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Reading Reflection for Egbert: Computer Enhanced Language Learning Environments: An Overview

Because I have had little previous experience with CALL and have not read any literature with regard to this subject the overview of CALL environments by Egbert was very enlightening. I appreciated the background information of Spolsky's Theory of Conditions for Language Acquisition which was an equation composed of the learner's knowledge in the present plus abilities, motivation/affect, and opportunity which equaled the knowledge and skills of the learner in the future. This theory points out the importance that the opportunity or learning environment has on language acquisition and how this component can be most directly influenced by me, the teacher. Egbert continues her overview by laying out the 8 conditions for optimal language learning environments.

They are as follows:
1) Learners have opportunities to interact and negotiate meaning
2) Learners interact in the target language with an authentic audience. (authentic = purposeful interaction)
3) Learners are involved in authentic tasks (those having the same types of cognitive challenges as complicated real-world tasks do.)
4) Learners are exposed to and encouraged to produce varied and creative language in their target language.
5) Learners have enough time and feedback, which facilitate the formulation of ideas.
6) Learners are guided to attend mindfully to the learning process. (mindful = they must be motivated to take the opportunities presented to them and to be cognitively engaged as they perform them.)
7) Learners work in an atmosphere with an ideal stress/anxiety level. (teacher's expectations must be reasonable and their goals attainable)
8) Learner autonomy is supported. (although not complete autonomy as teacher's feedback and mediation is important)

I really enjoyed reading about these conditions that are necessary for optimizing language acquisition and then reflecting on my Spanish classroom from last year. I definitely succeeded in providing some of these conditions and did not do so well with others. For example, I wish I had produced more opportunities for condition # 3 where they could use Spanish to perform tasks that would affect them in the real world.

Egbert continues to discuss how the 8 conditions and the relevance to CALL can be discovered through classroom research. Classroom research finds out what works for individual teachers and adds to the growing knowledge about CALL through developing hypotheses, gathering data, and then evaluating the findings. Egbert notes Purcell's six levels of research and six steps of research. What I thought was interesting was the importance of asking good questions for CALL research. You need to be specific/pointed with your research question yet general across courses and programs. You also need a very specific hypothesis in order to evaluate your data at the end of your research.

One problem that I have with this article is the confusion that I felt when dealing with Step 4 and 5 (determining how to test the research question and gathering data). I felt that Purcell and Egbert were unclear about the value of qualitative vs. quantitative research. I know that Egbert says that you should consider a design that works for your research question, however, what is the benefit of qualitative over quantitative and are we missing crucial analysis by using qualitative data? These are some questions that I would have liked to see answered better, especially if we as teachers are to perform experiments in our own classrooms. On the contrary, I do like how Egbert listed some new ways of collecting data through video and audio recordings to examine the student's behavior with technology. Overall I appreciated Egbert's goal of trying to connect what is being taught in a classroom using CALL and what is actually be learned through research.

posted by Christine Parker @ 6:31 PM