects require some form of instructional intervention, although it remains unclear what type of intervention is most effective. One instructional possibility is ‘input enhancement’. This presentation reports a study that investigated the effect of two different types of input enhancement (input enrichment and input enrichment + noticing instruction) on both the intake and acquisition of a difficult grammatical structure (negative adverbs). The effect of the instruction was measured in terms of both implicit and explicit L2 knowledge. The study showed that enhanced input in the form of enriched input resulted in intake and assisted the acquisition of implicit knowledge. It showed that asking students to pay attention to the target structure conferred no additional advantage for either intake or acquisition.
You may have heard of Versant, an automated test of spoken English that is taken over the phone and takes only 15 minutes. It uses speech recognition for its scoring. I just found a demo of how it works online, which is quite neat: http://www.versanttest.co.uk/free_demo.htm
I have long been interested in Language & Development and Linguistic Rights (and very sorry to miss this year’s Language & Development conference) and was therefore interested to be given a brochure at the recent TBLT conference in Lancaster on a book series called ‘Encounters, Language and Diversity’, edited by Jan Blommaert, Ben Rampton, Marco Jacquement, Anna de Fina and Norman Joergensen. It includes books on topics such as linguistic rights, ‘the asylum speaker’, language in African education, and other topics at the crossroads of linguistics, communication, culture, law and other disciplines. You can find more information here.
Thornton and Houser were among the first to show the potential for cellphones for vocabulary learning back in 2004. They sent out SMS messages to their students with new vocabulary, and made sure that each item was received multiple times by their participants. I don’t think (but I could be wrong here) that they made use of spaced learning by increasing the time interval between each exposure. Flaschard software is excellent at that, and now there are programs for use on cellphones. This could potentially be excellent as you are likely to have your phone with you when it is time for your next rehearsal. Here is one such program (www.flashmybrain.com) but there are many others.
Why do students not like to keep portfolios? I think it’s largely because they require a lot of effort, and effort that is clearly separate from and in addition to that demanded by the language activities they engage in. It takes an extra step to pull out a notebook or (more likely) log on to a website to update your learning record or to write up your reflections. That’s why it’s important to make the process as easy as possible and to integrate reflection into the learning process. Since most learning takes place outside the classroom, how can we encourage this reflection ‘in-the-moment’? To my mind cellphones are an excellent candidate. Using the simple voice recorder available on most phones students can be asked to record such things as:
- their use of the language outside the classroom (length, location, purpose)
- examples of the target language (for example a particular feature discussed in class)
- their success or otherwise in doing so (self-assessment)
- any questions they come up with
Several applications let you automatically upload voice notes to an online account. Some, such as one of my favourite pieces of software, Evernote (www.evernote.com), let you share an account. As a teacher you could set this up and let students send their recordings directly to that account so that both they and you can review it. An audio message as feedback will certainly cost you less time than a written comment. The (audio)record of students’ learning gives you a chance to give them credit for their out-of-class learning while giving you an immediate account of whether and how they use and learn the language on their own. In this way, mobile portfolios could be a feasible way to assess students’ development towards autonomy.
Coursesmart, a publisher of college textbooks in the US, is offering an Iphone application that gives you access to over 7,000 textbooks. Why are publishers of language education materials so far behind….?
As those of you who read my blog regularly will know, I strongly believe that computer games have an important role to play in education. One school in New York is taking this to the next level by delivering its entire curriculum through four domains, such as ‘Codeworlds’ (a combination of maths and English), and ‘Being, Space and Place’ (English and Social Studies). Each of these comprises a series of games that bring together several skills. An example of these is one in which students play the role of pyramid-builders to learn about engineering, maths, geography and other fields. The programme started last month and it will be very exciting to see how it goes.
It is interesting that, to the best of my knowledge, there have been no studies that have used dynamic assessment to measure autonomous learning. Dynamic assessment is a procedure that has its origins in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and that integrates assessment with instruction. The assessment involves interaction between the assessor and the learner, during which the assessor offers help to the learner with task completion. In this way it is a measure of a learner’s ability to learn, not a static measure of the outcome of that process. The score on a dynamic assessment may be expressed as the difference between the initial performance and the final performance, or the score on the final performance only. Additional measures include learners’ ability to transfer what they have learned to other situations and their ability to complete the task independently. DA is thus future-oriented and learner-oriented and takes into account both the individual and his interaction with the environment. It could thus very well be an excellent way to investigate the independent aspect of autonomous learning, especially if changes in this ability could be measured over time (for example, before and after a course or using a particular resource such as a self-access centre). Has anyone used DA in relation to autonomy?
Here are a couple of useful references:
Matthew E. Poehner (2008). Dynamic Assessment. A Vygotskian Approach to Understanding and Promoting L2 Development. Springer: Educational Linguistics , Vol. 9. ISBN: 978-0-387-75774-2
Poehner, M. E., & Lantolf, J. P. (2005). Dynamic assessment in the language classroom. Language Teaching Research, 9(3), 233-265. doi: 10.1191/1362168805lr166oa.
