El Blog de Susana: Reflections on Bimodal CMC

martes, 27 de febrero de 2007

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).

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