Mozuku

The thing above is a QR (Quick Response) code. QR codes can contain various information including text, links, phone numbers, and even some images. They are primarily aimed at cell phone users recently and are becoming increasingly common in advertising. At the recent Wireless Ready conference, one presentation discussed the way in which QR codes can be used in classes. You see, these codes are easily generated with one of the many online generating services (just google QR cod generator). And once you have the code squares, you can print them out or paste them into a blog or website. You can use the codes to have learners put short texts (up to about 140 characters) into their cell phones. These messages can be saved and learners can take them with them. The presenter at Wireless Ready was doing interactive treasure hunts with groups of his learners. Of course, you could also give some important vocabulary or usage information. The best part is it involves no downloading for either the creator or the user, and no internet access fees.

Chatroll is a chat-discussion tool that recently opened. Learners can join or start discussions on any topic.

As I mentioned in my last post, increasing the amount of time learners engage in English is essential for success. Of equal, or I should say related importance, is the need to provide activities where learners can participate in communities of use–places where they can construct identities of themselves as English users. Hanna & de Nooy (2003) asked students learning French to participate in online debate forums at the Le Monde newspaper website. Their students met with mixed success. The ones who wrote simplistic messages asking for help learning French were ignored or met with sarcastic comments. Others who tried hard to actively participate and express their ideas, met with better success. The focus for everyone–the native French users in the forum and the learners–had to remain on the content of the discussion. Hanna and de Nooy say “…the critically important message for this study, framed in the vernacular, is that if you want to communicate with real people, you need to self-present as a real person yourself. From an instructional perspective, encouraging (or requiring) students to participate in noneducationally oriented online communities would involve teaching students how to recognize genres, and subsequently, how to engage in discussion that does not ultimately revolve around the self…as the exotic little foreigner/the other” (pg. 73). That means that using the language and participating as an individual is essential to identity formation and language development.

Which brings us to the big problem of where. Forums for language learners are often too simplistic (”Hi, my name is Hanako and I like music. Do you like music?”) or learners may have been forced to participate and are not likely to participate further (”I’m Ali. I lke pretty girl….aaaaammmmmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!”). Large forums for native speakers (or near-natives) may be out of reach for many or most of our learners, as the Le Monde exercise showed. The answer might be smaller forums on much more specific topics that learners already have expertise in. Lam (2000, 2004) followed the development of a learner who found his voice and his entrance-way into linguistic competence (of a sort, anyway) by participation in blogs related to a Japanese pop singer. On the negative side, the dangers of this type of learning don’t go away so easily. These sites can also just as easily host predators as active learners. Students need a little heads-up training in online community self defense.

A new site and promising site for this kind of participation is Chatroll, where people find chat partners by topic. The name is made from combining chat with blogroll. There are already lots of topics here, but users are free to create their own topics. This latter function is what makes the site really useful, I believe. Learners can more easily get to linguistic competence and an identity as an English user if it develops through their topic identity. But they need to be able to find or create a group that specifically matches that topic. By being part of a group of similarly-interested individuals, the chances of meaningful interaction are greatly increased. The only problem at this point is that there aren’t that many people in the Chatroll system yet. Hopefully that will change. There may be some topics here that instructors are uncomfortable with ( the flirting group comes to mind immediately, and there is probably some more dicey or racy content). I plan to get my students to report on what they do in their blogs so I can monitor as best I can how they participate.

Two games to introduce here that are accessible to English learners in Japan. The first is Phantasy Quest. It is simple but engaging with limited vocabulary. You play a shipwrecked sailor trying to find his way around an unfamiliar island with suspicious inhabitants and find the woman who was on the ship with him before the shipwreck. The next is Job Pico, a challenging problem/mystery-solving puzzle in which you try to escape from a room. The situation is that it is a kind of job interview task that you need to perform to show that you have the smarts needed for the job. It’s a nice interface (playable in both Japanese or English for people who might get stuck and want to remove the language barrier for a while). The game has great 3-D walk-through graphics and could be used for some reading practice or, even better, for a type of do and report orally assignment.

Some of language learning requires rote memorization, and rote memorization can be facilitated by technology, which can help in the organizing and delivery of content. It can also play an important role in feedback. Of course, a learner with flashcards or a classroom activity can often accomplish this as well, but computers can do it all faster and more efficiently. These days, however,  it sometimes seems that it is not fashionable to talk about rote learning in EFL because of the bad name the audio lingual approach still has, and the educational technology field to still pretty busy exploring social technologies and trying to distance itself from the time when CD-ROM-based fashcards and multiple choice questions was what people meant when they talked about using computers for language learning. But while social learning is very important, some rote memorization can go a long way in improving proficiency, especially (but not only) for less-proficient learners. Learning vocabulary requires much more than just memorizing meanings, however. To “know” a word, learners must know the meaning, written form, spoken form, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, associations, and frequency of that word (Schmitt, 2000). Last week, I  found out about 2 recently developed vocabulary learning sites, Learnit Lists and Quizlet. Each site uses a different approach and focuses on different vocabulary.

Learnit Lists focuses on the 1000 most common words and aims to help you learn 10 words daily in your target language by serving you a new list every day. There are 15 language pairs available, including English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese & Czech (you choose which language you want to go to and which language you want to go from). More languages will be added they say. The lists are simple one-to-one translations of important words and thus are out of context. I also found many errors in the Japanese translations of English words (nouns for verbs, particles as verbs). But even meaning aside, the site cannot help you with the spoken form, grammatical behavior, collocations, register, or associations. It can only give you the written form of high frequency vocabulary words (and no phrases or fixed expressions as far as I can see). Also, there is little learner control of content. Possibly useful for entry level learners, when the developers get the translations cleaned up.

Quizlet attempts to marry the best of rote learning techniques with the power of social networking. It bills itself as the “end of flashcards” and provides a nice system of self training and testing that you plug your own content into. If learners can be educated a little about the nature of vocabulary, they can then use this tool to learn it more efficiently. They can also share lists with others, reducing the time needed to input the vocabulary (which while it will facilitate learning, may cause some learners to avoid using this tool).  Some very common content is already available (important SAT vocab, prefixes and suffixes, for example) and there are groups creating ESL vocabulary with pronunciation and other content as well. The author lists the features as follows: the system keeps track of your progress, facilitates sharing with e-mail notification when others contribute sets to your  lists and allows chat boxes so learners can talk to each other while learning. Also, any language can be input and accent buttons for non-English letters can be used. The learning system is also nicely designed. It  provides pages that allow learners to familiarize themselves with the vocabulary, a call and response learning function and a testing function. Combine this with easy input and editing and sharing and you have a very powerful tool. Highly recommended!

Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Game Goo is a site that says it provides “learning that sticks.” There are lots of reading games here, and they are organized by level. At the lower levels are phonics games focusing on sound discrimination, etc. My favorite game on the site is Monkey Business, a game where learners must arrange parts of a sentence to complete bridges for a monkey to cross. It would make a nice fluency activity for lower level learners. There is not too much vocabulary and much of it repeats. Fun and encourages speed. Flash-based.

Houghton Mifflin Company produced this site that features short written texts from various elementary school levels that need to be edited (corrected). Learners can see the text and number of corrections that need to be made. Learners click on various parts of the text to make corrections in a pop-up box. Nice interface. Good levels. Good feedback. Sort of a long introduction. Needs Shockwave.