Healey(2007) has made a brief but concise discussion of the four perspectives in autonomy and language learning in CALL. The four perspectives that CALL educators need to take into account are the technical, psychological, sociocultural and critical perspective. In terms of the technical perspective, Healey also further elaborates on the relationships of content and locus of control. The technical environment in CALL can be determined by how structured the content is and how much control teachers and learners have. In the psychological perspective, Healey argues that learners’ motivation is perhaps the key factor in determining the success of learning. As a result, it’s crucial to provide venues such as web sites or podcast for students’ work so students may have a sense of achievement and higher motivation. Healey also points out that autonomy does not equal isolation. Drawing on sociocultural theorists such as Vygotsky (1978) and Wenger (1999), Healey(2007) argues that internet access can help create community of practice among learners around the world and can foster autonomous learning through active interaction among learners. The author also reminds us that the need to rethink the relationship between technology and power. Just as other human artifacts, technology is not neutral and is also deeply influenced by power and ideology. CALL educators need to make students aware of the political and critical issues in language learning.
I enjoyed reading Healey’s work in CALL and autonomy. As she points out, autonomous learning is one of the major learning goals for most language educators. I was also very impressed by her discussion of autonomy from four different perspectives. I agree with Healey’s point that motivation could be increased by giving learners control and power to make choices. However, I also believe a well structured instructional environment and appropriate scaffolding are just as important. Too much freedom and little guidance often result in waste of valuable instructional time and both learners’ frustration. Therefore, inquiry-based learning such as webquests can be ideal instructional model. Lastly, I would like to echo Healey’s point in the political-critical perspective. Just as printed reading texts often only reflect values and ideas of certain groups of people (people of the dominant groups), we need to make students more aware that online reading texts also encourage certain voices and discourage others. Who does technology privilege and who is silenced by it? These are questions we need to think hard about.

reflection 2: interaction

First I need to apologize for being so late this time and the confusion about the posts. I have been under the weather especially it's been so hot in Taiwan! Also, I thought I saved the first part as a draft and it turned out to be a post!!! techonlogy....

Anderson (2003) discusses the concept of interaction in CALL in this nicely titled article " Getting the mix right again". He first reviews the various definitions of interaction in the filed of education and refers to earlier educaitors such as Dewey for the definition and values of interaction in education. He then proposes the concept of equivalence of interaction or the equivalence theorem, as he terms it. He further argues that as long as one of the three forms of interaction is active, the other two forms of interaction can be at a minimal level without damaging the educational value. I appreciated Anderson's effort in theorizing "interaction" in education, Particularly in distance education in this article. As he rightly points out, the idea of interaction has long been a debate among educators. What counts as active interaction and participation in regular as well as distance educaiton classroom can be very different. He draws on the interaciton theories such as Wegner's "community of practice" as one of the framework to conceptualize interaction in education. He also details modes and equivalency of interaction and categorizes three types of interaction: student, teacher, and content interaction, and further provides examples of applying the equivalency theorem to popular education delivery modes.
Anderson(2003) has made some good points regarding the issues of cost and communities. With technology as well as strategies such as web-conferening, it's possible to connect students and teachers and increase significantly the student interaction. However, it will also raise the issue that whether its cost effective.

Although I appreciate his effort to theorize the concept of interaciton and the suggestions to put it into distacne education. I have my questions and concerns regarding a few arguments in this article. First of all, as I poit out in the last paragraph, Anderson(2003) draws on theorists from the pragmatic (Dewey) and socicultual (Wegner) tradition. In my understanding, interaciton among participants is the key factor in learning and knowledge construction from the sociocultural perspective. However, Anderson(2003) argues that human interaciton(teacher-student, student-student) can be replaced as long as the content interaction and its instructional design is right. This argument is where I have been wondering about CALL. From my personal experience of having a course such as this, my fellow students sometimes tend to interact with content and there's little interaction between and among students. How to write to create and build a relationship in a virtual classroom has long been my question as a student in distance educaiton and possibly an instructor in the future... Can we really substitute human interaciton as Anderson suggests here without degrading the educational experience? This is a question I have in mind when thinking about Anderson's title "Getting the mix right again" and I am wondering what exactly goes into the pot. How do distance educators strike a balance among student-student, student-teacher, and content-student interaction? Or is it possible to do so?

reflection 2: interaction

I appreciated Anderson's effort in theorizing "interaction" in education, oarticularly in distance education in this article. As he rightly points out, the idea of interaction has long been a debate among educators. What counts as active interaction and participation in regular as well as distance educaiton classroom can be very different. H draws on the interaciton theories such as Wegner's "community of practice" as one of the framework to conceptualize interaction in education. He also details modes and equivalency of interaction and categorizes three types of interaction: student, teacher, and content interaction, and further provides examples of applying the equivalency theorem to popular education delivery modes.

website evaluation: ESL MONKEY

Website title: ESL MONKEY.COM
Website URL: http://www.eslmonkeys.com/index.html
Grade/age level: multi-age
Language & content:

The website provides resources for teachers, schools and students. I think it intends to work as the information center for teachers who want to find ESL jobs, for schools which want to recruit ESL teachers, and for students who wan to find ESL schools. Advertisement is perhaps it's major concern! However, for this evaluation assignment, I will only focus on the students' learning resocurce part of the web site.

On the home page, it is devided into three parts with separate titles for its three different audience. It's first choice is for students to find ESL schools (schools are welcome to join and advertise their schools and programs on this web site) and the second link for students is then the learning resources. The main content includes small tools, big tools and interactive tools with links to every small, big and interactive tools pages. There are no external documents or guides for this website but becasue it's fairly easy to navigate so users can just play with it and figure out the contents and different links. In addition, there isn't much information on this website , so external document is not much needed.

I can see the wensite can be interesting to students because it offers lots of FREE stuff and the word free is everywhere. This definitely attract people who are interested in having more resources (reading materials, books, etc.) Also, are are a variety of activities such as word, slam/idiom and quote of the day, grammar focus, reading room and free English lessons which would appeal to learners. These choices are necessarily the most interesting and creative ones but they are the activities learners are comfortable with and interested in.

I think the activities on the website offere extensive reading and thus this can achieve the goal of previding language input and extensive reading for building vaocabulary. However, this website doesn't offer practice and there's also very little instruction. There are some guiding question for the activities in the reading room and in the reading activities of news articles and short stories. Other than guiding questions in the beginning of the activities, there isn't much teaching present. At most, I think they only provide information. In terms of feedback and assessment, there isn't any available on the website.

Perhaps although this is such a small website with very limited resources, it looks very organized and the pages are filled with words and informations. I realized some of the information is very repetitive after I played with it for 10 minutes. At the first look, the website does look colorful, organized, and somewhat attractive. I think the layout could be considered as one of the strengths of this website (just delussion?) Also, it is vey easy to navigate on this website, nothing complicated. A second strength of the website is that it offers internaitonal learning materia. I noticed that they include international newspaper articles such as articles from Bangkok Post, which is a relative usual choice of authentic material. However, I really appreciate their effort to include international reading texts becasue I believe students then will not just think they can only learn from reading articles from North American or British media.

However, there is also room for improvement. For example, most of the material is pretty outdated. I noticed some of the newspaper articles are from the year 2004. Also, some of the links no longer work. For example, the idiom of the day page doesn't have any information anymore and is still not removed from the website. Lastly, I found the website from goole. Although the website isn't very updated, it is STILL ranked as the first five websites on google when I typed in language learning website!

Got blog?

This is the first posting in this blog. I am perhaps the least intense facebooker among all my facebookmania friends, and not exactly a good emailer... Now I am proudly announcing that I am officially a blogger!

Reflection: definitions of CALL

I enjoyed reading both articles of the overview and various definitions of CALL. Egbert (2005) has nicely connected the definitions of CALL, TESOL standard, the guidelines of using technology, and the National Educational Technology Standards. The author also points out the the four key principles of CALL. The central argument of this book chapter is that the focus of CALL should be on language learning and not on technology. The effective and efficient use of technology then will facilitate both learning and teaching. Kern & Warschauer (2005) offer a good overview of the development of CALL. The authors review the shift in perspectives and theories and practices in CALL and the results of paradigm shift and their influences on the use of technology. The structural, cognitive/constructivist, and sociocultural perspectives all serve as significant frameworks for the use and development of technology in various stages of language learning. The authors also offer examples of different computer software and computer use to demonstrate the changing nature of technology in language learning and teaching.


I was particularly impressed by NBLT article by Kern & Warschauer(2005). I am familiar with the shifting perspectives in learning (structural, constructivist /cognitive and sociocultural) and it is very nice to learn more about how the field of CALL is also influenced by the paradigm shifts. However, after reading the articles I have a few questions and comments. First of all, just as Kern & Warschauer (2005) and Egbert point out, it is impossible to provide a definition which would cover the essential principles and most researchers would agree on. However, I was wondering that it might not be very productive in terms of teaching and researching since so many different abbreviations and terms are all used to refer to similar phenomenon in language education. In response to the Egbert article, although I appreciate his effort to connect the principles of CALL and various instructional standards, I feel some of the eight conditions of classroom language learning appear to be too general. For example, the definition of authentic tasks is still unclear. In addition, I don't think a learning task which learners may not use ourside of classroom or may not parallels real functions beyond the classroom is without value. After all, a language classroom is an environment created for maximum learning and not simple exposure to target languages. In general, I appreciated the point that all the authors make in the theory and practice of CALL which emphasizes communication and learning VIA technology. Technology is the facilitator in the language classroom and should not be the replacement of teachers. I also agree with the the sociocultural perspective of learning. A well-structured technology-mediated environment has much to offer since our students probably often feel more comfortable than teachers. The Time magazine article seems to be a good connection and bridge to our reading for this week. How we can create a true 21 century classroom so it will match our students' and even our very own lived experience can be quite a challenge.