Technology and Language Learning

312 Eng 3, Level 6

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The areas that will be considered in this handout are:

Speaking and listening (Podcasts or digital audio files)
Collaborative Writing (blogs and wikis)
Reading and language structure (Reading Companion, Live Ink, and
Computer-based concordance), and
Online interaction (Second Life, Chatbots, and all the social networks).
Autonomous learning is a concept in which the learner is fully responsible for his or her decisions
about their own learning. The autonomous language learner takes responsibility for the totality of
his learning situation. He does this by determining his own objectives, defining the contents to be
learned and the progression of the course, selecting methods and techniques to be used,
monitoring this procedure, and evaluating what he has acquired.

The earlier digital technologies are word processing, e-mail, or Web browsing, etc.

The emerging technologies are applicable to self-access and autonomous learning in the areas of
listening and speaking, collaborative writing, reading and language structure, and online
interaction.
Digital media reviewed include podcasts, blogs, wikis, online writing sites, text-scaffolding software,
concordancers, multiuser virtual environments, multiplayer games, and chatbots (chatter robot).
For each of these technologies, we summarize recent research and discuss possible uses for
autonomous language learning.
 Listening & Speaking
The development and diffusion of software for producing, uploading, downloading and playing
digital audio files (i.e., podcasts) make the flexible use of a wide range of audio material easier than
ever for language learners.
ESLpod.com includes more than 500 free downloadable audio files organized by topic and
developed especially for English language learners. Other premade podcasts are available to
promote academic listening skills, facilitate preparation for listening tests, provide grammar tips
or cover business English topics.
Audio podcasts also offer learners the opportunity to record their own speech in multiple genres
(reports, simulated broadcasts, oral presentations, etc.) to share with classmates or others (Lu,
2009) or to review themselves later to reflect on their language-learning progress.
Podcasts can be a repository (place to store) of classroom discussions or lectures for use outside of
class to extend and increase autonomous learning.
http://www.podcastsinenglish.com/index.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/user/podcastsinenglish
Moving beyond podcasting, EnglishCentral (http://EnglishCentral.com) uses speech recognition to
assist second language learners in improving their pronunciation and spoken language. The free
online site was launched in 2009 with funding from Google. Learners choose from popular videos
on the site, listen to words or sentences from them at controlled speeds, read and repeat what
they have heard, and receive feedback on their pronunciation and syntax.
Since podcasts give language learners access to content at the time and place of their choice, they
can be used not only for authentic listening in the classroom but also for self-study outside the
classroom. Self-access learning centers in tertiary education are increasingly using them to provide
learners with authentic listening materials (Peterson, 2010).
Lectures can be recorded as podcasts so that students who miss a class can download and later
listen to them on their computers or mobile devices.
http://llt.msu.edu/vol11num1/default.html
http://volkerh.public.iastate.edu/projects/podcasting/
http://web.tiit.edu.tw/acof/acen/Word/Nanya27/960703.pdf
https://sites.google.com/site/technologyintesol/ma-in-tesol-reflections/multimedia-listening-comp
rehension
http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Collaborative Writing: Blogs and Wikis
The term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple
people together (collaboratively) rather than individually.
A blog (also called a weblog or web log) is a website consisting of entries (also called posts)
appearing in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry appearing first (similar in
format to a daily journal). Blogs typically include features such as comments and links to increase
user interactivity. Blogs are created using specific publishing software.
It is "a Web page that serves as a publicly-accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically
updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author".
Blogs are a valuable tool for teaching writing in the students second language. Their capacity for
allowing users to publish and share their writings quickly, easily, and with only a minimum of
computer knowledge opens a number of possibilities for the learning of second language writing.
Bloch (2007) describes the use of blogging to promote critical literacy and academic writing among
college students. In the study, a class blog was created for students to read and respond to each
others posts and later use them in their academic papers.
The benefits of blogging were demonstrated among learners of English as a foreign language (EFL)
by Fellner and Apple (2006), who assigned Japanese university students to write daily blogs in
English during an intensive EFL course. Over a single week, students increased the amount of
words they wrote nearly fourfold, and also dramatically increased their use of academic
vocabulary.
The existence of free blogging software (see, e.g., http://blogger.com) provides a medium for
students to create public blogs on their own to discuss their personal and career interests. A case
study by Lam (2000) demonstrates the benefit of this kind of autonomous online publishing for
developing an identity as a competent user of English. For advanced students of English, having a
positive online presence through a self-published blog can also be helpful in the job market, by
demonstrating to an employer a learners expertise in English, technology use, and the content
area of the blog.

Blogs Types
The tutor blog: daily reading practice for learners, online verbal exchange using comments, class
information, resource for self study.
The learner blog: students get writing practice, develop a sense of ownership, and whatever they
write can instantly be read by anyone else and, due to the comment features of the software,
further exchange of ideas is promoted.
The class blog: Students can create a free-for bulletin board, interact in an international classroom
language exchange, or a project based language learning exercise, where students can develop
writing and research skills by creating an online resource.

Wikis
A wiki is a Web site that allows users to add and update content on the site using their own Web
browser. Wikis end up being created mainly by a collaborative effort of the site visitors. A great
example of a large wiki is the Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia in many languages that anyone can
edit. The term "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian phrase, "wiki wiki," which means "super fast." I
guess if you have thousands of users adding content to a Web site on a regular basis, the site could
grow "super fast."
Wikis provide another medium for self-directed writing, though some wikis, such as Wikipedia,
might be at a too-high level for some language learners. A simplified version, Simple English
Wikipedia, has been created to ensure greater access to information for English-language learners
and low-literacy adults and youth. Contributors to this new version are encouraged to use more
basic vocabulary and grammatical structures, avoid idioms and jargon, and write shorter articles.
Simple English Wikipedia can serve as a student research site for learners with beginning or
intermediate literacy skills, or a place for learners with intermediate or advanced writing ability to
contribute meaningful writing.

Pedagogical Benefits
A wiki enables communication and knowledge construction beyond the classroom.
Students become contributors, rather than just recipients of knowledge. As with blogging, wikis
enable students to take part in distributed research communities that extend spatially and
temporally beyond the classroom or class session (Mejias, 2006).
Students build a sense of community by collaborating on a shared goal, and they learn from
observing the communal work being drafted, refined, and finalized. Accountability is increased
through exposure to peers or the wider internet audience, which leads to greater care for linguistic
accuracy.
Collaborative writing tools of blogs and wikis are valuable for promoting: writing fluency and
strategies, and for helping students to develop a more confident identity as English writers.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Reading and Language Structure

What makes electronic reading more effective for language learners?
http://www2.smarttutor.com/player/swf/Vocab_SynonymAntonym_L5_V1_T3a.swf
IBM has developed a program called Reading Companion to develop speech recognition technology
for helping people learn to read.
 Reading Companion
According to IBM, users log on to the Reading Companion web site and are presented with material
to read. An on-screen mentor, or companion, reads a phrase to the user and then provides an
opportunity for the user to read the material, using a headset microphone. Depending on the
accuracy of what was read, the companion provides positive reinforcement (e.g., You sound
great!), gives the user an opportunity to try again, or offers the correct reading of the words on
the screen. As the users skill improves, the technology reads less material so that the learner reads
more.
An evaluation study, based on surveys, interviews and site visits, found that Reading Companion
was especially effective for helping ESL learners develop their language skills at a school or
community organization. The study found that students liked the self-paced (instruction proceeds
based on learners response) nature of the program and the opportunity to master different levels
of vocabulary in contexts relevant to their needs.
http://www.readingcompanion.org

Live Ink
Another program called Live Ink has been developed to help online readers better understand
natural language presented digitally. The program presents digital texts in a cascading format
(presented semantically) similar to poetry that is intended to better match the way the brain and
eyes process meaning.
Early research with Live Ink indicates it is highly promising for improving learners reading
comprehension, retention, and proficiency (Walker, Schloss, Fletcher, Vogel, & Walker 2005). A free
version of Live Inks ClipRead software is available for download from the companys Website.
http://liveink.com/
 Concordancers
Concordance is a list which is an alphabetical collection of the words with information about where
the words can be found and in which sentences. Computer-based concordancing is one type of
language analysis and structure tool that offers direct linguistic support to language learners. It
provides an alphabetical index of all words in a text or corpus, body, of texts, showing every
contextual occurrence of a word. After a word or a phrase is entered into a concordancer, a
selection of the sentences from the corpus containing the word or phrase appears.
Similar to a search engine in many respects (large body of text to be analyzed).
A small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular
words or phrases. Provide information on the frequency of words and structures and their
collocates. (page 106)
Corpuses are compiled from a variety of sources: written collections such as newspapers or
journals, or spoken collections taken from radio and television sources, or gathered on the street in
audio format. Each word is described by its location, its position in relation to other words in a
sentence, its frequency and so on. The concordancer searches the corpus, asks it about a particular
word and how it is used, and then you get a screen of results showing the word and enough text to
be able to understand the context in which it is used. Concordancing is therefore ideal for checking
collocation, the way words co-occur in a predictable pattern. Teachers also can use concordancing
to help learners notice and record the most useful terms in a text.
Today, any teacher can introduce concordancing to students simply by pointing to free online sites
such as Corpus Cowww.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.htmlncordance English (http://).
These sites allow students to investigate immediately how particular words or phrases are used in
context and with what collocations they tend to occur.
http://www.lextutor.ca/concordancers/concord_e.html
Second, whereas early large-scale corpora were based exclusively on written texts, there are now
corpora of spoken texts, such as the free online Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English
(http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase/), which includes 1.8 million spoken words searchable by
gender, age and position or role of the speaker, as well as by category of speech event.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/micase
To conclude, Reading Companion and Live Ink programs are used for improving reading
comprehension and proficiency, while computer-based concordancing is used for language
analysis and structure.

Online Interaction
Multiuser virtual environments: allow interaction among people in digitally simulated (virtual)
contexts in order to promote language learning.
Second Life: is used for promoting second language learning. It brings together tens of thousands of
users daily who design or share photos, build communities, and interact with the environment.
English learners can work with other non-native learners (ELF) and native English speakers, role play
situations. THEN, these benefits can be shared in a language classroom via presentation and essays.
Advantages of multiuser virtual environments:
Users can seek and use information on a variety of topics.
Users can create and post content.
Users can interact with others.
http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/second life
Social Networking: Facebook, twitter, youtube, Linked in, etc.
Social network sites are used for language learning immersion, creativity, and autonomy. We have
to enter our basic personal information in the profile section, and manage and maintain friend lists
(not pseudo or fake identity). They are Web-based services that allow users to create digital
identities for themselves, list other users with whom they have relationships or connections, and
view and communicate with these and other users all within a bounded (bordered or restricted)
system (with legal and social limits) (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).
What began as a tool to help friends and others connect and send messages to each other has now
evolved into a complex, globally ubiquitous (seeming to be in all places or everywhere) system that
serves many purposes, from marketing to professional networking.
Several social network sites have been set up specifically to connect language learners and mentors
in English and other languages, including Livemocha and Lang-8. These sites usually combine access
to self-study or autonomous material and opportunities to practice and communicate with others
through peer-to-peer or peer-to-mentor synchronous or asynchronous interaction.
 Chatbots
Chatbots present an outline for online interaction with a software-powered avatar (your photo) in
situations where live human interaction is not available or not preferred. They are an ideal tool for
autonomous learning in that they require no teacher or partner. Fryer & Carpenter (2006), for
example, point out how learners can use chatbots to independently practice language structures
and can also view or print the transcripts of chat sessions for further reflection and analysis (Fryer &
Carpenter, 2006).
http://elisalc.org/2011/12/17/salc-bot/
Conclusion
New technologies provide more tools than ever before for you as language learners though
autonomous:
listening (Podcasts or digital audio files),
writing (blogs and wikis),
reading (Reading Companion, Live Ink,
Computer based Concordancers), and
online interaction (different social networks).
For developing our language skills and with the advent of ICT, every autonomous learning tool is at
our hand such as computers, iPad, smart phones, etc. These technological tools provide flexible
means to develop language and literacy through authentic communication, collaboration,
networking etc. These tools offer excellent ways to meet our functional, vocational and academic
purposes.