"Most successful FL learning takes place with no technology support at all."

'Optimal Psycholinguistic Environments for Distance Foreign Language Learning' (Doughty and Long, 2003) is a very good article ...if you are interested in task-based language teaching, or non-traditional FL teaching. It provides good description of methodological principles for TBLT. However, I thought that discussion of the distance learning was not the strongest point of this article. Perhaps, as the authors mentioned, it was because no such course had been developed yet, so their argument was not supported by strong evidence.
But what I thought was interesting is that they said that the most successful FL learning takes place with no technology support at all. However, it involves a lot of resources ...that many schools today do not have; it would involve smaller classes and therefore a larger number of classes, larger number of FL instructors, etc.

Using Technology in Chinese Class

In the last few weeks I've been trying to run a mini-experiment. Nothing ambitious, just to try something out.
I teach Chinese 102 and our classes are very large (about 20 students in each), so naturally student's don't have very many chances to speak in class, so there is very little output (aural and written). What I did was I created a google document with some assignments for students. These are not mandatory and I cannot give students extra points or anything like that (since I am a TA not an instructor of record). It is simply for those who want to have extra practice.

The tasks are different: sometimes it is as simple as translating several sentences (usually with 'unique' Chinese grammar), sometimes I post several questions and students answer one, or sometimes I post a Chinese song (which includes subtitles) and ask questions about it. Students can see each others answers, but they have to write their own. I respond either individually or 'collectively' depending on the task.

The results are: some students participate in every activity and some in selective activities (possibly they are too busy, or simply don't want to do it). Some students have very short entries (i.e. 我 想 吃素，因為 素 好吃 ) and some have longer ones (我在家不做饭， 因为我的妈妈做饭。我只帮她做饭。她做饭做得好极了。每个她的菜我都喜欢吃。 但是我在图森的时候我自己要做饭。 我的菜没有我妈妈的菜好吃。所以我的爸爸常常说我得学怎么做饭。我觉得做饭很难。). Out of 20 people I have 9 participating at this point (of course there also students who seemed to be excited to do it, but when it came to actual doing, gave up).

The results are not exactly thrilling, but as I said it is just a trial. What I like about it is students can see other classmates answers (and they all go by their Chinese names, so I'm not sure if they recognize the other people's names). What could be improved is it could involve more collaboration.

Wikis and Colledge-/level Composition

The article that we read written by Warschauer and Grimes about Web 2.0 applications is very informative for it briefly describes the main characteristics of the most common Web 2.0 applications. Particularly what I found interesting is the comparison of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. And I have a simple question about it. Since the former is not worse (well, there is a very small difference) than the latter, then why don't college professors allow their students cite the Wikipedia? No one would think of dismissing Britannica as a source of citation, and it seems that a team of professionals 'keeps an eye' on the texts posted there. And when I say 'students', I mean students in lower-level classes (the first and second year students).

Involvement and Motivation

Some of the points in Other-Repetition as a Resource for Participation in the Activity of Playing a Video Game are very clear, some are arguable. But one thing that is clear is that all the case studies the researchers look at in this article involve individuals up until 14 years of age. The question that I’ve always had is how motivated are the learners of a FL? To clarify, I’m talking about intermediate to advanced learners who are at least in their mid-twenties (with some of them being in late twenties and early 30-ties).
I understand that gaming is an additional way of learning extra vocabulary but still… I wonder if the results yielded in researches involving teens and individuals in late 20s – early 30s are similar.

Chatting with Multiple Users

No matter how much we can read about chatting or any other communication tools, it is always helpful to actually try using them. This Tuesday was the first time I tried chatting with multiple users. Before I tried it, I had a more positive attitude towards this kind of chatting. Of course I read about the negative sides, such as difficulty to managing multiple topics, or difficulties associated with not being able to see people you’re talking to.
The biggest (and probably the only) source of frustration for me was the topics. Either we were discussing several different topics (even though we had one task) and at times and it was hard to follow the discussion because it was fragmented, or when one topic prevailed, not all of us were interested in talking about that particular subject, so we ended up watching 2 people chatting, etc. However, this problem could be eliminated by having fewer participants. And I also can see how this may be helpful when all participants are interested in the same area of studies but have different amount of experience.

On reading authentic (digital) materials

This entry is not on chatting but on reading digital texts. Reading Levy and Stockwell’s (2006) book CALL Dimensions (NOT for our class) where they discuss various CALL applications (including WebQuest and Web Inquiry Projects) made me think about the level of exposure of Chinese learners to authentic Chinese texts. It usually happens pretty late – during the 4th year.
The Chinese language not being an alphabetic language makes it very difficult to read authentic materials. So there is this constant worry about overloading students with authentic reading because if they don’t know the pronunciation of a word, they can’t look it up (which is relative fast and easy) in a dictionary. In this case they would have to check a dictionary for a word by strokes or radicals which take a lot of time if there are a lot of characters like that. Another problem is that if learners don’t know a good number of words in a given text, they will have trouble identifying where the word boundaries are (there is no space between characters, so it’s hard to tell where a word begins and where it ends).
However, there are downloadable programs that allow relatively easy reading. One needs to copy and paste a text into the program/document, then point at any word with the cursor and the definition/definitions and pronunciation of the word will be provided. It makes unfamiliar reading so much easier.
My question is then based on your experience and on what I wrote above, do you think let’s say 3rd year students of Chinese should be exposed to unformatted original texts (news articles, interviews, etc. from online news websites, for instance) since they can easily read them if they (assuming they use the software for reading Chinese texts)? My take on this is that it is beneficial and it should be done, but what’s your take on this? Can you predict any problems with it?
And if you are a Chinese speaker, do you know of any such software/dictionaries that I can download? Thanks.

Not to Overuse Technology

This posting is some thoughts on teaching a FL after having read some of the article in our class.
I think it is understood/accepted that the best any FL course can do is to prepare students for studying in the country of the target language. In other words, having a degree in a FL (BA or MA) alone without having experience of studying overseas does not make learners proficient in the FL at all. The majority (if not all) of MA students have studied in the country of the target language. However, it seems that with the correct use of all the available technology (including some of the tools covered by the 'Reports' that we've read), it is realistic and possible to achieve the same results (if not better, if we are only talking about linguistic competence) if a learner went to the country of the target language. Of course the question is how to implement technology into the FL classes wisely (some of the doubts abou 'unwise' use of technology are expressed on Tanya's blog).