What did Grgurović & Hegelheimer find with regards to using subtitles and transcripts to help ESL students develop listening skills in English? What are some of the implications for instruction?
Subtitles along with video are prefered by students. Especially, when designing help otions in your CALL, use them. Students use them more often than plain transcripts. It imply's then that the old-fashioned grammar CALL is in fact on it's way out. Students are looking for multimedia type of packages when they turn to CALL, not the two-dimensional paper lesson.
From your reading of Levy, comment on one or more of the issues related to the practice dimension of CALL what you would want to take into consideration for your own classroom.
I suppose in the end, the more issues you consider the better. As far as which are most important, it depends on the situation. Like they always say in teaching, it is "case by case".
Let'say you work in an American high school, as an example. An issue could be integrating the CALL into your classes and it being slowed by the ESL staff of 4 or 5instructors who are trying to stay "uniformed" in their approach and instruction. If some of the staff can't integrate the technology, because they don't understand it, you may end up stuck waiting for things like training. Then comparing that to a situation, say working overseas, and you are the entire ESL department. You act more as an island in the school, and may be more concerned with which area of language to focus on. It is a real a case by case consideration, when you think about implimenting it. We should be ready for all the issues.
Then considering CALL design, think how difficult it really can be to do.
Nice point to bring up there Chris (and I think this is coming from personal experience of yours). It must be very difficult to get everyone on the same page when using CALL materials in a school, and to standardize how every teacher is using the software. I suppose the ideal situation would be where all the ESL teachers train on the software together, and then throughout the year share on how each person is using the program, what difficulties and successes they've had, and ideas on how to improve its use in the labs. I'm also supposing that in reality this is quite difficult to implement, and in the end use of CALL software is very different from teacher to teacher.
ReplyDeleteI remember the story you told me about you setting up Rosetta Stone in your old school, and your school paying for the software on each of the computers, and that you recently found out that it's no longer in use! What a waste. I can only imagine your frustration at working hard to get it set up and get students used to using the program, only to have it fall into disuse right after you leave. Argh.