Kibbitzer Kalamity ;)

      The information presented in Tim John's Kibbitzers offers an incredibly in-depth look at the target language and its correct usage. Using the first Kibbitzer as an example, it was interesting to see how the data set presented both the original and revised sentences, in which the word "incessant" was replaced by the suggested word, "steadfast" (Kibbitzer 1). The fact that the data is provided below the comparison sentences for each term helps to illustrate the differing connotations between the two terms. This type of Kibbitzer usage could be very useful in the classroom. The various Kibbitzers could be employed to help illustrate how one word could be a better choice than another, which would be helpful for English Language Learners because it would explain and provide examples in context as to what words could work better. 

The MICASE Kibbitzers were fairly interesting to read through; however, some appeared to be more difficult for ESL students. Using the "Among or Between" Kibbitzer (MICASE Kibbitzer 2), a teacher could use this to gradually introduce students to the differences between the two words. It starts out by introducing the simple rules that apply to both words, then slowly progresses into describing the more complex rules, and finally concludes by showing the language usage in the data. While these Kibbitzers explore each data point thoroughly, I think John's Kibbitzers appear to be more student-friendly and accessible. If a teacher was to use these in the classroom, I would recommend John's Kibbitzers because the target language lesson is more approachable (and there are 81 available vs. MICASE's 14).  

Corpora Critique

Evaluation criteria: 

1. Design must be principled, "the texts in a corpus need to represent the type of language that the corpus is intending to capture" (Reppen 3)
2. Corpus must consist of "a large collection of texts" (Reppen 3)

American National Corpus (ANC)

     This corpus is made up of over 20 million words, with ~15 million words being available for free download, of which 3,217,772 words are spoken and 11,406,555 are written. It appears that the types of sources are fairly limited, with spoken words coming from some face to face, but a majority from phone switchboard conversations. The written texts are more varied; however, they too are much more limited than the sources offered by other corpora. The texts appear to come from more with a majority of the texts coming from more formal sources, being from domains such as "technical," "journal," and "government" (ANC 2009). While this corpus would be useful for tasks requiring the use of more technical data, it would not be appropriate for lessons aimed at introducing students to conversational spoken data or other more colloquial data. 

     The corpus home page does not seem very user-friendly, and I did not like the interface. Another element of it that was that users would have to pay or download the free part onto their computers, which is not ideal. 

 Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

     COCA is an amazing source of data. It is "composed of over 425 million words in more than 175,000 texts" (COCA 2011). Because COCA's data is broken down into various registers, the data can be used to teach multiple types of lessons. Such registers include spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic (COCA 2011). Compared the the ANC, this corpus offers a much wider variety of data. Additionally, the easy-to-navigate interface opens up the opportunity for student interaction using the corpus in classroom lessons. 

Cambridge English Corpus (CEC)

     Dang! The CEC consists of over 1.5 billion words throughout all of the CEC corpora resources. The reason that it is so much bigger than the aforementioned corpora is because it pulls texts from multiple resources, ultimately gathering information that covers British English, American English and Learner English (CEC 2012). I am thoroughly impressed by the extremely large range of resources that the CEC offers, and think that the Learner English corpora resources would be an incredibly useful tool for ESL classes. Because the Learner English resources include texts from the Learners' written English and Error coded learner written English corpora, one could choose to incorporate error coded or non-coded texts in the classroom. These examples could help students identify types of grammatical points and could supplement lessons on various topics. 

Online Video Projects

     I love the idea of engaging students in learning through the use of student-produced audio. I think that by giving the students a chance to be creative, it enhances student motivation and increases their interest in the assignments. Personally, I love assignments that allow me to be creative and interpret them individually. The idea of using student-produced videos would be an incredible option, as long as it was feasible, i.e. sufficient/available technology, relevant to coursework, etc. Some issues I noticed with the Phrasal Verb Video Dictionary was that some of the videos were lower quality due to the recording devices, while others were difficult to hear. Another issue that I noticed was that some of the definitions were not correctly used in the videos. For example, in the "on the ball" definition video, one student says, "On the ball, the teacher is coming." Another example where the students mixed up the definitions was "touch on." The students said, " touch on, I need to study," and in response, another student said, "Okay, I will touch on- it was great." I think the students confused the meaning of "touch on" with summarize in the video, whereas they could have used it in a clearer manner.  

     Despite the shortcomings, the Phrasal Verb Video Dictionary is a great idea! Since the class I observed is an ESL Low-Intermediate Reading course, this type of idea could be incorporated into a lesson and assignment to help introduce students to vocabulary that could come up in future readings. If I were to teach this type of class, I would try to incorporate a variety of activities to engage and hold the students' interest. Rather than simply holding class everyday where the students had to sit still and read, I would try to encourage the development of skills necessary to successfully read through interactive and entertaining activities. One way of incorporating video in the classroom with the students would be to have them complete various activities relating to course texts, such as conducting "author interviews," where the students would be in charge of researching the author to ensure a realistic interview. Additionally, the students could conduct interviews similar to the one in the Mexican Immigration to the U.S. YouTube video. In order to add authenticity to the assignments, students could interview real authors (if possible) or peers, random people, etc. to get opinions on a certain text, topics, etc. Another assignment could include students recreating or rewriting/changing the ending to a story and acting it out on video. 

Group Project 1: Reflections

1.  How did your group use technology to work collaboratively? 

     Our group used technology as a tool to help us stay on the same page. We utilized Google Docs to share our brainstorming notes and then also to compile each person's individual part of our Rationale. Using these tools allowed us to read and  peer-edit our work in a time efficient manner, which allowed us to expedite the editing process. Once we had all finished our individual parts of the Rationale, we uploaded them to the Google Docs for editing prior to publishing it to our wiki. Additionally, we used technology such as PowerPoint and Word to create our lesson plans and scaffolding presentations. 

2. How could you have used technology in additional ways to help your work?

     We could have incorporated more Internet-based activities in order to encourage the students to become more technologically-savvy and familiar using various modes of technology available today. We could have researched various websites similar to the site we used during the problem-solving workshop.

3. What did you learn about technology, collaborative work, problem-solving, and/or interaction by doing the group project? 
     I found that creating and publishing a group project required a lot more communication than most group projects. At first, I was nervous about the project because we didn't communicate about the project during the weekend, but started working on the project during the first in-class work session. However, I was really happy that our group was able to effectively brainstorm and we were all able to complete our designated project for Thursday's class. This allowed us to determine what else needed to be done before the due date, and when we met on Saturday, we were able to finish the remaining elements of the project in just a few hours. Using technology definitely allowed us to communicate more effectively, as it allowed us to work on our components when it was the most convenient for us individually.

4. How can what you learned inform your own teaching (either in the second language classroom, or elsewhere)?

     This experience will definitely help me remember to plan ahead of time and more efficiently as a teacher. I was so happy with the final outcome of our group project because of the positive communication, and will definitely strive to replicate the experience with future collaborations. As for future teaching, I will also strive to include technology-enhanced activities in order to challenge my students and introduce them to varied types of learning and lessons/activities. 

Computer-Mediated Communication in Language Learning

Computer-mediated Communication (CMC): incorporation of online communication technologies into a learning setting (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, p. 21) 

Synchronous CMC: possible simultaneous interaction, through tools such as instant messaging, text and voice chat rooms, and videoconferencing (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, p. 21) 

Asynchronous CMC: delayed communication through tools such as email, discussion boards, blogs, podcasting and webcasting (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, p. 21) 

Both synchronous and asynchronous CMC are invaluable in the classroom, as they offer many language learning opportunities that would not be accessible otherwise. Synchronous CMC offers students the ability to interact with other students in real-time, from any location. An advantage of this interaction type is the multitude of available communication opportunities. Teachers can establish connections with fellow teachers in schools across town, or even across the world, and can schedule student chat opportunities with the students from other schools via chat, Skype, etc. This type of partnership lends authenticity to the communication activities, and students would be excited to interact in a new modality and even more, with students from different locations and cultures. A disadvantage of this type of communication could be the potential negative side effects that could stem from having such an instant, real-time interaction. Students engaging in chat could be offended due to a lack of facial cues and a more-relaxed diction, which could result in a student accidentally saying something they didn't intend to be offensive. Otherwise, synchronous CMC can be a valuable tool for encouraging real-time student interaction. 

While synchronous interaction tends to rely more on informal writing exchanges, asynchronous communication modalities give learners time to review and edit their work (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, p. 21). An advantage of asynchronous CMC is that students have time to think about what they are saying. This provides language learners with an adequate amount of time needed to develop their ideas. This is supports Condition 5 for Optimal Language Learning (Egbert & Hanson-Smith, p. 21). If students have an adequate amount of time to work, then they won't be stressed, and will be able to engage in a better higher-level learning than under other circumstances. Unfortunately, one of the disadvantages of asynchronous CMC is that the students may become frustrated with waiting for other students to respond because the communication is not instantaneous. Ultimately, both types of interaction have their strengths and weaknesses, but should be incorporated into the classroom to enhance language learning and students' interaction. 

Developing Critical Thinking: Rationale for Rationale Software

The software for Rationale appears to be pretty useful for teachers' use in promoting critical thinking. The concept-mapping options would be incredibly useful for helping SS to grasp the idea of logically organizing their thinking into clear pathways, and the fact that the software allows teachers to provide feedback & comments is invaluable. I really enjoyed seeing the Jumble Jigsaw activity and reading about its use--this would be a fun way to challenge students to develop their critical thinking skills, and since the Jumble activities are random, students would constantly be challenged.

The problem that may arise in a classroom is how to incorporate this software. Firstly, teachers would have to consider the technology available to them during class time, and available to students at home. If the availability of technology is an issue, this software would be too difficult to incorporate into a class, and the teacher should just approach critical thinking strategies by introducing mapping by hand. As for the $64,000 question: if a school has the available resources and can afford the software programs, then by all means-- invest in the software. However, if the software programs will negatively impact the schools and won't be used often enough to justify spending the money to buy the software, then the teachers should be creative enough to find alternate approaches to teaching critical thinking strategies.

Wiki-Farm Wanderings

Wiki: "a web site developed collaboratively by a community of users, allowing any user to add and edit content" (Merriam-Webster)

When we started this class, I had no idea what a wiki was, other than thinking that "wiki" was simply an abbreviation for Wikipedia. What's more, I had absolutely no idea how to go about creating my own wiki. However, through experimenting with both Google Sites and Wikispaces, I have found them both to be very simple to navigate. 

Wikispaces had an extremely user-friendly interface. The first time I visited the website and signed up for an account, I was still skeptical of the ease I was experiencing, but as soon as I logged in and clicked "New Wiki," a giant "Welcome to Your New Wiki" page popped up! This page was very helpful and informative as I wouldn't have known to think of all of the topics it covered, but it did get overwhelming. I noticed that I started skimming through the topics, rather than poring through them as I first did when I opened the page. As for the rest of the site, I enjoyed the various options it provides that Google Sites does not, such as: Favorite Sites, Inbox, News, Monitoring (sites you want to watch) and community. This allows the user to personalize his/her homepage based on personal interests. 

When it came to creating the actual wiki, it was really easy to create and edit as well; however, it took me a few minutes of clicking around on the site to find the "New Page" link, which turned out to be housed under the "Pages and Files" tab--go figure. I had a lot of fun playing with my test wiki. Inserting pictures and links used the same toolbar as Google Sites, but it was difficult to resize the images without ruining their proportions. 

Overall, Google Sites is really awesome for one's personal webpage, but Wikispaces seems to offer more for teachers. The features of the site that provide special access for K-12 and Higher Education teachers seem to open up a lot of options for including technology in the classroom.  Additionally, I found it fascinating that it allows for teachers to create a whole class' worth of student accounts without requiring any of the student information. This would save a lot of time in the classroom; if the teacher can simply provide the preestablished account information to the SS, then there is more structured time for the T to help the SS become familiar with the site and it's resources, rather than wasting a lot of class time trying to set up the accounts. 

Now that I have successfully navigated the world of two different "wiki farms," I feel very comfortable with my ability to create wikis. I came into this class with no wiki experience, and have successfully created one on both Google Sites and Wikispaces. I feel that the only way to really learn how to navigate web pages is to explore them, so before introducing wiki use to 

my students, I would make sure that I was well-versed in the demands of each site. Furthermore, once introducing the wikis into a classroom, I would give my students class time to become familiar with the sites. I would encourage my students to navigate the sites on their own so they become familiar with wikis in a relaxed atmosphere, and I would be available to answer any questions that could come up. Through this experience, I have discovered how useful wikis can be in a teaching environment, and I will challenge myself to incorporate them in my teachings. 

Nailing the Needs Analysis

Questions: 

Hmm... let's see. I guess I have a few...

 

1. What happens if I've contacted ESL teachers from various teaching sites, and nobody gets back to me? 

2. How does the title of this assignment relate to the needs analysis assignments we completed in English 125E, where we had to actually create and perform a test or survey of a student's English proficiency? 

Contexts for assignment: 

Ideally, I would love to teach in a community college ESL classroom, or in an Intensive English Program (IEP), such as the English Language Institute on Sac State's campus. However, since I have already worked in the ELI for the past two fall semesters, I am trying to branch out and gain some classroom observation experience in another setting. I am hoping to find a professor at one of the community colleges for my classroom observation-- I think this will challenge me to step outside of my comfort zone (ELI) and force me to make new connections outside of those I have already established in ELI. 

Prior Knowledge about Context: 

 As far as I know, community college (CC) ESL programs aim to help students increase their English proficiency levels through classroom teaching and assistance through other resources... However, my knowledge about CC ESL teaching and learning is very limited. I am hoping to gain a better idea of the challenges and student demographics that CC professors help, which will better prepare me for future teaching experiences. 

Steps to Completing the Needs Analysis: 

I emailed Professor Gabriella Nuttall, the ESL Department Chair at Sacramento City College (SCC) on Friday regarding setting up a classroom observation with her or any other ESL professors at SCC, and am currently awaiting her response. If I cannot set up a meeting at SCC, I will also contact other ESL professors in the Los Rios district. Another option I will pursue if necessary is finding a teacher in one of the Sacramento-area adult schools, and finally, if none of these options pans out, I will contact the professors I know in ELI to see if I could sit in on any of their classes. 

I plan on giving Professor Nuttal until Monday or Tuesday to respond, and if I don't hear from her by Tuesday at the latest, I will proceed by reaching out to other professors in the area as well. 

Overall: 

Although this Needs Analysis assignment varies drastically from that in English 125E, I think this assignment will challenge me to view ESL teaching from a completely different angle than I am familiar with. I typically tend to focus on teaching approaches and a lesson's context, whereas I don't really consider the technological benefits and opportunities available in a classroom and how they can help expand my teaching options. This assignment (and class in general) will help me consider and explore technology as a teaching tool and will challenge me to creatively find ways to include technology within my teaching.   

Optimus Prime & Optimal Language Learning Environments

http://images.wikia.com/transformers/images/9/95/Transformersnewpic1.jpg

     While Optimus Prime may be known as a character in the popular Transformer movies, I thought of him when I read the section about optimal language learning  environments. Through reading about the eight conditions that are covered in the first chapter of CALL Environments (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007), I was able to identify the conditions for optimal language learning  environments that helped me feel like Optimus Prime in my language learning experiences. 

I took three years of Spanish in high school, and recently embarked on a mission to reclaim my Spanish language skills by adding a Spanish minor. By reflecting on my language learning experiences, I found that conditions #3, 5 and 7 were the most influential in my language learning.

The third condition stipulates that, "Learners are involved in authentic tasks" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). Looking back at my high school Spanish language learning experiences, the lessons that stood out the most were those that involved Task-Based language learning. Every week, my teacher held "Fun Fridays," where we would visit various workstations, rotating through a different one each week, such as cooking, film, music and arts & crafts. Each station required us to rely on a different set of skills- for example, at the cooking station, we had to follow a recipe written out in Spanish in order to make the targeted food; however, through the incorporation of fun activities, we didn't realize that we were being linguistically challenged.  

The next most influential condition was #5, which states that, "Learners have enough time and feedback" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). All of my high school Spanish teachers were very patient and willing to give their students as much time as needed to ensure that we were learning at our full potential. I didn't realize how important this element was to our language learning, but in July 2009, I spent three weeks in Mexico after not doing anything with the Spanish language in over three years since graduating high school. I was shocked to find that I was speaking and thinking in Spanish within a day of arriving! ... My high school Spanish 1 teacher had been a native German woman who taught Spanish and French. At the time I was enrolled in her course, I thought the notion of having a woman with a thick German accent teaching us Spanish was ridiculous; however, I now realize that as a quadrilingual, she was probably one of the  most-qualified people to be teaching us a second language. I now believe that she was very aware of our needs because of her first-hand experiences with language learning, which helped strengthen and solidify our basic language foundations. In my case, I returned to Spanish three years later after doing nothing with the language, and was still able to recall all of my Spanish 1 learning (and some Spanish 2 & 3 aspects), which I accredit to her great teaching and patience. 

The last condition that has influenced my own language learning was #7, which says, "Learners work in an atmosphere with an ideal stress/anxiety level" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). While my teachers pushed us to stretch beyond our comfort levels, we always felt comfortable testing new vocabulary and verb tenses because we understood that our teachers would correct us as necessary, but were always supporting us in our language learning endeavors. Overall, the 3rd, 5th and 7th conditions helped me feel like Optimus Prime in that they helped me feel like I could tackle anything that came my way in the Spanish language.

The use of technology could help support the establishment of the conditions for optimal language learning environments by enhancing the lessons already in place. In the case of my Spanish teacher's "Fun Fridays," she successfully incorporated technology into her lessons by creating different workstations that included a variety of technological inventions. For example, the cooking station required kitchen gadgets, the film station relied on a television and DVD player, and the music workstation required a stereo. Through the incorporation of technology in teaching, students have more opportunities to make meanings, "interact in the target language with an authentic audience," and are "exposed to and encouraged to produce varied and creative language" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). 

While the inclusion of technology in one's classroom can have many positive effects on student learning, one problem that might arise could be a technology overload, which could overwhelm students and lead to a sub-optimal learning environment. This could occur when students are hit with input from too many technological sources in a short amount of time. A good way to prevent this from happening is to limit the exposure the students have to technological input--a good example of this is how my Spanish teacher structured "Fun Fridays." She set it up so that each group rotated through one workstation each week, rather than having us be overwhelmed by cooking recipes, music and film all back-to-back. This would have resulted in an overload of language input, which would have led to a decrease in the amount of language knowledge/vocabulary gained. The inclusion of technology definitely helps lend strength to the optimal classroom language learning, but should be used in moderation. 

Reflections: Blogging Beginnings

     When we first received the syllabus stating that we would have weekly blog assignments, I immediately felt my stomach start to knot. Start writing blogs? Me? I couldn't fathom the idea. I had previously established my Blogger account to follow friends during their study-abroad adventures, but hadn't created my own... until now. Creating a blog was surprisingly simple- all I had to do was log in to my account using my Google account information and then click on the button that read, " New Blog." While creating the blog was simple, deciding on a title for it was impossible. I wanted to find something quirky, something fun, something inoffensive, and the list goes on and on. After finally settling on "My CALL Contemplations," I have determined that blogging is even easy enough for my technologically-inept self to use, and given Blogger's user-friendly interface, I am confident that I could teach students how to use and create their own blogs.