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¡Hola!

Are you ready to practice your Spanish? Here you have an amazing tool for practicing your Spanish. This blog is designed just for you! Add comments, questions, play, whatever you want to do! That is our blog.

I think playing is a good way of starting! Let's play. Click in the link below.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/z/szg127/actividad%20hot%20potatoes/index.htm

New world: podcast

What is Podcasting? According to Stanford University, podcasting is a method of making audio files available over the Internet such that they can be automatically downloaded and listened to on your computer or loaded onto your portable audio player.

You can subscribe to podcasts via an RSS feed. To subscribe to the podcast feeds, download podcasting software and add the feed. The popular subscription services are iTunes, Odeo, and iPodder. These services allow you to search, select, subscribe, update, and manage podcasts.

(REFERENCE: http://itunes.stanford.edu/rss/)

Reflections on Bimodal CMC

Susana García Prudencio

Many interactionist SLA studies focus on the importance of negotiation of meaning, focus on form, task based learning, and collaborative learning. Robert Blake (2005) investigates the bimodal (sound and text) CMC interactions of students immerse in a totally virtual first-year of Spanish curriculum. Blake’s data show to new veins of research: CMC can be used at the beginning levels, and investigate the effect of chat tools as a sound-exchange option.

Students are immersed in a program called Spanish Without Walls (SWW) that combines several multimedia language materials (CD-ROM, content-based web readings and flash activities, and a bimodal CMC tool based on Flash Communication Server software (allowing SCMC and ACMC). Students must chat live with their instructors and virtual-classmates (collaborative tasks). Fascinatingly, this chat tool make possible three different CMC modalities: (1) a talk button, (2) a chat window, and (3) a texpad window. The interesting fact here is that students need to take turns when using textpad or talk functions in order to communicate. However, when using the chat function, students can send text to anyone at anytime. Following this thread of turn-taking, Herring (1999) brings the discussion of turn-taking and shares the main problematic features about turn-taking in SCMC. We can refuse to admit that sometimes chat environments are propitious for violating turn-taking. However, as we can see here in these textpad and talk environments, this turn-taking cannot be violated since students must wait their turn in order to talk.

According to Blake, distance language instruction offers a viable option for those students that do not have access to the traditional classroom setting or just prefer this virtual environment.

Blake, supported by several studies, claims that online students performs as good as classrooms students and the fact that on line students pay more attention to written forms might explain why this students perform well in written measures. In addition, the flexibility of been able to work at their own pace, as well as, the feeling of less stress learning environment. Nonetheless, as Blake points out, the challenge for online learning lies in the students’ interest for the course and the attractiveness of the material.

Blake makes an interesting parallelism among networked exchanges and face-to-face interactions. In addition, he gives the opportunity to students to bring alive the language being studied since nothing can replace human interactions, not even a highly entertaining multimedia resources. Furthermore, Blake give to CMC a central role to within the curriculum in the online learning environment, albeit many FL professionals are skeptical about the efficacy of on line language courses.

Finally, I share with Blake his statement about that CMC, in distance language courses, is “one of the only channels available to establish the type of human interactions that help them to motivate us all to learn” (Blake, 2005:509).

References

• Blake, R. (2005). Bimodal CMC: The glue of language learning at a distance. CALICO Journal, 22(3): 497-511.

• Herring, Susan. (1999). Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4 (4) June 1999.

• Class notes

Using SCMC in FL Classroom Setting

The Benefits (and Disadvantages) of Using SCMC in Foreign Language Classroom Setting

Susana García Prudencio

I would like to describe some advantages of Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (SCMC) that I have found interesting while reading some of the papers for class. I will focus in synchronous written text; in addition some allusions to synchronous oral chats will be mentioned. The effects of the SCMC environments are very varied. Next, I will list the most important advantages, in my opinion, within SCMC environments:

• Low stress environment. Students feel more comfortable in this familiar environment and the level of anxiety in class will be diminished. Besides, participation class could be positively affected with less anxiety.
• Written text gives the opportunity to go back and re-read the recent conversation. Then, students can go upward to check their own messages, as well as, the others.

• Students and instructors can print the conversations taken and work later on with them. Also, they can work with their interlanguage competence.
• In written chats the students have more time to formulate their preverbal plan.
• In written chats the students have more time to respond the other(s) question(s) or statements. Because of this, students’ responses are more complex due to the extra time and less anxiety.
• Provides a great deal of additional interactive language practice.
• Promotes not only written or grammatical skills but other cognitive and pragmatic skills too, such as oral proficiency, reading and listening abilities, accuracy, pragmatic competence, and lexical acquisition, among others.
• Gives to the instructor and students the possibility to share any kind of file to work with (e.g. PDF file, images, word documents, etc.).
• It is ideal for distance learning and hybridization courses.
• Oral chats students can practice pronunciation and intonation, besides all cognitive skills that listening competence evolved.
• Several scholars support the idea that SCMC share similarities with oral communication, in terms of participant roles, discourse functions, and negotiation of meaning.
• It is ideal for collaborative projects and promotes creativity.
• Facilitates more contact with the target language than in traditional classrooms settings. Therefore, students are exposed to more input and intake which help them to improve their target language.

However, SCMC environments also entail several disadvantages such the following:

• It is hard to set up, therefore ICC (Intercultural Communication) is difficult to establish.
• You need to be familiar with the interface, program or software need it for the SCMC environment.
• It is possible to find digression in the discourse of the conversations, as you can find these off-task problems in any classroom setting.
• Keyboarding.
• It is usual to find typos in written chat environments.
• No prosody: because there is no sound, it is hard to practice pronunciation and intonation.
• Because prosody is not possible in written chats, emoticons or other kind of emotional expressions are required in order not to offend the other interlocutors.
• It can be concerning the use of abbreviations, such as “b/w” (between) in English or “pq” (porque) in Spanish.
• It can be seen as a mean in which simultaneous feedback is absence and messages are posted as soon as the system receive them (disrupted turn adjacency).

References

• Sykes, J. (2005). Synchronous CMC and pragmatic development: Effects of oral and written chat. CALICO Journal, 22(3): 399-431

• Herring, Susan. (1999). Interactional coherence in CMC. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4 (4) June 1999.

• Thorne, S. (1999).Chapter 3: Educational and foreign/second language uses of computer-mediation: A review of research. In: An activity theoretical analysis of foreign language electronic discourse. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Class notes.

Technology in FL Education. (APLNG 589)

Some new acronyms and some new definitions

Susana García Prudencio

When talking about technology and foreign language education many acronyms and definitions jump into the scene. Many times you are not sure about this new terminology, above all when you are novel in this fascinating field. That's why my first words in this section account for the meaning of these abbreviations and these new definitions.

CALL: Computer Assisted Language Learning

ICALL: Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning

CMC: Computer-Mediated Communication

SCMC: Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

ACMC: Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

NCI: Networked Collaborative Interaction

WELL: Web-Enhanced Language Learning

ICFLL: Internet-Mediated Intercultural Communication in Foreign Language

MOO: Multiuser domain Object Oriented

CACD: Computer-Assisted Clasroom Discussion

The following definitions are from our Wiki space (TechaWiki) and mostly of them have been taken from Wikipedia.

Blog - a user generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. (Wikipedia).

Vlog - or Videoblog- (a portmanteau combining video, web, and log) is a blog that includes video. (Wikipedia).

Wiki - a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and typically without the need for registration. (Wikipedia). Wikis are great for collaboration projects. (Class notes).

Podcast - a media file that is distributed by subscription (paid or unpaid) over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. (Wikipedia).

Video podcast - (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast) is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures. (Wikipedia).

Wiki Farm - is a server or a collection of servers that provides wiki hosting, or a group of wikis hosted on such servers. (Wikipedia).