Reflection on Roed

This week reading is about virtual environment for language learning. It is interesting that people behave differently when communicating online compared to that in reality. I agree what Roed suggested that students will have less pressure when communicating online.

According to the research, the high flyers, just like what they did in reality, lead the communication. They can be the modal communicator and demonstrate the 'good' language use in that virual environment. But what about the low achievers? Is that the vicious cycle that they would never be able to lead the communication like what the high flyers do? Will the virtual language learning environment really boost them confidence? I doubt it.

I believe that the low achievers can be encouraged to speak more with the teacher's encouragement - both spoken or body language. Therefore, virtual environment can be a compliement for the language learning in reality.

Week 2 Reflection

I believe the services the software included will be one of the important elements for choosing a CALL material. Nowadays many services providers provide online learning packages for language teaching. They always provide service hotline to students for solving technical problems. Therefore, parent's IT skills can be a less important factor.
Getting students to login the software may already be a problem to some schools. Some service providers will give a constant progress report to teachers to notify their students' performance. It would be a useful tools for monitoring students' work outside lessons. Some even phone students' parents if they find that students do not login the software at all. Parents can then monitor their children's performance.
These are what I believe 'user-friendly'. The users of CALL materials is not just students. Teachers and parents are also crucial for the success of CALL materials.

Week 3 Reflection - using Internet as corpus

The Internet is, no doubt, a very giant pool of information which can motivate the autonomous learning and cross-cultural learning, as Warschauer suggested. This pool is the excellent source for executing project-based learning, which is one of the important elements for the education reform nowadays.

In my teaching, I often ask my students to go on the web and search for information. Last week, I asked them to listen to a poem (Rain, by Shel Silverstein) and I asked them to search for the meanings of new words. The students immediately surf to Yahoo! Dictionary and look into those words they don't know. Yet, they could not find the word 'slishity-sloch' from that dictionary. I, then, told them to look into other methods. They then just stopped and looked around for help. Later I showed them to use search engine and search for the collocation of those words. Finally, they are able to find out that the word is actually the onomatopoeia.

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