the pdf. - Language Learning & Technology - Michigan State University

ARTICLES Corpus-Assisted Creative Writing: Introducing Intermediate Italian Learners to a Corpus as a Reference Resource Abstract | Article PDF Claire Kennedy and Tiziana Miceli Griffith University pp. 28–44 Using Synchronous Online Peer Response Groups in EFL Writing: Revision-Related Discourse Abstract | Article PDF Mei-Ya Liang National Central University pp. 45–64 The Effects of Captioning Videos Used for Foreign Language Listening Activities Abstract | Article PDF Paula Winke, Susan Gass, and Tetyana Sydorenko Michigan State University pp. 65–86

Call for Papers – Learner Autonomy Article PDF p. 87

Reviewer Acknowledgments Article PDF p. 88

Volume 14, Number 1 February 2010 COLUMNS From the Editors Article PDF by Dorothy Chun & Irene Thompson p. 1–2 Invited Commentary New Tools for Teaching Writing Article PDF by Mark Warschauer pp. 3–8 Emerging Technologies New Developments in Web Browsing and Authoring Article PDF by Robert Godwin-Jones pp. 9–15 Announcements News from Sponsoring Organizations Article PDF pp. 16–19

REVIEWS Edited by Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation Raquel Oxford and Jeffrey Oxford (Eds.) Article PDF Reviewed by Ulugbek Nurmukhamedov pp. 20–23 The Theory and Practice of Online Learning Terry Anderson (Ed.) Article PDF Reviewed by Mandy Reinig pp. 24–27

Contact: Editors or Managing Editor Copyright © 2010 Language Learning & Technology, ISSN 1094-3501. Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors.

About Language Learning & Technology

Language Learning & Technology is a refereed journal which began publication in July 1997. The journal seeks to disseminate research to foreign and second language educators in the US and around the world on issues related to technology and language education. •

Language Learning & Technology is sponsored and funded by the University of Hawai'i National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) and the Michigan State University Center for Language Education And Research (CLEAR), and is co-sponsored by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL).

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Language Learning & Technology is a fully refereed journal with an editorial board of scholars in the fields of second language acquisition and computer-assisted language learning. The focus of the publication is not technology per se, but rather issues related to language learning and language teaching, and how they are affected or enhanced by the use of technologies.

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Language Learning & Technology is published exclusively on the World Wide Web. In this way, the journal seeks to (a) reach a broad audience in a timely manner, (b) provide a multimedia format which can more fully illustrate the technologies under discussion, and (c) provide hypermedia links to related background information.

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Beginning with Volume 7, Number 1, Language Learning & Technology is indexed in the exclusive Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), ISI Alerting Services, Social Scisearch, and Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences.

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Language Learning & Technology is currently published three times per year (February, June, and October).

Copyright © 2010 Language Learning & Technology, ISSN 1094-3501. Articles are copyrighted by their respective authors.

Sponsors, Board, and Editorial Staff Volume 14, Number 1

SPONSORS University of Hawai‘i National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) CO-SPONSOR Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) ADVISORY AND EDITORIAL BOARDS Advisory Board Susan Gass

Michigan State University

Richard Schmidt

University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Editorial Board Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas

Georgetown University

Klaus Brandl

University of Washington

Thierry Chanier

Université Blaise Pascal

Robert Godwin-Jones

Virginia Commonwealth University

Lucinda Hart-González

Second Language Testing, Inc.

Philip Hubbard

Stanford University

Michelle Knobel

Montclair State University

Marcus Kötter

University of Münster

Marie-Noelle Lamy

The Open University

Meei-Ling Liaw

National Taichung University

Lara Lomicka

University of South Carolina

Noriko Nagata

University of San Francisco

John Norris


Lourdes Ortega


Jill Pellettieri

Santa Clara University

Joy Kreeft Peyton

Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington, DC

Patrick Snellings

University of Amsterdam

Maggie Sokolik

University of California, Berkeley

Susana Sotillo

Montclair State University

Mark Warschauer

University of California, Irvine

Editorial Staff Editors

Dorothy Chun

University of CA, Santa Barbara

Irene Thompson

The George Washington University (Emerita)

Trude Heift

Simon Fraser University

Carla Meskill

State University of New YorkAlbany

Managing Editor

Matthew Prior


Web Production Editor

Carol Wilson-Duffy

Michigan State University

Book & Multimedia Review Editor

Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas

Georgetown University

Emerging Technologies Editor

Robert Godwin-Jones

Virginia Commonwealth University

Copy Editors

Dennis Koyama

Kanda University of International Studies

Daniel Jackson


Associate Editors

Copyright © 2010 Language Learning & Technology, ISSN 1094-3501. The contents of this publication were developed under a grant from the Department of Education (CFDA 84.229, P229A60012-96 and P229A6007). However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

Information for Contributors

Language Learning & Technology publishes articles, commentaries, and reviews relating to the application of technology to language learning, teaching, and research. General Policies | Articles | Commentaries | Reviews General Policies The following policies apply to all submissions: 1. The journal now requires that all article submissions be uploaded through our new online management system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/llt. You will be asked to first register and log in to use the online system. Complete instructions are provided on the site. Please contact the Managing Editor ([email protected]) if you experience difficulty. 2. Manuscripts that have already been published or are being considered for publication elsewhere will not be considered. If your submission is part of a larger study or if you have used the same data in whole or in part in other papers published or under review, you must write a cover letter stating where the paper is published/under review and describing how the current submission to LLT makes a different and distinct contribution to the field. 3. All article submissions should conform to the requirements of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition). Authors are strongly encouraged to have their manuscripts proofread by an editor familiar with English academic prose and APA guidelines. Both American and British English spelling conventions are acceptable. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of all references and citations. 4. The online management system will automatically convert your uploaded files into HTML and PDF formats. All article submissions must be in Microsoft Word (.DOC) format. Images, tables, figures, appendices, and audio/video files should be uploaded separately. Images should be uploaded separately as .JPG, .TIF, .EPS, or .GIF files. More details can be found on http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/llt under User Tutorials. 5. Authors are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the electronic format by including hypermedia links to multimedia and other materials both within and outside the manuscript. 6. List the names, institutions, e-mail addresses, and if applicable, WWW addresses (URLs), of all authors. Include a 50-word biographical statement for each author. This information will be temporarily removed during the blind review. 7. Authors of accepted manuscripts will assign to LLT the permanent right to electronically distribute their article, but authors will retain copyright. Authors may republish their work (in print and/or electronic format) as long as they acknowledge LLT as the original publisher. 8. Requests for republication should be addressed to the author(s). LLT should be acknowledged as the original publisher.


9. The editors of LLT reserve the right to make editorial changes to manuscripts accepted for publication for the sake of style or clarity. Authors will be consulted only if the changes are substantive. 10. Minor edits will be made within 14 days after publication. Post-publication changes involving content will be made only if there is a problem with comprehensibility. Such changes will be accompanied by a note of revision. External links will be validated at the time of publication. Broken links will be fixed at the author’s request. Articles and Commentaries

1. LLT publishes articles that report on original research or present an original framework that links second language acquisition theory, previous research, and language learning and teaching practices that utilize technology. Articles containing only descriptions of software, pedagogical procedures, or those presenting results of surveys without providing empirical data on actual language learning outcomes will not be considered. 2. General guidelines are available for reporting on both quantitative and qualitative research (http://llt.msu.edu/resguide.html). 3. Articles should be no more than 8,500 words in length, including references and a 200-word abstract. Appendices should be limited to 1,500 words. Lengthy appendices should be included as hyperlinks and sent as separate files in .html or .pdf format. 4. Commentaries are short articles, typically 2,000-3,000 words, that discuss material either previously published in LLT or otherwise offering interesting opinions on issues related to language learning and technology. 5. Titles should not exceed 10 words and should be adequately descriptive of the content of the article. 6. All articles and commentaries go through a two-step review process: Step 1: Internal Review. The editors first review each manuscript to see if it meets the basic requirements (i.e., that it reports on original research or presents an original framework linking previous research, second language acquisition theory, and teaching practices), and that it is of sufficient quality to merit external review. Manuscripts that do not meet these requirements and are principally descriptions of classroom practices or software are not sent out for further review. The internal review generally takes 1-2 weeks. Following the internal review, authors are notified of the results. Step 2: External Review. Submissions which meet the basic requirements are then sent out for blind peer review by 3 experts in the field. The external review takes approximately 2-3 months. Following the external review, the authors are sent copies of the external reviewers’ comments and are notified as to the decision (accept as is, accept pending changes, revise and resubmit, or reject).


Reviews

1. LLT publishes reviews of professional books and software related to the use of technology in language learning, teaching, and testing. 2. LLT does not accept unsolicited reviews. Contact Review Editor Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas ([email protected]) if you are interested in having material reviewed or in serving as a reviewer. Send materials you wish to be reviewed to: Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas 2133 Comus Court Ashburn, VA 20147 3. Reviews should provide a constructive critique of the book/software and include references to theory and research in second language acquisition, computer-assisted language learning, pedagogy, or other relevant disciplines. They should also include specific ideas for classroom implementation and suggestions for additional research. 4. Reviews should be limited to 2,000 words. Reviewers are encouraged to incorporate images (e.g., screen shots or book covers) and hypermedia links that provide additional information. 5. The following information should be included in a table at the beginning of the review: Books

Software

Author(s) Title Series (if applicable) Publisher City and country Year of publication Number of pages Price ISBN

Title (including previous titles, if applicable) and version number Platform Minimum hardware requirements Publisher (with contact information) Support offered Target language Target audience (type of user, level, etc.) Price ISBN (if applicable)


Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/editors.pdf

February 2010, Volume 14, Number 1 pp. 1–2

FROM THE EDITORS Happy 2010 to all our contributors, reviewers, and readers! We hope that you are ready to face the challenges and opportunities that the New Year will bring. We are happy to report that we have received 139 submissions from 26 countries in 2009 and are looking forward to another productive year. Our readership remains robust worldwide: just in the last two weeks of December 2009, we had 4,231 visits from 120 countries/territories. It is our pleasure to introduce Volume 14 number 1, a regular issue of our journal. We have assembled one commentary, three articles, one column, and two reviews covering a range of CALL topics and a variety of languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, Italian, Russian, and Spanish). In his invited commentary “New Tools for Teaching Writing,” Mark Warschauer discusses the importance of learning to write in a second language, as well as the role of digital media in writing instruction. In “Corpus-Assisted Creative Writing: Introducing Intermediate Italian Learners to a Corpus as a Reference Source,” Claire Kennedy and Tiziana Miceli describe three case studies that provide a starting point in the process of developing corpus-consultation literacy in the context of learning Italian as a foreign language. The authors see the process of “making the corpus your own” as a matter of developing not only skills in conceptualizing and executing searches and interpreting examples, but also understanding the principles that underlie the effective use of corpora and reference resources in general. “Using Synchronous Online Peer Response Groups in EFL Writing” by Mei-Ya Liang proposes an analytic framework for describing L2 interaction during synchronous computer-mediated communication. The results of the study showed that students tended to focus more on content discussion than on negotiation and error correction and that the quantity and quality of each type of interaction were dependent on groups and tasks. The author proposes ways in which the proposed analytical framework can be applied to writing instruction. “The Effects of Captioning Videos Used for Foreign Language Listening Activities” by Paula Winke, Susan Gass, and Tetyana Sydorenko reports on the results of a study that investigated the effects of captioning during video-based listening activities designed for learners of Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian. The results showed that captioning was more effective than no captioning. For learners of Spanish and Russian, captioning first was more effective than captioning second, while for Arabic and Chinese learners, there was a trend toward captioning second being more effective. Interview data showed that students used captions to increase attention, improve processing, reinforce previous knowledge and decompose language, although some learners reported using captioning as a crutch. In his popular Emerging Technologies column, Bob Godwin-Jones describes recent developments in Web browsing and authoring and their implications for language learning. He discusses some of the significant transformations of the Web that expand and supplement its ability not only to retrieve and display data, but also to make it a vehicle for delivering Web-based applications and server-stored programs with sophisticated user interfaces and a full range of interactivity. This added Web functionality will support the creation of interactive Web pages for language practice

Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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and the design of collaborative environments for group interactions. We are pleased to present two book reviews, edited by Sigrun Biesenbach-Lucas. Ulugbek Nurmukhamedov reviews Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation edited by Raquel Oxford and Jeffrey Oxford. Most chapters in the book describe empirical studies of different innovative technologies and state-of-the-art tools, present ideas for pedagogical applications, discuss effective strategies, and offer useful suggestions on how these technologies could be applied to improve language teaching and learning. Mandy Reinig reviews The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (second edition) edited by Terry Anderson. The book explores technologies developed in the five years since the publication of the 1st edition such as increased use of social networking sites and audio and video support in the classroom, illustrated by experience gained in the distance education program at Athabasca University. The volume offers a good starting place for institutions interested in the development of online courses by providing useful information on the pedagogical applications of different technologies and the need for support services tailored to online learners. We have an important announcement for our authors and reviewers. Due to the large number of submissions that LLT receives, and through the support of the National Foreign Language Resource Center of the Unviversity of Hawai‘i and the Center for Language Education and Research of Michigan State University), we have adopted ScholarOne ManuscriptsTM (Formerly Manuscript Central) for managing our online submission and review processes. Starting on February 15, 2010, all articles, columns, and reviews should be submitted online through ScholarOne. Full instructions and support will be available on the site and a user ID and password can be obtained by authors and reviewers on the first visit. We appreciate your patience during the transition period.

Sincerely, Irene Thompson and Dorothy Chun Editors

Language Learning & Technology

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INVITED COMMENTARY: NEW TOOLS FOR TEACHING WRITING Mark Warschauer University of California, Irvine Less than two decades ago, new forms of socially constructed multimedia were believed to be devaluing writing, marginalizing the essay, and contributing to a postmodern death of the author (e.g., Faigley, 1997; Landow, 1992). But today, writing is more important than ever before (National Commission on Writing, 2003), mastery of the essay remains critical to academic success (Intersegmental Committee of the Academic Senates, 2002), and, as Chesher (2005, para. 1) has noted, “the author is alive and well, and has a blog.” Writing is especially important for the instruction of second language learners for three reasons. First, writing well is a vital skill for academic or occupational success (National Commission on Writing, 2004), but one that is especially difficult for second language learners to master. Second, writing can be an effective tool for the development of academic language proficiency as learners more readily explore advanced lexical or syntactic expression in their written work (e.g., Warschauer, 1996; Weissberg, 1999). Third, writing across the curriculum can be invaluable for mastering diverse subject matter, as written expression allows learners to raise their awareness of knowledge gaps, abstract problem-specific knowledge into schemas that can be applied to other relevant cases, and elaborate mental representations of knowledge that can be more easily retrieved, while simultaneously allowing teachers to better understand the students’ state of knowledge and thinking process and thus adjust instruction as necessary (see discussion in Reeves, 2002). New digital media have played an important role in the teaching of writing, through both the cognitive era that began in the 1980s, in which word processing was emphasized as a tool for revision (Pennington, 1993), and the sociocognitive era that began in the 1990s, in which computer-mediated communication was emphasized as a tool of social construction of meaning (Kern & Warschauer, 2000). Over the last decade, though, important new tools have emerged for the teaching and learning of writing. In the remainder of this essay, I briefly review four such tools: blogs, wikis, automated writing evaluation, and open-source netbook computers. Most of what I write about will focus on English language learners, as that is the target of my most recent research; some of it may be applicable to teaching other languages as well. BLOGS The development and free online availability of blogging software has helped transform the Web from a place principally used to access information to one where vast numbers of people publish their own work, with hundreds of millions of blogs launched in the past decade. The potential role of blogs in education, and in second language learning in particular, is revealed through an analysis of the medium’s affordances. The value of online communication in second language learning has been attributed to how it combines the interactivity of speech with the permanence of writing (Warschauer, 1997). Yet different types of online communication achieve this combination in different ways. An analysis by Herring and colleagues demonstrates how blogs serve as a bridging genre between more highly interactive forms of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) and standard published HTML documents (see Figure 1). Blogs are more frequently updated (in terms of adding new content or comments), include more exchange among people, and have a higher percentage of text (as opposed to multimedia) than standard Webpages. But the exchanges on them tend to be more asymmetric (i.e., dominated by main authors) and less frequently updated than CMC sites such as newsgroups. If online communication represents an intermediate space between speech and writing, blogs can thus be characterized as Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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occupying an intermediate space among online media. Blogs thus represent a particularly effective tool to combine the publishing and discussion of student writing in a single medium. Standard HTML documents (e.g., personal home pages) infrequently updated asymmetrical broadcast multimedia

Weblogs

frequently updated asymmetrical exchange text-predominate

Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (e.g., newsgroups) constantly updated symmetrical exchange text only

Figure 1. Weblogs as a bridging genre. Adapted from Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright (2005). Blogs have revived the importance of authorship, and indeed created more authors than probably any other medium in human history. Yet they have also changed the nature of authorship, with writers on public blogs needing to be concerned about both their immediate audience of intended readers and an essentially unlimited audience of anyone with a Web browser who could accidentally or intentionally come across a blog posting (such as a future employer). Blogging can thus be used to help students write for a social audience and hone their words in response to others, while becoming sensitive to both the benefits and risks of expressing themselves online. Second language educators are exploiting the affordances of blogs to good effect. The ease of writing and publishing on blogs makes them an appealing medium to students and thus has been found to help increase the quantity of student writing as well as its lexical sophistication (Fellner & Apple, 2006). Having students write on blogs can help learners transition from a more colloquial to an academic writing style, develop a sense of voice, learn to participate in a community of writers, and gain an important new literacy in its own right by becoming contributors to and not just consumers of online content (Bloch, 2007; Rezaee & Oladi, 2008). WIKIS Parallel to the rapid growth of blogs over the last decade has been similar growth among wikis. The most prominent wiki, Wikipedia, ranks sixth among most visited Websites in the world, and features 14 million articles written in more than 200 languages. Lesser known wikis exist on a large array of topics, and free software is available for teachers to start their own wikis. Much of the discussion regarding the role of wikis in education has focused on the suitability of Wikipedia as a source for student research. The founder of Wikipedia, Jim Wales, provides the most commonsense answer to this, suggesting that although Wikipedia can help provide an overview of issues and a starting point for identifying primary sources, students are better off using primary sources as definitive sources in their research. “For God’s sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia,” Wales told one college student (Young, 2006, para. 2). A more interesting question is how writing for wikis in language, composition, and other courses can affect the learning process. The potential of wikis for teaching and learning is hinted at by Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, who commented, “The blogosphere is a community that might produce a work, whereas a wiki is a work that might produce a community.” Cunningham’s statement illuminates a central contradiction of CMC since its inception: it has served as a powerful medium for exploring identity, expressing one’s voice, airing diverse views, and developing community, yet has proven a very unsuitable medium for accomplishing many kinds of collaborative work due to the inherent difficult of arriving at decisions in groups dispersed by space and time (see meta-analysis comparing faceto-face and computer-mediated decision-making by Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002).


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Wikis turn traditional CMC activity around. Whereas e-mail and chat facilitate informal, author-centric, personal exchange, writing on a wiki facilitates more formal, topic-centric, depersonalized exchange. Each edit makes a concrete contribution to a collaborative written product. A log of edits and their authors is relegated to a separate page, which a teacher can use to confirm who contributed what to a joint student product. Wikis are thus an especially powerful digital tool for collaborative writing and collective knowledge development. Initial reports of the use of wikis for collaborative writing assignments in second language learning suggest that participating students increase their quantity of writing, develop more confidence in their writing, and find such assignments motivating (Mak & Coniam, 2008; Kovacic, Bubas, & Zlatovic, 2007). There is no published research yet on projects involving students writing for Wikipedia, but the existence of a Simple English Wikipedia targeted at English language learners could facilitate such projects. AUTOMATED WRITING EVALUATION Automated essay scoring has been under development since the 1960s, when researchers first created programs that could assign essays a numerical rating based on their similarity in machine-countable lexical and syntactic features to essays on the same topic previously scored by human raters (for an overview, see Warschauer & Ware, 2006). In the last decade, though, broader automated writing evaluation (AWE) programs have been developed that combine automated essay scoring software with a range of other tools for classroom use, such as model essays, scoring rubrics, graphic organizers, word banks, dictionaries, thesauri, and spelling/grammar/usage checkers. Upon first consideration, the use of machine scoring appears to conflict with the goals of a sociocognitive approach to writing, and, indeed, automated essay scoring has been widely criticized within the composition community (e.g., Cheville, 2004). However, my research (e.g., Grimes & Warschauer, in press) and that of others (e.g., Chen & Cheng, 2008) suggests that the impact of such software depends to a large effect on how it is used. When AWE is used to replace writing for a teacher or other audience, students are dissatisfied (Chen & Cheng, 2008). However, when AWE is used as part of a social writing process—in which, for example, students write earlier drafts for review by the software, and later drafts to be submitted to the teacher or published online for peers—results are more positive (Grimes & Warschauer, in press). Such use provides students a range of tools (e.g., word banks, scoring rubrics) and rapid feedback (both on overall score and on language mechanics) to encourage and motivate autonomous writing and revision. And while students are working autonomously, teachers can individually help students most in need, while still reviewing all students’ final drafts (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008). Finally, AWE software programs also include tools for teachers to comment on student drafts, and my most recent research project (see description below) suggests that some teachers use these tools to increase the amount of instructor feedback to students. OPEN-SOURCE NETBOOKS The use of technology for teaching writing is most effective when students have daily access to an individual computer (see studies by Russell, Bebell, & Higgins, 2004; Warschauer, 2006). Until recently, such access was very expensive to provide. However, new hardware/software combinations now make possible much more sustainable one-computer-per-student initiatives. Netbook computers—laptops that are optimized for low weight and low cost—first emerged in late 2007. Most current models have 9-10 inch screens, weigh 2-3 pounds, and have sufficient capacity for most educational applications other than video editing (which could be carried out as needed on a small number of more powerful shared computers rather than on individual computers). Though netbooks can run on Windows, Linux-based open source operating systems maximize their effectiveness, since they place


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fewer demands on the computers’ limited capacity, and the use of other open source software (e.g., for word processing) further reduces the educational cost. More recent hardware developments, such as the use of very power- and cost-efficient ARM-based processors in new kinds of laptops that are sometimes referred to as smartbooks, may further remove barriers to widespread use of educational computers for the teaching of writing. With funding from the Haynes Foundation and Google Research, I am currently carrying out a study in two U.S. school districts that have substantial numbers of English language learners and that have recently implemented district-wide student writing programs involving individual use of open-source networks combined with district-wide blog and wiki media. The total cost of hardware and software for the program in each district is approximately $300 per student; one of the districts also uses an AWE program at an additional cost of about $20 per student per year. In that latter district, students first write their essays using the AWE software, and then are encouraged to post their final essays on the schoolcommunity blog for comments from other students, teachers, or parents. The quantity of student writing appears to have gone up substantially in both districts, and students also receive much more feedback on their writing, whether it be from blog comments by peers, online comments from teachers, or softwaregenerated scoring or error feedback. Initial test score analysis suggests substantial benefits in writing outcomes, including for English language learners. CONCLUSION The diffusion of new technologies, and the development of the knowledge economy that these technologies have contributed to, have made the teaching and learning of writing more important than ever before. Fortunately, these same new technologies can also aid the teaching of second language writing. Blogs, wikis, automated essay scoring, and open-source netbooks are four important tools that can assist writing instruction. As with other educational tools, none of these will bring positive results merely from their presence. However, thoughtful use of these tools can enhance effective instructional approaches that emphasize writing for meaningful social purposes, mastery of relevant genres, and development of students’ academic language proficiency.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Rick Kern and Doug Grimes for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Warschauer is Professor of Education and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the Digital Learning Lab and the Ph.D. in Education program, the latter of which includes a specialization in Language, Literacy, and Technology. His most recent book is Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom (Teachers College Press).


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REFERENCES Baltes, B. B., Dickson, M. W., Sherman, M. P., Bauer, C. C., & LaGanke, J. S. (2002). Computermediated communication and group decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 87(1), 156-179. doi:10.1006/obhd.2001.2961 Bloch, J. (2007). Abdullah's blogging: A generation 1.5 student enters the blogosphere. Language Learning & Technology, 11(2), 128-141. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol11num2/bloch/default.html Chen, C.-F. E. C., & Cheng, W.-Y. E. C. (2008). Beyond the design of automated writing evaluation: Pedagogical practices and perceived learning effectiveness in EFL writing classes. Language Learning & Technology, 12(2), 94-112. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num2/chencheng.pdf Chesher, C. (2005, May). Blogs and the crisis of authorship. Paper presented at the Blogtalk Downunder conference, Sydney, Australia. Retrieved from http://incsub.org/blogtalk/?page_id=40 Cheville, J. (2004). Automated scoring technologies and the rising influence of error. English Journal, 93(4), 47-52. doi:10.2307/4128980 Faigley, L. (1997). Literacy after the revolution. College Composition and Communication, 48(1), 30-43. doi:10.2307/358769 Fellner, T., & Apple, M. (2006). Developing writing fluency and lexial complexity with blogs. The JALT CALL Journal, 2(1), 15-26. Grimes, D., & Warschauer, M. (in press). Utility in a fallible tool: A multi-site case study of automated writing evaluation. Journal of Technology, Language, and Assessment. Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2005). Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information, Technology & People, 18(2), 142-171. doi:10.1108/09593840510601513 Intersegmental Committee of the Academic Senates. (2002). Academic literacy: A statement of competencies expected of students entering California's public colleges and universities. Sacramento: ICAS. Kern, R., & Warschauer, M. (2000). Theory and practice of network-based language teaching. In M. Warschauer & R. Kern (Eds.), Network-based language teaching: Concepts and practice (pp. 1-19). New York: Cambridge University Press. Kovacic, A., Bubas, G., & Zlatovic, M. (2007). Evaluation of activities with a wiki system in teaching English as a second language. Retrieved from http://cmc.foi.hr:8080/eng-wiki/articles/ICTFlorence_Kovacic-Bubas-Zlatovic_2007-distr.pdf Landow, G. P. (1992). Hypertext: The convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Mak, B., & Coniam, D. (2008). Using wikis to enhance and develop writing skills among secondary school students in Honk Kong. System, 36(3), 437-455. National Commission on Writing. (2003). The neglected "r": The need for a writing revolution. New York: The College Entrance Examination Board. National Commission on Writing. (2004). Writing: A ticket to work…or a ticket out. New York: The College Entrance Examination Board. Pennington, M. (1993). Exploring the potential of word processing for non-native writers. Computers and the Humanities, 27(3), 149-163. doi:10.1007/BF01830068 Reeves, D. (2002). Accountability in action. Denver, Colorado: Advanced Learning Press.


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Rezaee, A. A., & Oladi, S. (2008). The effect of blogging on language learners' improvement in social interactions and writing proficiency. Iranian Journal of Language Studies, 2(1), 73-88. Russell, M., Bebell, D., & Higgins, J. (2004). Laptop learning: A comparision of teaching and learning in upper elementary classrooms equipped with shared carts of laptops and permanent 1:1 laptops. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 30(4), 313-330. doi:10.2190/6E7K-F57M-6UY6-QAJJ Warschauer, M. (1996). Comparing face-to-face and electronic communication in the second language classroom. CALICO Journal, 13(2), 7-26. Warschauer, M. (1997). Computer-mediated collaborative learning: Theory and practice. Modern Language Journal, 81(4), 470-481. doi:10.2307/328890 Warschauer, M. (2006). Laptops and literacy: Learning in the wireless classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. Warschauer, M., & Grimes, D. (2008). Automated writing assessment in the classroom. Pedagogies, 3, 22-36. Warschauer, M., & Ware, P. (2006). Automated writing evaluation: Defining the classroom research agenda. Language Teaching Research, 157-180. doi:10.1191/1362168806lr190oa Weissberg, B. (1999). Developmental relationships in the acquisition of English syntax: Writing vs. speech. Learning and instruction, 10, 37-53. Young, J. (2006, June 12). Wikipedia founder discourages academic use of his creation. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/


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EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN WEB BROWSING AND AUTHORING Robert Godwin-Jones Virginia Commonwealth University In this new decade of the 21st century, the Web is undergoing a significant transformation. Supplementing its traditional role of retrieving and displaying data, it is now becoming a vehicle for delivering Web-based applications, server-stored programs that feature sophisticated user interfaces and a full range of interactivity. Of course, it has long been possible to create interactive Web pages, but the interactivity has been more limited in scope and slower in execution than what is possible with locallyinstalled programs. The limitations in terms of page layout, interactive capabilities (like drag and drop), animations, media integration, and local data storage, may have had developers of Web-based language learning courseware yearning for the days of HyperCard and Toolbook. But now, with major new functionality being added to Web browsers, these limitations are, one by one, going away. Desktop applications are increasingly being made available in Web versions, even such substantial programs as Adobe PhotoShop and Microsoft Office. Included in this development are also commercial language learning applications, like Tell me More and Rosetta Stone. This movement has been accelerated by the growing popularity of smart phones, which feature full functionality Web browsers, able in many cases to run the same rich internet applications (RIA) as desktop Web browsers. A new Web-based operating system (OS) is even emerging, created by Google specifically to run Web applications. In this column we will discuss recent developments in Web browsing and authoring and what the implications may be for language learning. We will touch on what has changed since LLT columns surveying the state of the Web five years ago, “Ajax and Firefox: New Web Applications and Browsers” (2005), and ten years ago, “Web Browser Trends and Technologies” (2000). WEB BROWSERS AS OPERATING SYSTEMS? In Internet time five years ago is ancient history, so it may not be surprising that the discussion of browsers in 2005 included the recent release of Netscape 8, while 2000 marked the appearance of Netscape 6. This first widely-used browser finally gave up the ghost with Netscape 9 in 2008. But the big news in 2005 was the surge in popularity of a newcomer, Firefox, which actually arose from the ashes of Netscape in the guise of the Mozilla Foundation. In 2005, Firefox was making inroads in gaining market share over Microsoft’s dominant market leader Internet Explorer (IE). Still, IE at that time was capturing about 84% of Web users (all such statistics are approximations). Today the percentage of IE users is considerably lower, around 63%. Firefox (now at version 3.5) continues to gain in popularity, usually attributed to its fast processing, security features, user-friendly interface, and the large number of add-ons available. Opera (from Norway) and Safari (from Apple) have considerably smaller percentages of the market. Yet these two browsers have more importance than their numbers suggest. They tend to support emerging Web standards early and implement experimental features, which often subsequently make their way into other browsers. The fact that IE no longer has a virtual stranglehold on the market has led Microsoft to be more responsive in adding user-requested features and, in some instances, in complying with Web standards. The current competitive browser market, in fact, is leading to much more development than was the case in recent years. Without competition in the browser market, it is not likely we would be seeing the host of new features now being incorporated into “modern browsers,” often defined as Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google’s Chrome. The Chrome browser was initially released in late 2008 and in the short time since, has become the third most widely used browser (after IE—versions 6,7, and 8 combined—and Firefox). This is in part due to innovative features such as the merging of the address bar with the search window, and a new, minimalist interface. Chrome also enhances security through technologies for isolating potential harmful content and


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New Developments in Web Browsing and Authoring

maintaining and checking against a database of malicious sites. This process isolation also adds more stability to the browser; if a Web site causes one tab to crash, the other tabs still keep working. One of the immediately noticeable user experiences with Chrome is the increased speed of JavaScript code execution. This is particularly important in enabling Web applications to run more smoothly. Chrome also introduces a new way of working with Web applications, allowing users to save them as icons to the desktop. When opened from the desktop, the browser window displaying the application shows only the title bar, not the rest of the browser toolbar. In this way, Chrome blurs the line between Web and desktop applications. Some analysts have argued that this kind of hybridity is the reason Microsoft until recently has been so slow in improving IE and expanding its functionality, in order to cement the prominent position it occupies in the OS and office application markets by stifling competition from the Web. Certainly, the existence of reliable Web delivered applications such as Google Docs, along with free or inexpensive Web file storage, offers a new alternative to the traditional desktop model. Increasingly, such applications take another step away from the desktop by enabling users to save documents to the “cloud” (i.e., to an Internet server). Google has taken the next logical step in this evolution, by announcing the Chrome OS, slated to be released in 2010. It is designed to be a lightweight but fast environment for running Web applications. It is most likely to be used in netbooks (low cost small laptops without an optical drive) or other portable computing devices. The assumption—and business calculation—Google is making through this development is that enough of the functionality users want and need for their computing devices will be available through the Web, eliminating the need for a desktop OS altogether. Google is not the only company moving in this direction. Palm introduced in 2009 its new OS, called WebOS. Applications for new Palm devices are built using standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with some proprietary additions specific to Palm devices. The user interface is designed for a touch screen and features applications running as “cards” (shades of HyperCard) in a multitasking environment. Users click on a card to start up a program, flick left or right to move to other running programs and flick up and away to quit. The WebOS features easy social networking through its “synergy“ function, which integrates all contact information from different sources and offers built-in access to Facebook as well as to a combined SMS/IM messaging window. The seamless integration of social networking services is a feature increasingly seen in browsers, both desktop and mobile. It reflects the enormous growth in the popularity of sites such as Facebook and services such as Twitter. Both the increased usage of such services and their gradual ubiquity may lead language professionals to think about leveraging student use of such services into language learning opportunities. There are already projects like the Facebook Language Exchange. With the rapid growth of the smartphone industry, this trend is likely to accelerate. WebOS is built around the Web layout engine WebKit, originally developed by Apple from KHTML, for use in its Safari browser. Apple made WebKit open source in 2005 and since then it has been used in a number of browsers and mobile devices, including the Google Android platform, Palm devices, Nokia phones (running the Symbian OS), and the iPhone. The fact that all major smartphone manufacturers, except Blackberry (which reportedly will be upgrading its browser to WebKit), now use WebKit makes it easier for developers to create Web applications that will run predictably in different mobile environments, although some implementation quirks remain. This extends to desktop systems using WebKit as well as other devices such as tablets running Android or the iPhone OS. Of course it is also possible to create “native” applications which will run only on a specific platform. There are SDKs (software development kits) for both the iPhone and Android which, however, use different programming languages, Objective-C and Java respectively. While creating a native application may offer advantages such as tighter integration with device-specific features and a familiar, common user interface, this approach sacrifices the benefits of having the program run unchanged on multiple platforms. In fact, Web applications can be designed to look much like native applications. The iPhone allows, like Chrome, Web applications to be saved on the home screen as icons. Among iPhone developers there has been some


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lively discussion on the choice of developing using Web standards or the proprietary iPhone SDK. The runaway success of the iPhone App store and the profits it offers developers might well point in that direction. However, given the diversity of devices now available, it would seem to be best practice for developers of language learning programs to use open Web standards. The exception might be situations in which a particular device or OS has been selected for exclusive use, as in campuses making the iPhone or iPod Touch available to all their students. HTML 5 ON THE RISE What makes it possible for Chrome or the iPhone to make Web applications available locally, as if they were native applications, are new features that are part of the upcoming HTML 5 standard. In fact, a major element in the design of HTML 5 is to improve the delivery of Web applications. This is apparent from the name and make-up of the group which initially pushed for the standard, WhatWG, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, founded by representatives from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. From the perspective of 2005, the fact that a new version of HTML was being developed at all would be a surprise, as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had planned on HTML being phased out, to be replaced by the XML variant of HTML, XHTML. XHTML 1.0 became a W3C recommendation in 2000. HTML 5 was first developed independently of the W3C by the WhatWG group but since has been incorporated into a new HTML working group at W3C. The call for the continued use and further development of HTML was based on the desire to keep the fundamental language of the Web as simple, backwards-compatible, and forgiving as it had been since the early days. The stricter rules of XML make this less easily doable in that language. In order to satisfy both groups, and to insure compatibility with existing XHMTL pages, the current plan calls for development of both HTML 5 and a corresponding XHTML 5. The first full candidate release of HTML 5 is scheduled for 2012 but many of its features have already been adopted in browsers, with Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome offering the most support. HTML 5 introduces a number of changes in HTML tags, eliminating some (such as align, bgcolor, frameset) while adding many additional tags and features. The deprecated tags will continue to be supported by browsers (what a mess the lack of support for frames would be), but to be valid HTML 5, dropped tags will not be able to be included. One of the major directions for the changes in tags is to allow for more semantically meaningful mark-up of pages. New elements, which supplement the ubiquitous “div” tags include header, footer, article, and aside, all of which, along with other new tags, should make it easier to identify (and search) the structure and contents of Web pages. This is also likely to make page rendering faster. As could be expected, a number of the new features in HTML 5 are designed to offer better support to Web applications. One of the limitations that Web applications have had in comparison to their desktop cousins, has been the limited ability to store data short- or long-term on the local machine. HTTP cookies offer only limited data storage (20 cookies of 4 KB each per domain). HTML 5 introduces DOM storage (also called Web storage) which, like cookies, allows saving of data into associative arrays (key/value pairs) but with much larger capacity (up to 10 MB per domain). HTML 5 also offers Web application the ability to cache needed files locally (listed in a manifest file) which, assuming needed run data has been saved, can then be run even if an Internet connection is not available. This is, for example, how Gmail works off-line. The process is used by the iPhone OS and Chrome to be able to create shortcuts to saved Web apps. In the 2005 column, I discussed the arrival of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) as a new means to create Web applications. The JavaScript functions work in the background to fetch new data from a server, which allows content on a Web page to be updated without the need for the page to re-load. The XMLHttpRequest object, originally a proprietary feature added to IE, allows this to work. Given its widespread use, this object (along with other popular Microsoft introductions such as innerHTML and contentEditable) are being integrated into the HTML 5 standard. To further improve Web applications,


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“Web workers” are also part of the proposed standard. Web workers are not, as the name may suggest, techies building Web sites, but a means to allow JavaScript code to run in parallel rather than sequentially. These separate background threads allow AJAX pages to run more efficiently. In comparison to 2005, performance of AJAX pages is already enhanced in browsers today through faster execution of JavaScript. From being a much maligned add-on to Netscape 2 in 1995, JavaScript has become the essential glue that allows page elements to interact with one another and with server resources. The importance of JavaScript for Web designers has led to the creation of a number of JavaScript code libraries (especially for use in AJAX), such as jquery. The OpenAJAX Alliance has been created to try to achieve some level of interoperability among the libraries. Google has also been working in this direction, through creation of an AJAX Libraries API, which makes it very easy to use the most popular JavaScript libraries for Web applications. With just a few lines of code, developers can easily add very powerful JavaScript functionality from a great variety of libraries. The libraries themselves are hosted on Google servers (which pledges to keep them “indefinitely“) and are regularly updated. The increased efficiency of JavaScript execution in all browsers, but especially in Firefox and Safari, are orders of magnitude better than in 2005. This, too, allows operation of Web applications to more closely resemble desktop applications. Another new HTML 5 feature, cross-window messaging also points in this direction, allowing text messages to be sent (normally in the background) from the current window to other windows. WHAT DOES HTML 5 OFFER LANGUAGE LEARNING? Many educational resources for the Web are created in Adobe Flash, a proprietary format that uses a browser plug-in to play movies and interactive content. While Flash is widely supported it does not run on all platforms, and in particular not on some mobile OS's. This is true as well for Microsoft’s competitor to Flash, Silverlight. Each program can be used to embed interactive content which is able to communicate with other elements of a page through JavaScript. Both Silverlight and Flash, through its rich Internet application client Flex, also allow Web applications to run on the desktop like native applications. However, integrating Flash or Silverlight objects into a Web page is not as seamless as it is using standard HTML elements. There is also frequently an issue with slow performance and even crashes when running Flash, particularly on Linux and Mac OS. Nevertheless, both technologies will certainly continue to be important for Web developers, including language-learning professionals. HTML 5 introduces alternatives to Flash or Silverlight. New “audio” and “video” tags allow integration of these media in a similar way to how the image tag currently works in HTML. As a regular part of the default document object model (DOM) of the page, an HTML media object offers easier options for interacting with other elements on the page, as can be seen in on-line demos. [Note: HTML 5 examples cited here will need to be viewed in a recent version of Firefox, Safari, Opera, or Chrome]. The audio/video tags also simplify the task of creating custom playback controls. This feature is clearly of considerable potential interest for developers of language learning programs which incorporate video and audio, enabling, for example subtitles to be added easily (through a text file referenced by the video tag) turned off or on by the user. The audio/video playback capabilities of HTML 5 will also allow for synchronized multimedia. Of even greater interest as an alternative to Flash development is HTML 5 support for Canvas, originally introduced as a proprietary object in Apple Safari browser. Canvas is used for creating graphics through use of JavaScript and CSS code, allowing graphical elements to be created and changed on the fly. The ability of Canvas to paint directly to the page has made it a compelling alternative for game developers, as seen in on-line prototypes which demonstrate some of its capabilities. Simulations can also be created in Canvas, as a physics experiment illustrates. Sound can also be added. One could envision using Canvas to create a simulated environment for culture or language applications, such as building scenarios for greetings, shopping, buying a ticket, etc. While Canvas is currently supported in most browsers, for IE a work-around is necessary. Many implementations of Canvas use a


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powerful JavaScript library, processing.js, which makes the somewhat complex operations needed to create images or animations much easier. It is a powerful tool for making visual representations of data, building custom user interfaces, or developing Web-based games. Canvas is supported in WebKit , so applications incorporating it should run on mobile WebKit-based browsers. The issue of compatibility also effects currently the use of the video tag, with different browsers supporting different video encoding formats. It might be mentioned in this context how tightly Internet giant Google has tied its wagon to HTML 5, likely forcing other companies eventually to follow suit in terms of HTML 5 support. The most compelling evidence of Google’s commitment is Google Wave, a rich collaborative environment, created using HTML 5 technologies. Google Wave breaks down the barriers between different kinds of services and document types. It features a window displaying a set of documents (a “Wave”) which can include virtually any kind of content. All documents are stored on a central server. If a group member of a Wave creates a new addition to the Wave or edits an existing resource, this will immediately appear in real time in the Wave display of all members of that group, including, amazingly, what is being typed letter by letter. In this way, the system, works like a combination of email and instant messaging. Because the history of the Wave is maintained in all its detail, it also works as a rich collaborative environment, like a blog or wiki. Documents can also be uploaded and shared, with a change log to see revisions and the ability to revert to previous versions. In that way, it provides much of the functionality of versioning in office applications. Additional functionality is possible through adding extensions to Wave; currently there are half a dozen language tools available as extensions. There is currently a Calico Wave exploring what the application might mean for language learning, including the question of whether the use of Google Wave might even serve as a replacement for a learning management system such as Blackboard. Some of the uses explored include the use of a voice recording/playback extension, a translation robot, and video conferencing. Google Wave is still in beta so it is too early to tell whether it will be as transformative as some claim. At a minimum, its advanced features demonstrate in a dramatic way the high degree of interactivity and collaboration becoming possible on the Web. Other HTML 5 elements provide additional intriguing possibilities for language learning. New HTML form fields offer over a dozen new modes of interaction. Drag and drop is now possible not only within the browser but extending to the computer desktop. This includes the ability to drag and drop multiple files at a time from the local computer to be sent to a server. These additions take a further step in allowing Web applications to function in similar ways to desktop programs. They make it more likely that language-learning programs, such as intelligent language tutors, could be coded in HTML 5, adding the benefits of having them available on mobile devices. Another new HTML feature, geolocation adds the ability to track user locations. This makes it easier to create services like Google Latitude, which finds and indicates on a map the locations of members of a specified group. All of this new functionality could be of significant interest in creating interactive Web pages for grammar practice or collaborative environments for group interactions. While currently not supported in all browsers, forward-looking developers would be well–advised to follow HTML 5’s gradual adoption, in order to consider taking advantage of new features as they become widely supported.

RESOURCE LIST Demos of HTML 5 features •

A form of madness–Dive Into HTML5

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Animations, transitions and 3D transforms - Morphing power cubes

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Bespin - Code in the cloud - From Mozilla Lab


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Box2DJS - Physics engine for JavaScript

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Canvascape – “3D Walker” - Ben Joffe

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CanvasPaint

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Choose your own HTML 5 adventure

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Chrome experiments - Home

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ContentEditable - HTML5 demo

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HTML 5 demos and examples

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HTML5 Canvas and audio experiment

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HTML5 Canvas experiment

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Javascript Wolfenstein 3D - From Nihilogic blog

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Jigsaw puzzle by Raymond Hill: An HTML5 -based jigsaw puzzle

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O3D Beach demo - YouTube HTML5 demo

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PaintWeb integration examples

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physicSketch

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Poster Circle

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Web forms 2 demo page by Shwetank Dixit

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WebKit HTML 5 SQL dtorage notes demo

HTML 5 and Web Standards •

A preview of HTML 5 - From A list apart: For people who make websites

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An introduction to the Canvas element - From Bright Hub

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Bespin and the open Web - From Google I/O developer conference

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Canvas primer - Example: Using gradients

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DOM storage - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Google bets big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O - From O'Reilly Radar

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Hoa: Offline applications with HTML 5 - From msc mobile blog

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How HTML5 will change the way you wse the Web - From Lifehacker

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HTML 5 canvas - the basics - From Opera Developer Community

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HTML 5 differences from HTML 4

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HTML 5 reference

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HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight? - From InfoWorld

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HTML5 (including next generation additions still in development) Google goes HTML5: Demos experimental version of Gmail - From ReadWriteWeb

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HTML5 and the future of the Web - From Smashing Magazine


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•

HTML5 features at a glance - A selection of support features

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HTML5 file API brings drag-and-drop uploads to the Web - From Webmonkey blog

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HTML5 JS APIs

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Javascript geolocation using Google AJAX APIs - The why and the how

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Microsoft joins HTML 5 standard fray in earnest - From Business Tech - CNET News

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New elements in HTML 5: Structure and semantics - From IBM developer works library

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On HTML 5 drag and drop - From Alert Debugging

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Using files from web applications - From Mozilla Developer Center

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Watch YouTube videos without Flash in HTML5 - From The NeoSmart Files

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Yes, you can use HTML 5 Today! - HTML & XHTML Tutorials

JavaScript •

Google AJAX Libraries API - Google code

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JavaScript engine speeds - From John Resig blog

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JavaScript gaming - The best JavaScript games on the web

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Processing.js

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The future of JavaScript engines: Replace them with JavaScript compilers - From Shore Street blog

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Top JavaScript and AJAX Libraries

Language Learning •

50 iPhone apps to help you learn a new language - From Online College Degree

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Cheat sheet: Hints and tips for Google Wave - From The Shiny Wave

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Google Wave extensions list

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Google Wave: 5 ways it could change the Web - From Mashable: The social media guide

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Language Exchange - From Facebook

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Language learning applications for smartphones, or small can be beautiful

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Smartphones drive language learning innovation - From Physorg.com

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The #iPod touch and the #iPhone will change language learning - From The Linguist List blogs

Web Browsers •

Browser statistics - From W3schools.com

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Google's Chrome grabs No. 3 browser spot from Safari - From Computerworld

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Testing mobile browser compatibility–the beginning - From QuirksBlog

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Usage share of web browsers - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


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News From Our Sponsors

NEWS FROM SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS Sponsors University of Hawai‘i National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) Co-Sponsor Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL)

University of Hawai‘i National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) The University of Hawai‘i National Foreign Language Resource Center engages in research and materials development projects and conducts workshops and conferences for language professionals among its many activities. CULTURA: WEB-BASED INTERCULTURAL EXCHANGES (OCTOBER 10-11, 2009) The Cultura project, pioneered at MIT by Gilberte Furstenberg and her colleagues, has inspired a variety of online cultural exchanges based on a set of principles and best practices. The Cultura: Web-Based Intercultural Exchanges pre-conference event featured presentations by a variety of educators who have created exchanges based on the Cultura model. LANGUAGE LEARNING IN COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNITIES (LLCMC) CONFERENCE (OCTOBER 11-13, 2009) Once, computers were seen as thinking machines or electronic tutors. Now the computer has become one of many devices that people use to form virtual communities of all kinds. In the field of language education, computer mediated communication (CMC) enables students to interact with one another free of space and time constraints and to participate in communities of learning with their counterparts in the target culture. The Language Learning in Computer Mediated Communities (LLCMC) Conference explores the use of computers as a medium of communication in language learning communities. Conference highlights included a plenary talk by Dr. Gilberte Furstenberg (MIT), a special panel presentation showcasing online cultural exchanges based at the University of Hawai‘i, and a variety of intriguing concurrent sessions. NEW NFLRC PUBLICATIONS Toward Useful Program Evaluation in College Foreign Language Education by John M, Norris, John McE. Davis, Castle Sinicrope, &Yukiko Watanabe, (Eds.) This volume reports on innovative, useful evaluation work conducted within U.S. college foreign language programs. An introductory chapter scopes out the territory, reporting key findings from research into the concerns, impetuses, and uses for evaluation that FL educators identify. Seven chapters then highlight examples of evaluations conducted in diverse language programs and institutional contexts. Each case is reported by program-internal educators, who walk readers through critical steps, from identifying evaluation uses, users, and questions, to designing methods, interpreting findings, and taking actions. A concluding chapter reflects on the emerging roles for FL program evaluation and articulates an agenda for integrating Language Learning & Technology

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evaluation into language education practice. Browse the table of contents. Hoping and language learning by Tim Murphey This 60 minute video presentation asks the question, “To what degree do our methods provide productive pathways and confidence to aid our language learners?” During this sixth annual presentation in Hawai‘i, Tim Murphey discusses the importance of fostering language learners’ hope, agency, imagined selves, and communities motivation and ways to do so. View/download free. Check out our many other publications. OUR ONLINE JOURNALS SOLICIT SUBMISSIONS Language Learning & Technology is a refereed online journal, jointly sponsored by the University of Hawai‘i NFLRC and the Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR). LLT focuses on issues related to technology and language education. For more information on submission guidelines, visit the LLT submissions page. Language Documentation & Conservation is a fully refereed, open-access journal sponsored by NFLRC and published exclusively in electronic form by the University of Hawai‘i Press. LD&C publishes papers on all topics related to language documentation and conservation. For more information on submission guidelines, visit the LD&C submissions page. Reading in a Foreign Language is a refereed online journal, jointly sponsored by the University of Hawai‘i NFLRC and the Department of Second Language Studies. RFL serves as an excellent source for the latest developments in the field, both theoretical and pedagogic, including improving standards for foreign language reading. For more information on submission guidelines, visit the RFL submissions page.

Michigan State University Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Five professional development workshops are slated for July 2010. o

Using Video to Promote Language Development in the Classroom

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Blending Language Classes 101

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Rich Internet Applications for Language Learning: Introductory Techniques

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Rich Internet Applications for Language Assessment

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The Second “C”: Culture Teaching in the Language Classroom

Detailed information on all workshops can be found on our website: http://clear.msu.edu/clear/professionaldev/summerworkshops.php. CONFERENCES CLEAR exhibits at local and national conferences year-round. We hope to see you at ACTFL, CALICO, MIWLA, Central States, and other conferences.


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NEWSLETTER CLEAR News is a free biyearly publication covering FL teaching techniques, research, and materials. Download PDFs of back issues and subscribe at http://clear.msu.edu/clear/newsletter/. MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT Selected Products The list below comprises just some of our free and low-cost materials for language educators. Be sure to visit our website occasionally for updates and announcements on new products: http://clear.msu.edu. •

CLEAR’s Rich Internet Applications initiative has been underway for over three years. RIA is a research and development lab where our programmers are working on free tools that language teachers can use to create online language teaching materials—or have their students create activities themselves! There are currently ten RIAs, including: o

NEW! QuizBreak! (gameshow template for creating Jeopardy-like activities)

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NEW! Scribbles (script teaching tool for non-Roman characters)

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Revisions (process writing and feedback tool)

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Broadcasts (create your own podcasts)

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Worksheets (add multimedia elements to online worksheets)

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Audio Dropboxes (put a dropbox in any web page; students’ recordings get put into your dropbox automatically)

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La phonétique française (CD-ROM) – This cross-platform multimedia program consists of interactive lessons that can be used by French teachers to learn how to teach pronunciation, or by advanced students working independently.

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Introductory Business German (CD-ROM) – This CD-ROM provides a condensed, highlyfocused set of activities intended for use by business professionals who conduct business with Germans and German companies and wish to learn more about the German business and economics environment.

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Celebrating the World’s Languages: A Guide to Creating a World Languages Day Event (guide) – This free publication provides a step-by-step guide to planning “World Languages Day,” a university event for high school students designed to stimulate interest in learning languages and to highlight the importance of cultural awareness.

Coming Soon!

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More Rich Internet Applications Introductory Business Chinese

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The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) The Center for Applied Linguistics is a private, nonprofit organization that promotes and improves the teaching and learning of languages, identifies and solves problems related to language and culture, and serves as a resource for information about language and culture. CAL carries out a wide range of activities in the fields of English as a second language, foreign languages, cultural education, and linguistics. Featured Resources: •

Report From the National K-12 Foreign Language Survey CAL surveyed public and private elementary and secondary schools across the country to identify current patterns and shifts in foreign language education over time. Visit our Web site to learn more about the survey and read the executive summary.

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CAL News CAL News is our electronic newsletter created to provide periodic updates about our projects and research as well as information about new publications, online resources, products, and services of interest to our readers. Visit our Web site to sign up.

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Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages Visit the Alliance Web site to browse the Heritage Language Program Profiles, view the Heritage Voices Collection, and sign up to receive the quarterly electronic newsletter, Alliance News Flash.

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Center for Research on the Educational Achievement and Teaching of English Language Learners (CREATE) Visit the CREATE Web site to learn more about CREATE, its research, and upcoming events. To keep current on CREATE activities sign up to receive its electronic newsletter, CREATE News, and periodic announcements via email.

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CAL SIOP Professional Development Services CAL works with schools, states, and districts to design and deliver high-quality, client-centered professional development services on the SIOP Model.

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CAL Services: Institutes on Teaching Reading to English Language Learners In response to growing requests from K-8 educators for training materials on teaching reading to English language learners, CAL will be offering additional institutes in Washington, DC in 2010. CAL provides a variety of professional development and technical assistance services related to language education and assessment needs.

Featured Publications: • • • • • •

Foreign Language Teaching in U.S. Schools: Results of a National Survey Refugees from Iraq (Expanded Refugee Backgrounder) Using the SIOP Model: Professional Development Manual for Sheltered Instruction Developing Reading and Writing in Second Language Learners Realizing the Vision of Two-Way Immersion: Fostering Effective Programs and Classrooms What’s Different About Teaching Reading to Students Learning English?

Visit CAL’s Web site to learn more about our projects, resources, and services. Language Learning & Technology

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Language Learning & Technology http:/llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/review1.pdf


REVIEW OF SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE NET GENERATION Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation Raquel Oxford and Jeffrey Oxford (Editors) 2009 ISBN 978-0-9800459-2-5 US $30.00 (paperback) 240 pp. National Foreign Language Resource Center University of Hawai’i at Manoa Review by Ulugbek Nurmukhamedov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), the term “Net Generation” has been clearly defined by Prensky (2001), who states that Net Generation members are “digital natives” since they “[have] spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age” (p. 1), all of which make them different from the baby boomer generation. For those who are eager to learn more about the language learning needs and necessities of the Net Generation, the edited book by Oxford and Oxford (2009), entitled Second Language Teaching and Learning in the Net Generation is a must-read resource. Since most of the contributors to the book are second and foreign language instructors as well as researchers, almost every chapter of the book describes empirical studies involving different innovative technologies and state-of-the-art tools, offering pedagogical ideas, effective strategies, and useful suggestions on how these technologies could be applied to enhance language teaching and learning. The book comprises 14 chapters that include a wide range of topics. In Chapter 1, van Compernolle and Williams look into technology as a means of communication that can potentially contribute to the implementation of “intercultural communication, sociolinguistic and pragmatic development, and online communication and linguistic accuracy” (p. 11) and review advantages and disadvantages of each of these areas. In Chapter 2, Niño provides information about Internet based technologies, such as Google, wikis, Blogs, Skype, YouTube, Podcasting, and social networking sites, offering particularly useful and teacherfriendly suggestions on how these tools could be used in second language teaching and learning. For example, language learners can use Google to learn vocabulary (e.g., find correct spelling, look for appropriate collocations), collaborate on writing tasks; similarly, teachers can provide ESL writers with written feedback via Google Docs and furthermore utilize Google Talk to create opportunities for interaction in the target language. Chapter 3 reports on a study that investigated the computer competence of secondary school students, teachers, and administrators in a school in Germany in an attempt to examine whether there was a gap between theory and practice in terms of the participants’ computermedia literacy. Although responses to questionnaires revealed that the teachers believed that computer literacy skills were important for the future of the students, the majority of the students claimed that they had acquired essential computer skills, as well as online browsing techniques, not from their teachers but by themselves. Chapters 4 and 5, after providing an informative synopsis of the background, as well as the current status, Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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of hybrid curricula (i.e., activities which could be done largely online instead of in a traditional classroom) in second and foreign language teaching, respond to an ongoing question about whether or not digital natives are ready for hybrid foreign-language instruction. In Chapter 4, Goertler believes that college students are “maybe” ready to benefit from hybrid (i.e., blended) courses. She also claims that it cannot be “assumed that because someone is a digital native that that person wants to learn any particular subject matter in a digital format” (p. 61). She further adds that certain constraints, such as language learning preferences and computer literacy skills, need to be taken into account even among the members of the Net Generation. In Chapter 6, Raquel Oxford examines the use of writing-assistant programs (Atajo 3.0 and Spanish Partner) to improve the writing skills of learners of Spanish in terms of quality and quantity, particularly the use of grammar and vocabulary, in their compositions. Chapters 7 and 8 provide information about studies that examined podcasts and their use in language teaching and learning. The authors of Chapter 7, Bird-Soto and Rengel, provide examples from their own experience of the challenges and learning curves they had to master and teaching insights they gained before, during, and after they launched Personalidades. This project was integrated into a course curriculum to give intermediate to advanced learners of Spanish an opportunity to improve their listening and speaking skills, as well as develop interaction among students and teachers through interviews which were later posted on discussion boards. In Chapter 8, Ducate and Lomicka describe a study in which learners of German and French, after receiving instruction on how to create a podcast session, were asked to create their own podcast as a course requirement. In addition to podcasting posts on special blogs, the students also had to write comments on their blogs about their learning experience with podcasting. In Chapter 9, Lazo-Wilson and Espejo demonstrate how blogs could be used in language classrooms and report on a study in which blogs were set up successfully for three different Spanish courses at Eastern Washington University with the objective to review grammar, expand vocabulary, and broaden students’ cultural awareness. Chapter 10 focuses on students’ utterances collected from WebCT sessions, primarily used to create a “data-driven learning” approach (Johns, 1991, p. 27) to teaching grammar rules to learners of French. Chapters 11 and 12 describe several online activities involving Second Life (SL), “an online virtual community that is being created by its residents in which they can own land and build houses and either rent or reside in them” (p. 154). After logging on to SL, the students were able to practice target language via activities (e.g., inviting lecturers from different countries, teaching vocabulary by using visual cues in 3D format, organizing field trips to popular buildings and sites in the world), which are often difficult to organize quickly in real life, especially in a traditional classroom environment. In chapter 13, Warren describes the pros and cons of web-based portfolios and their pedagogical asset to teaching target language culture to foreign language students. In Chapter 14, Charbonneau-Gowdy talks about the role of Sociocultural Theory and technology in teaching English to NATO-supported military personnel and explains how this online project generated collaborative and empowering dialogues between teachers and learners during the course of the program. Although the book covers a broad range of topics in terms of different tools, varied technology, diverse research interests and studies involving different learner populations, all 14 chapters have one theme in common: the use of technology can supplement and enhance language learning and teaching particularly in the era of the Net Generation. The suggested activities in the book can certainly meet the needs of language instructors who often look for innovative ways to use technology in a foreign and second language teaching setting. Technologies ranging from SL, podcasting, blogs, wikis, Internet-based activities to language learning software are believed to be the kind of tools the Net Generation are already familiar with. Podcasting, for instance, has already entered the realm of language learning (Thorne & Payne, 2005) and is believed to accelerate language acquisition through new applications and creative podcasting broadcasts. Teachers can use podcast episodes to teach listening skills, speaking strategies, and pronunciation, as well as raise learner’s awareness about cultural differences (Fox, 2008). In fact, learners whose language classes incorporated podcast sessions and podcasting related activities (reported Language Learning & Technology

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in Chapters 7 and 8) spoke positively of this tool and believed that it improved their listening skills, exposed them to different accents, enabled them to record their own voices, and gave them ample opportunities to explore the target language. Despite such positive comments, O’Bryan and Hegelheimer (2008) caution that “podcast users and developers should focus on what this technology may add to an existing program of study and reflect on how it may transform language learning” (p. 346). This statement clearly indicates that technology alone does not make language acquisition happen; instead, it facilitates the language learning process. Integrating new innovative tools and emerging technologies into a traditional curriculum will require a hybrid approach to language teaching and learning, with instruction being done partially outside of the classroom depending on the different technologies. Chapters 4 and 5 provide detailed information about the implications of hybrid courses for foreign and second language learning/teaching. Both chapters claim that the majority of foreign language learners at U.S. universities support the importance of the use of technology in second language learning since their language skills improved. Interestingly, among learners of the Net Generation are also those who express more negative attitudes toward hybrid instruction due to previous, presumably negative, experiences with the use of technology in language classrooms. Some of the frustrations result from the fact that even ‘digital natives’ still need special assistance with certain technological tools (e.g., creating podcast episodes; using SL). As a response to these attitudes, Goertler (in Chapter 4) counters that the few negative answers from learners should not hinder the development of hybrid language learning since the mindsets and attitudes of learners towards the use of technology can vary based on their personality, language learning styles, and preferences. In addition to emerging technologies and their connection to pedagogy, Chapters 11 and 12 discuss how SL can be used in language teaching. Clark, in Chapter 11, shares ideas on how SL can be integrated into a course syllabus and suggests interactive activities that can bring creativity into an existing curriculum. The recommended activities, such as learning Spanish vocabulary with visual cues, introducing each other’s avatars (i.e., an image representing “real” people in online games, chat rooms, and online virtual worlds), learning Spanish culture, are worth trying because these activities promote interaction and raise cultural awareness among learners. Based on previous research involving SL, Cooke-Plagwits, Chapter 12, recommends effective ways to incorporate other online tools (e.g., supplementary webpages, videos, podcasts, wikis) into SL to create even more interactive activities for language learners. However, the author also warns SL users of certain problematic sides of SL because “its interface is not particularly intuitive, and its learning curve is fairly steep” (p. 177). This issue was also encountered in a study by Sadler & Nurmukhamedov (2008), in which high intermediate ESL students were given tasks using SL, such as constructing tables, building different shapes, and looking for different items in a designated area. Even though the participants understood the instructions for the tasks, the students could not finish the tasks within the designated time frame of 45 minutes because the participants were all “newbies” (i.e., a term used by SL members to refer to somebody who does not have much experience using the virtual world). Clearly, teachers’ and students’ patience and practice are required to overcome learning curves while using technology in foreign language learning setting. Surprisingly, however, while the book emphasizes the use of technology in foreign and second language learning, only two chapters include images of the types of technology described (Wimba voice chat, and discussion board; video-based conferencing software Waveasy). For readers who have only recently started integrating and using technology, the inclusion of images could help see or imagine the mentioned technology and/or tools as students engage in activities. Additionally, URL addresses of software and programs (e.g., SL; university-based learner-friendly blogs) have not been provided either, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, for educators to use these resources and techniques in different classroom settings. Currently, interested readers will have to find information about the mentioned software or the website URLs themselves. Although techies (those who are technologically savvy) might be familiar with most of the resources and websites provided in the chapters, for both tech-aficionados and tech-novices, Language Learning & Technology

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the absence of URLs could be a slight inconvenience. However, despite these inconveniences, the book editors Oxford and Oxford manage to fulfill its overall purpose, namely “how technology is both being used and can be used to improve second language acquisition” (p. 2) in the ever expanding Net Generation. The chapters have been carefully selected to address the issues based on research and practical explanations, making this book appropriate for a range of audiences: techies, tech-aficionados, and tech-novices. For this reason, this book can function as a useful practical resource for instructors working in intensive language programs and eager to incorporate state-of-the-art technologies into their existing syllabi, and university faculty who teach CALL related courses at the university level. These audiences will benefit from the research ideas, listed literature in the references section, and classroom-friendly practical suggestions provided in the book.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Ulugbek Nurmukhamedov is an ESL instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include L2 writing, spoken grammar, and vocabulary acquisition. He is also interested in using research from corpus linguistics to enhance vocabulary and grammar accuracy among L2 writers. Email: [email protected]

REFERENCES Blake, R. (2001). What language professionals need to know about technology. ADFL Bulletin, 32(3), 9399. Chapelle, C. (2003). English language learning and technology. Lectures on applied linguistics in the age of information and communication technology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fox, A. (2008). Using podcasts in the EFL classroom. TESL-EJ, 11(4). Retrieved from http://tesl-ej.org Hegelheimer, V., & O'Bryan, A. (2008). Mobile technologies, podcasting and language education. In M. Thomas (Ed), Handbook of research in Web 2.0 and second language learning. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Johns, T. (1991). From printout to handout: Grammar and vocabulary teaching in the context of datadriven learning. ELR Journal, 4, 27-45. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants: A new way to look at ourselves and our kids. On the Horizon, 9(5). Retrieved from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing Sadler, R., & Nurmukhamedov, U. (2008, March). Second Life and task-based learning. Paper presented at the CALICO Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA. Tapscott, D. (1998). Growing up digital: The rise of the Net generation. New York: McGraw-Hill. Thorne, S. L., & Payne, J. S. (2005). Evolutionary trajectories, Internet-mediated expression, and language education. CALICO Journal, 22(3), 371-397.


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REVIEW OF THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF ONLINE LEARNING The Theory and Practice of Online Learning Terry Anderson (Ed.) 2008, 2nd Edition ISBN 978-1-897425-08-4 1st Edition - Free (available at http://cde.athabascau.ca/online_book/) 2nd Edition Printed Copy - $39.95 XI, 472 pp. AU Press, Athabasca University Edmonton, AB, Canada Review by Mandy Reinig, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona Present-day distance education relies on a variety of technological tools, including e-mail, synchronous and asynchronous communication, specially designed websites and online modules. As a result, colleges and universities have to adapt their distance offerings in order to keep up with rapid technological changes. The Theory and Practice of Online Learning (TTPOL), edited by Terry Anderson, examines whether colleges and universities are meeting the needs of online learners and whether they can improve the services they offer to these learners. The 2nd edition of the book explores additional technologies developed in the five years since the publication of the 1st edition such as increased use of social networking sites and audio and video support in the classroom, illustrated by experience gained in the distance education program at Athabasca University. TTPOL addresses issues that need to be considered by administrators and educators when creating, implementing, and maintaining online courses or programs at academic institutions. The book will not only benefit administrators and educators, but will also be useful in graduate education courses by exposing future educators to the most important issues involved in distance education. TTPOL is divided into four main sections, each focusing on a particular issue. Each section contains four to five contributed chapters that describe the building blocks, tools, and information necessary for the creation and delivery of successful online courses. The first section, Role and Function of Theory in Online Education Development and Delivery, contains four chapters that describe the educational theories and online learning philosophies that underlie many online courses. Chapter 1, by Mohamed Ally, discusses behaviorist, cognitivist, constructivist, and connectivist schools of learning, all of which have impacted the creation and delivery of online courses. Ally proposes a learning model based on these educational theories which details the components of a successful online course (Figure 1). Chapter 2, by Terry Anderson, explains the attributes of online learning, such as student centeredness, as well as the various forms of interaction which take place in online environments, such as student-teacher and teacher-content interactions. According to Anderson, all of these are enhanced by the semantic web to create an environment where advanced levels of learning can take place. Dianne Conrad, in Chapter 3, explores prior learning assessment and recognition within the online environment and the use of e-portfolios as an assessment tool. Finally, Chapter 4, by Heather Kanuka, discusses the philosophies of online instruction in terms of Dahlberg’s (2004) three stances including uses, technology, and social determinism. In addition, she discusses various philosophies of teaching, such as liberal and radical, and the role played by technology according to these philosophies. It Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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is these theories that form the backbone of online education and not the technology itself (Bonk & Reynolds, 1997; Rovai 2002).

Figure 1. Components of effective online reading (p. 37). The second set of chapters, Infrastructure and Support for Content Development, describes the necessary support and structures needed for effective course development. Chapter 5, by Alan Davis, Paul Little, and Brian Stewart, discusses the components of an online learning system and the issues related to Language Learning & Technology

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transitioning from traditional to online education. The authors discuss the need to understand students’ needs and the desired outcomes before developing online courses. Rory McGreal and Michael Elliott, in Chapter 6, expand upon the previous chapter but exploring the technologies that are currently available for delivery of online courses, such as streaming video and wikis.They examine their educational uses and provide resources for readers to begin to explore these technological options. Chapter 7, by Patrick Fahy, continues this discussion by examining the strengths and weaknesses of both current and emerging forms of technology, as well as the issues that need to be considered when selecting a technological tool to use. The emergence and examples of programs using mobile technology are discussed in Chapter 8 by Maureen Hutchinson, Tony Tin, and Yang Cao, as a means of exploring the next wave of online learning. Finally, Terry Anderson, in Chapter 9, investigates the social challenges that instructors might face when teaching in an online environment. Anderson also provides examples of technology, such as blogs, YouTube, and Skype, which can assist in meeting with these social challenges. The third section, Design and Development of Online Courses, explores in detail the components involved in the development of online courses. Dean Caplan and Rodger Graham, in Chapter 10, describe the necessary personnel, such as a web designer and faculty, required to conduct successful online courses as well as the components that need to be in place before online courses can be effectively and efficiently taught. Chapter 11, by Jan Thiessen and Vincent Ambrock, discusses the role and responsibilities of an online course editor and the value such a person adds to the course development process. Chapter 12, by David Annand, expands on the previous chapters by exploring the real costs of conducting online courses and discussing how to determine if an online course is likely to be cost effective. In the final chapter of this section, Nancy Parker focuses on quality management and what needs to be considered in order to provide quality online instruction. Parker also describes some of the legislation and policies that are in place, specifically in Canada, to maintain the quality of online instruction. The final section of TTPOL, Delivery, Quality Control, and Student Support of Online Courses, contains five chapters that discuss that actual design of online courses and the implementation of some of the support services necessary for delivering successful online instruction. In Chapter 14, Terry Anderson explores issues related to “getting the mix right” (p. 348) in terms of creating a social, cognitive, and teaching presence in an online environment to be able enhance instructor effectiveness. The right mix is important in the development of trust among students, instructors, and the technology itself in creating an interactive environment (Doering & Beach 2002; Malhotra, Majchrzak, & Rosen, 2007). Chapter 15, by Alex Kondra et al. discusses the development of call centers for distance learners and provides an example of a successful call center at Athabasca University. In Chapter 16, Kay Johnson et al. examine the types of library support that online learners require as well as the creation of virtual library environments. Chapter 17, by Susan Moisey and Judith Hughes, explores the issues related to supporting online learners, including disability services, career advisement, and academic support to enable students to succeed in an online environment. In closing, in Chapter 18, Deborah Hurst and Janice Thomas examine the development of teamwork and group projects in an online course and provide two case studies of successful team building projects in an online graduate course. Even though TTPOL provides a wealth of information, there are several areas where further information would have been helpful. For example this book focuses mostly on what is taking place in Canada, specifically at Athabasca University. It would have had a much wider appeal if it had also included chapters on online learning implemented at institutions in the U.S. and Europe, among other places. In addition, the chapters focus a bit narrowly on whether or not online learning meets the needs of the students and on the importance of course design and content in conjunction with technological tools. However, the effectiveness of online courses and the actual compatibility of the students’ and the university’s needs are not addressed. Additional research, such as by Sampson (2003), which examined the satisfaction of students taking a distance education courses at a British university to determine if the online courses were meeting students’ expectations, would be beneficial to understanding the Language Learning & Technology

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effectiveness of online education. Sampson’s work demonstrates the importance of knowing if a program is meeting students’ needs in terms of course content as well as student services. By the same token, several chapters present detailed descriptions of how or why different forms of technology have been used, particularly at Athabasca University, but few chapters actually present statistical information on these programs. For example, it would have been valuable to know how many students are making use of the various call centers to determine how useful these centers are and what questions students typically ask. In addition, information on what types of online courses have been created, the number of students who typically take the courses, and information about the students’ satisfaction with their online education would also aid in the understanding of the impact of and the need for online courses. Despite these shortcomings, TTPOL offers a good starting place for institutions interested in the development of online courses by providing useful information on the pedagogical applications of various types of technology and the need for support services tailored to online learners. With that in mind, the book contributes to the understanding of the development of online courses and of the need to adjust instruction and services to meet the needs of students in the age of technology.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Mandy Reinig is an Education Abroad Advisor and ESL instructor at Pennsylvania State University in Altoona. She recently completed her Master’s Degree in TESL, and her thesis focused on the use of blogs in ESL writing. She is working on implementing other forms of technology into her teaching. Email: [email protected]

REFERENCES Bonk. C.J., & Reynolds, T.H. (1997). Learner-centered web instruction for higher-order thinking, teamwork, and apprenticeship. In B.H. Khan (Ed.), Web-based instruction (pp. 167-178). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. Dalhberg, L. (2004). Internet research tracings: Towards non-reductionist methodology. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 7(1). Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/ Doering, A. & Beach R. (2002). Preservice English teachers acquiring literacy practices through technology tools. Language Learning and Technology, 6(3), 127-146. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol6num3/doering/default.html Malhotra, A., Majchrzak, A., & Rosen, B. (2007). Leading virtual teams. Academy of Management Executive Perspectives, 21(1), 60-70. Rovai, A. (2002). Building sense of community at a distance. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 3(1). Retrieved from http://www.irrodl.org Sampson, N. (2003). Meeting the needs of distance learners. Language Learning & Technology, 7(3), 103-118. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num3/pdf/sampson.pdf


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CORPUS-ASSISTED CREATIVE WRITING: INTRODUCING INTERMEDIATE ITALIAN LEARNERS TO A CORPUS AS A REFERENCE RESOURCE Claire Kennedy and Tiziana Miceli Griffith University In much of the literature on the exploitation of corpora for language learning, the learners are viewed as researchers, who formulate and test their own hypotheses about language use. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our intermediate-level students of Italian in a previous study, we have designed a semesterlong apprenticeship in corpus use which does not demand of them the high level of language proficiency, attention to detail in observation, and logical rigour that we consider necessary for rewarding work in the learner-as-researcher role. Instead, we introduce a corpus initially as an aid to the imagination in writing, and then to achieving accuracy through specific grammatical problem solving. We see this as the groundwork for subsequent development of the students’ research skills with corpus data. This paper describes the approach we have adopted to the corpus apprenticeship and reports on an evaluation of its effectiveness through case studies of three students and their use of a corpus and bilingual dictionary as reference resources when writing. Drawing on insights from the case studies, we outline a working definition of corpus-consultation literacy for our learning context and identify some refinements to be made to our apprenticeship. INTRODUCTION Corpora and concordancers are now widely recognized as significant resources for L2 teaching and learning. Whether the learners have direct access to a concordancer or a teacher selects concordances for them to work on—approaches labelled as “hard” and “soft,” respectively, by Gabrielatos (2005)—there is broad agreement that working with corpus data can benefit learners by developing a process-oriented view of language learning and fostering their active involvement (O’Sullivan, 2007). Other key theoretical arguments for encouraging learners to examine concordances are that this can enhance their appreciation of the relationship between form and meaning, and therefore of the idea of grammar as essential to the construction of a text’s meaning (Gavioli, 1997), and stimulate attentiveness to the relationships between words and their context (Aston, 2001; Milton, 1999). The grammatical consciousness-raising effects of work with concordances have been espoused particularly by Johns (1991), whose metaphor of the “learner-as-researcher” has proved very influential. Johns describes the learner armed with a corpus as a linguistic researcher who formulates and tests hypotheses on the basis of evidence from real language use. Thanks to the direct access to language data, the learner-researcher can engage in an individual process of discovery of grammar and meaning and take on greater responsibility for learning, while the teacher assumes the role of research coordinator rather than fount of knowledge. But Johns (1988, p. 21) also notes the potential for “serendipity learning,” or incidental discoveries in the course of corpus investigations. Bernardini builds on this in developing the “learner-as-traveller” approach to using corpora, where what matters is not the starting or end point of an investigation but the choices made, the strategies adopted, the experience gained and the findings along the way (2000, p. 142). While many recent empirical studies have shown that corpus use can be highly productive and enjoyable for learners in various contexts, these generally positive results are sometimes “tempered in no small measure by the strongly worded negative reactions from the learners” (Chambers, 2007, p. 7). Some learners perceive corpus consultation as too time consuming (Chambers & O’Sullivan, 2004; Yoon & Hirvela, 2004) or laborious and tiring (Chambers, 2005; Cheng, Warren, & Xun-feng, 2003). Braun (2007) and Davies (2004) identify specific difficulties students face in managing a hypothesis-testing Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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process and in their observation and analysis of concordance data, while Granger and Meunier (2008, p. 248) note the challenge of motivating students to work with multi-word patterns if they perceive learning single words as already sufficiently demanding. Several scholars therefore stress the importance of appropriate training in corpus consultation, through teacher-guided activities, before students embark on independent work (Chambers, 2005; Cheng et al., 2003; O’Sullivan & Chambers, 2006; Vannestal & Lindquist, 2007; Yoon & Hirvela, 2004). Bernardini (2004, p. 26) specifically recommends starting with “convergent” tasks—that is, tasks in which anyone working with the same data should arrive at the same outcome—so that the teacher can ensure certain basic techniques are applied and a correct path is followed through the processing of the data, before proceeding to “divergent” tasks, where different people working on the same data autonomously are expected to arrive at different outcomes (see also Leech, 1997). Frankenberg-Garcia (2005), in light of her analysis of students’ choices of reference resources for various types of queries, highlights the importance of presenting a corpus as an addition to the learners’ suite of resources rather than in isolation. With reference to this wealth of empirical studies, in a theoretical discussion of the assumptions underlying learners’ use of corpora and their implications for pedagogy, O’Sullivan (2007) calls for work to define corpus-consultation literacy and paths to achieving it. We began to incorporate work with corpora into our Italian programme at a university in Australia several years ago, attracted by its potential usefulness in our context, where we seek to marry attention to grammatical form with a basically communicative teaching approach. Opting for a “hard” approach to corpus use by our students made sense in light of our emphasis on cultivating learning strategies to support their development as independent life-long learners. We consider appropriate training in corpus consultation to be especially important in our case: as FL learners in Australia, with few opportunities for immersion, our students are unlikely to have the high proficiency levels of the ESL, EAP and translation students referred to in many studies of corpus use; in fact, they typically reach what we consider a highintermediate level after three years. In this article we first illustrate our current approach to training our students in corpus consultation. We then present an evaluation of that approach through case studies of three students’ use of a corpus and dictionary as reference resources while writing. In discussing the insights gained from this empirical work, we seek to contribute to understanding of what constitutes corpus-consultation literacy and to support O’Sullivan’s theoretical case for giving greater prominence to corpus-consultation literacy in language learning. We also identify some refinements to be made to our training. OUR CORPUS APPRENTICESHIP Underlying our current approach to training in corpus use are three decisions, based on our experience with several cohorts of students and our response to the literature referred to above. First, we see mastering corpus consultation as a gradual, long-term process that needs to be treated as an integral part of the overall language-learning process. For this reason we decided to integrate training in corpus use fully into the curriculum—through a series of activities in class and for homework—and to look upon the learners’ difficulties and possibly negative responses as the kind of wavering to be expected in the early stages of a journey. Indeed, we call our semester-long introduction to corpus work an “apprenticeship,” in order to reflect this long-term perspective. Second, we decided to insert the apprenticeship into a major creative writing project, this being the component of our Italian programme where we thought it most likely to engender a positive response. Central to our second-semester, second-year course is an autobiographical writing task, in which the students compose six chapters on set themes, published in installments throughout the semester on the course Website. They tend to become very enthusiastic about this task, as it brings the opportunity to write about topics that matter to them and a sense of achievement through sharing what they produce. We hoped their engagement with this project would help make them well disposed towards a corpus presented explicitly as a resource to support it. But we also saw the autobiography as a type of task within which we could make the usefulness of a corpus particularly apparent. It lends itself to addressing the following challenges discussed by Granger and Meunier (2008) and Milton (1999): raising learners’ Language Learning & Technology

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consciousness about the importance of phraseology and encouraging them to venture beyond their existing repertoire of multi-word patterns. Furthermore, by virtue of its creative nature there is considerable scope for adapting the content to take advantage of the serendipitous discoveries of language patterns that a corpus facilitates. Our third decision was to downplay the learner-as-researcher notion. Having identified difficulties encountered in corpus investigations by our students in a previous study (Kennedy & Miceli, 2001), we now postpone to after the apprenticeship the kind of corpus work that demands the high proficiency in understanding examples, and stringent observation and reasoning, that we consider inherent in a learneras-researcher role and possibly responsible for some of the negative reactions reported in other studies. By this we refer to the kinds of investigations aimed at deriving a general and complete rule, such as answering the question “What is the difference between convince and persuade?” in the highly effective way that EAP students working with Johns (1991) were able to do. Such investigations are challenging for our intermediate-level students because they entail a thorough and detailed classification of the examples found in a search, and therefore require confidence in interpreting numerous examples and identifying small differences between them, in order to formulate any exceptions along with the general rule. They can also demand a high degree of rigour in observation and reasoning—research skills that our younger students are usually only in the process of developing in their studies in general. We therefore focus our apprenticeship instead on corpus use in relation to the specific requirements of a writing task to hand; that is, on investigations aimed at finding models for patterns to use at a given point in a given text.

Figure 1a. Index of text-types present in CWIC, showing the number of texts included of each type. Language Learning & Technology

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Figure 1b. List of texts of a single type (in this case personal letters), obtained by clicking on the name of the type (lettera priv) in the screen shown in Figure 1a. The tools we use in the apprenticeship were custom-built for our students and learning context. We compiled the corpus, called CWIC (Contemporary Written Italian Corpus), a 500,000 word collection of letters, emails, and material from magazines, intended to provide models of personal writing on everyday topics, as well as texts by professional writers such as journalists and film critics. It can be interrogated via the Web or in standalone mode on a CD-ROM. The user interface was designed to look familiar to anyone accustomed to Internet searching.1 In addition to concordancing, the search engine allows swapping between a concordance line and the whole text it came from (Figures 2a–b) and browsing whole texts by text type (Figures 1a–b), and produces frequency lists. We are fortunate in having access to a classroom whose configuration is particularly suited to the writing workshops and the corpus apprenticeship embedded in them, with computers handy and plentiful but not intrusive, as recommended by Chambers and Bax (2006, p. 471) for classroom CALL in general. The thrust of the apprenticeship is to introduce the students to two key ways of using CWIC to enhance their writing: to enrich the content and language of their text, through what we call pattern-hunting; and to edit their text for lexico-grammatical accuracy, through pattern-defining. Both the pattern-hunting and Language Learning & Technology

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pattern-defining functions entail exploring the corpus in search of models for word patterns2 to employ in one’s own text (adapted as necessary), but their departure points differ. Introducing the students to pattern-hunting amounts to encouraging them to use the corpus as an aid to the imagination and memory. All writers, and L2 learner writers in particular, can find themselves at a loss for ideas on what to write about and/or words to express it. In both cases the problem can be tackled by searching the corpus on words likely to be associated with the topic concerned, and then scanning the concordance lines for potentially useful patterns. For example, when the students were writing about their sense of personal space in one of their autobiography chapters, we suggested pattern-hunting in relation to questions such as “What sorts of things might I talk about in relation to my living space?” and “What adjectives or set phrases might I use to talk about my need for space?” Most started by searching on the familiar word spazio. This not only turned up ideas and expressions to borrow, such as “reagire di fronte alle invasioni del proprio spazio” (react to the invasion of one’s space), “ritagliare uno spazio per sé” (carve out a space for oneself), and “rubare spazio” (take space)—see Figure 2a, lines 65, 57, 76—but also triggered further searches, on words encountered in the concordance lines, such as “percorso” (path) and “compromesso” (compromise). The other two principal techniques we introduce for pattern-hunting are browsing through whole texts, chosen on the basis of text type and title, and perusing frequency lists for common two-word, three-word, or four-word combinations.

Figure 2a. Some results of a search on “spazio” used in a pattern-hunting operation when writing about personal space. Language Learning & Technology

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Figure 2b. Display of full text obtained by clicking on a concordance line (in this case from concordance line 57 in the screen shown in Figure 2a; the text is no. 32 of the letters to the “Psychology” column in the magazine Donna). Pattern-hunting is somewhat similar to Milton’s (1999) wordlist-driven approach, intended to “[encourage] novice writers to experiment with grammatical and lexical patterns that they might otherwise be unaware of, or misuse, or avoid” (p. 243). We see both pattern-hunting and Milton’s approach as useful not only because they provide access to ways of saying things in the target language for which there may be no exactly corresponding pattern in the learners’ first language, but also because they can therefore highlight for the learners the significance of this non-correspondence phenomenon. Milton’s students work with a monolingual corpus enhanced by the provision of categorized lists of patterns that are deemed useful for the learners and whose usage can be explored in the corpus. The difference between the approaches is that Milton’s is focused on finding words to express what the user already has in mind to say (e.g., through a linking expression), while, as discussed above, pattern-hunting encompasses not only searching for how to say something but ideas on what to say about something. The different approaches reflect different orientations of the corpus use—to support creative writing in our case and academic writing in Milton’s. The second function we introduce our students to, pattern-defining, differs from pattern-hunting in that it is concerned with finding models when we do have a specific target pattern in mind for use at a particular point in a text. Usually it is a matter of knowing some of the component words and seeking a model for the exact structure required; for example: which preposition is required after a verb in a certain context, or Language Learning & Technology

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the position of an adjective relative to a noun in a particular usage. Figure 3 provides an example of a pattern-defining operation carried out by one of our students.

Figure 3. A search conducted by S3 in a pattern-defining operation aimed at establishing if the pattern “so” “that” can be rendered in Italian with “così” “che” and if the subjunctive mood is required after the “che.” The following parameters have been selected: at most 1 word distance between the two searched words, searched words only in the order given, 12 words of context displayed on each side, 50 concordances per page in random order. We chose to concentrate on pattern-hunting and pattern-defining in the apprenticeship in the expectation that these functions can be productive and rewarding for learners even at an intermediate level of proficiency. We hope thus to acquaint our students with corpora as reference resources in a way that is motivating and stands them in good stead for subsequently developing into fully-fledged languagelearners-as-researchers. The advantage of beginning with pattern-hunting is that, in the students’ first encounter with the corpus, the emphasis is on an individual exploration of the data rather than achieving correct answers. While there is a progression from teacher-guided work to less guided work in each phase—pattern-hunting and pattern-defining—there is not a progression from convergent to divergent tasks such as described by Bernardini (2004). Pattern-hunting work is divergent by definition: even when starting out with the same lookup, students will take different paths in exploring the data and come up with different outcomes. The teacher’s guidance in the pattern-hunting phase lies in recommending types of questions to pose and types of techniques to employ (searching on topic words, browsing whole texts and frequency lists). However, our second, pattern-defining, phase does rely on convergent tasks, as we take all students through some illustrative pattern-defining operations together.


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EVALUATION OF THE APPRENTICESHIP AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPING CORPUS-CONSULTATION LITERACY Aims and method At the end of the course in which we conducted the apprenticeship in its current form for the first time, we carried out an investigation into our students’ use of CWIC and bilingual dictionaries, through case studies of three individual students. Our attention was focused on these two types of resources because they were the ones we had explicitly given training in, during that course and the prerequisite course in the previous semester, respectively. In investigating which functions the students used each resource for and how effectively, especially in light of Frankenberg-Garcia’s (2005) finding that her students of translation favoured bilingual and mediated reference resources over monolingual and unmediated ones,3 we particularly sought to understand the ways in which the students had taken up CWIC—a monolingual and unmediated resource—as a result of our apprenticeship. We were especially interested in whether or not they had embraced both the functions of the corpus that we had concentrated on: pattern-hunting and pattern-defining. Through the insights from the case studies we hoped to better understand what it should mean in our context to seek to develop students’ corpus-consultation literacy, and thus identify ways of improving our approach to integrating the corpus into the students’ suite of reference resources. The principal questions addressed were: 1. Which functions did the students use the corpus and dictionary for, and how effectively? 2. What factors, especially skills, knowledge and attitudes, affected their propensity and ability to use these reference-resource functions? 3. And therefore, how can we improve the apprenticeship to cultivate appropriate skills, knowledge, and attitudes? The three students, whose participation in our study was voluntary, were taking a major in Italian within the undergraduate degree programme in Languages and Applied Linguistics. They were all hard-working and highly motivated, and had achieved grades of Distinction or High Distinction in their three previous Italian courses.4 None of the three had had any exposure to corpora prior to our course. We do not claim the three students constituted a representative sample of their cohort but we consider them appropriate and interesting case-study subjects because of the different approaches to language learning and reactions to the corpus they exhibited in class. Furthermore, they came from different age groups and study experiences: two were women, aged 20 (S1) and 55 (S2) respectively, and the third a man aged 27 (S3). Two of them had had prior experiences of learning a language to a high proficiency level: S1 in English as a second language, learnt at high school in Australia; and S3 in Portuguese through formal instruction and immersion, for work purposes. The primary method we used to obtain a detailed picture of the three participants’ use of the resources was to set them a writing activity to work on independently for 45 minutes and interview them each for 45 minutes immediately afterwards. The purpose of the semi-structured interview was twofold: first, to extract a retrospective report on their use of reference resources during the writing activity, with a recording of their computer screen activity available to prompt the memory where necessary; and second, to discuss their habits, preferences and expectations regarding reference resources in general, and collect any feedback they offered on the apprenticeship. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The writing activity we set was intended to give the participants ample scope for using the corpus in the ways practised in the course, as well as any other reference resources they habitually used. We invited them to reread the first and second chapters of their autobiography (written three months earlier), choose one of them and work on enriching it through additions and modifications. We stressed that this meant enhancing the text rather than correcting it grammatically, and that we wanted them to pay special attention to a suitably varied choice of vocabulary.5 We encouraged the participants to use any reference resources they chose. They brought their own printed bilingual dictionaries with them, and S2 also Language Learning & Technology

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brought a grammar book and a verb book. They used the computer we provided for access to CWIC and, in S3’s case, an online bilingual dictionary. We also provided a printed monolingual dictionary, which none of them consulted; the word “dictionary” when used below therefore refers always to a bilingual dictionary. In analysing each student’s work during the case-study activity we classified the operations carried out by function6 and then type of resource, on the basis of the intentions declared in the retrospective report. The three functions we considered significant for the discussion below are shown in Table 1: pattern-hunting, pattern-defining, and finding an Italian equivalent for a given English pattern. It was important to include the function of finding an Italian equivalent—a classic function of the bilingual dictionary—because a few students had developed the habit of using the corpus to expand on the information found in the dictionary, even though this was not something that had been explicitly taught in class.7 Table 1. Classification of Functions Used in the Case-Study Activity Function Pattern-hunting Pattern-defining

Finding an Italian equivalent for a given English pattern

Resource(s) corpus only corpus only dictionary only dictionary and corpus (to expand on dictionary information) dictionary only dictionary then corpus (to expand on dictionary information)

We also collected data through an end-of-course questionnaire, on the students’ perceptions of the autobiography task, and homework they completed in the second and sixth week of the apprenticeship with the corpus, respectively. The homework tasks concerned included suggestions intended to help the students practise using the corpus while writing their current autobiography chapter, in the ways they had been doing in class: pattern-hunting in the first week and pattern-defining in the fifth. The discussion that follows is the fruit of our reflection on the qualitative data collected as described above. This reflection was aimed at describing each participant’s use of CWIC and dictionaries, in the case-study activity and in general, and comparing their reference-resource use in light of their different perceptions of the autobiography task and the corpus apprenticeship. In this way we sought to identify factors that appeared to support or impede their taking up the various functions of the corpus, and that suggest practical steps to be taken to improve our training. Results and discussion There was marked variation among the three students in the frequency with which they used each resource in the case-study activity. The interviews confirmed that each had a different set of purposes to which he/she tended to put the resources and, in particular, had adopted a different set of functions of the corpus. Participant S1 The young woman, S1, found the autobiography task particularly rewarding, both in a personal sense and for the development of her writing skills.8 Her motivation was enhanced by the knowledge that her work was to be published on the course Website and therefore “each instalment needed to be worth reading.” In her writing she seemed prepared to take risks in sentence construction and word choice for the sake of expressiveness, where other students might restrict themselves to elements they were fairly confident of using correctly. In the case-study activity, S1 was the only participant to use the corpus for both pattern-hunting and pattern-defining. Her aim in enriching the text was to convey more of how she felt about the friend who was the topic of the chosen chapter. She did this by adding elements of description and embellishing existing ones, usually inserting or replacing single words or groups of words rather than adding complete Language Learning & Technology

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sentences. She conducted 11 pattern-hunting operations, 9 of which led to borrowings; 1 successful pattern-defining operation using the corpus; 1 unsuccessful pattern-defining operation involving the dictionary and the corpus; and 3 dictionary searches for Italian equivalents, 2 of which were unsuccessful. S1 was enterprising in her pattern-hunting, adopting various techniques for seeking out not just words but ideas on what to say. In addition to searching on a noun such as esperienza to find an adjective to describe an experience, or on a verb in order to borrow an adverb, she devised more ingenious strategies, including a search on insieme (together) for ideas on activities done together with her friend to relate, and a search on mi manca (I miss him) for help in adding what she missed in particular and how she felt. Another interesting strategy was searching on an adjective in order to find other adjectives, on the grounds that “when you look for one [there are] usually a few … adjectives put together.” Also noteworthy was S1’s satisfaction with the spoils of her pattern-hunting: she evidently savoured some of the words and expressions found, such as specchio di una profonda emotività (reflection of a deep capacity for emotion), with reference to a person’s eyes. Some of her borrowings included the word(s) she had actually searched on, while others were of patterns found in the surrounding text: this was the case for the specchio expression, fruit of searching on gli occhi (eyes). S1 seemed comfortable with CWIC’s monolingual and unmediated nature and not disconcerted by displays of large numbers of examples. Her approach to dealing with concordances would not have been sufficiently rigorous if she was in a learner-as-researcher role and needed to carefully classify examples in order to derive a general rule, but was usually perfectly adequate for the functions she used. She would scan the examples initially for any that appeared readily comprehensible and potentially useful, sometimes scrolling through several pages and considering only a few examples on each. If she found promising examples fairly quickly, she began to examine them more closely; otherwise she abandoned the operation. While S1’s confidence in dealing with the concordances was usually warranted, and her attitude beneficial in that she was not deterred from experimenting with CWIC by lack of certainty of understanding them, it did mean she was likely to sacrifice concern for accuracy at times. Although she only once used a pattern from the corpus incorrectly in the case-study activity, it was clear from the retrospective report that she had sometimes been lucky, having not always paid sufficient attention to whether the words she borrowed were used in the corpus exactly as she intended to use them in her text. But it is worth noting that she made two similar errors in interpreting dictionary information, also due to too summary a consultation. S1’s explanation of why she was comfortable with CWIC was that by practising on her own she had discovered through experience what she could do with it. In her independent work, she valued both intentional searches, aimed at finding patterns for including in specific sentences or exploring grammatical structures that had come up in class, and leisurely browsing with its potential for serendipitous discoveries. Asked when she had started to find CWIC useful, she explained: …when I started using it at home and especially when we had to use it for our compiti [homework]… You find there’s more to it than is just on the first page you look up… Then there’s a lot of nice phrases that you can use, if not in that compito then in the next one or whatever you wish to write…. Sometimes you can look for a word or a phrase, or [sometimes] browse through all the articles; that’s when you’re not looking for anything in particular, you just want to learn new things… When I have time I just go and read things…. Clearly, S1’s positive reaction to the corpus was also facilitated by her strong engagement with the autobiography task through which she had been introduced to it, and by the fact that being online in the evenings—searching, browsing, chatting, or even trying out online translators—was a normal state for her. Participant S2 In contrast to S1, S2 was only moderately engaged by the autobiography task, and CWIC evidently made little impression on her. She described the autobiography task as very demanding but a useful opportunity to develop her writing skills. Reflecting on her life story was not a new experience for her, as a middleLanguage Learning & Technology

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aged person, and she did not see the task as drawing substantially on her imagination or affecting her personally. In the questionnaire she identified “dictionary work” as the area in which she had made most progress, through “striving to find the correct expressions to use.” In the case-study activity, S2 used her (printed) dictionary for two significant and successful find-anItalian-equivalent operations, and the corpus only once, for an unsuccessful pattern-defining operation. Her approach to enriching the text was not one that particularly lent itself to pattern-hunting: in inserting four new sentences at various places she focused on conveying exactly what she had in mind at the outset, in sentences as grammatically correct as possible. However, the main reason she did not do any patternhunting was, as emerged in the interview, that she had not adopted it as a corpus function at all. And her unsuccessful pattern-defining operation revealed a lack of expertise with the second function of the corpus. First, she failed to use the search parameters to implement her search in an efficient way, and therefore spent considerable time scrolling through irrelevant examples. Then, on (correctly) establishing that no useful examples were produced by that first search, she lacked the necessary experience and confidence either to persevere by trying substitutions (searching on a different but comparable adjective to the one she was interested in) or to choose to abandon the operation on the grounds that it might require too many attempts. She did abandon the operation, but this was because she lacked faith in her ability to use the corpus and feared wasting time, rather than because she judged CWIC might be inadequate for solving the particular problem in her limited timeframe. However, it became clear in the interview that S2 was capable of great perseverance in dictionary use, where she was particularly expert and confident. She was prepared to spend considerable time and thought on a find-an-Italian-equivalent operation with her dictionary, trying various headwords and crosschecking between the English-Italian and Italian-English ends. Her dictionary expertise had developed over time, as dictionaries themselves had evolved, and she was completely familiar with the new features of her recently acquired dictionary.9 She was also aware of having mastered her grammar book gradually, despite initial frustration: “I used to hate the index in the grammar book…. It’s a matter of becoming familiar with something and using it and making it your own.” “Making it her own” was what S2 had not done with the corpus: her understanding of its use(s) was not based on first-hand experience of any usefulness to her. In the interview, she reported that she had used it only when instructed to, in class activities and the relevant homework items. She identified two major deterrents. The first was CWIC’s monolingual nature: she considered her proficiency was not sufficient for her to “get the total meaning from the corpus” and saw great scope for getting things wrong if she failed to understand an array of examples completely. The second problem was her difficulty with the user interface: she felt she was slow in executing lookups, being confused by the search and display options available and hampered by being a “two finger typist.” We identified a third impediment to corpus use for S2: that she had not appreciated the value of patternhunting as a function that she could use to good effect even at her level of proficiency. Yet she had pattern-hunted with evident satisfaction in class at the start of the apprenticeship, as she recalled when prompted: “Ah yes that was… pretty good: putting in the word… and seeing what came up. Particularly amore. And a couple of times I found expressions [and] thought ‘Oh I’ll use that in my autobiography.’” She seemed not to have understood that we were proposing this as a general strategy for the students to adopt, not just as a playful introduction to the corpus content. In fact, ignoring pattern-hunting contributed to a more general misconception of S2: associating the corpus with the same functionality as the dictionary and grammar book. The ideas she expressed on the uses of the corpus, in contrast to those on the dictionary, were quite vague; for example: “I use the dictionary so much … to look for, you know, those phrases and expressions … That’s what I could come to CWIC looking for….” But given her sense of mastery of the dictionary and grammar book, it would clearly be pointless for her to seek answers in CWIC to problems she expected to solve more quickly and easily with them. We drew lessons from S2’s case for our future practice. The first was that more ongoing assistance in practising pattern-hunting and pattern-defining, through homework instructions, would have been useful for her. The second was that students with lower Internet literacy may need extra training in using the Language Learning & Technology

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search-engine interface. While most of the other students drew on a well-developed intuition for operating online resources, for S2 the CWIC interface was something she had to learn to use. At the interview we realized that she was not familiar with some important features; for example, she had difficulty in restricting the numbers of examples displayed (by searching on combinations of words), which undoubtedly exacerbated her sense of being overwhelmed by the problem of understanding the examples. Participant S3 The third case-study participant was like S1 in his propensity to seek out new words and expressions, while he shared with S2 a great concern for accuracy. For S3 the autobiography task was a good opportunity to develop his writing skills because, as he said “I always try to avoid simplistic writing and test ideas or ways I think things might be said, and the autobiography has been a good forum for that.” He also found it an interesting experience personally, in that it caused him to reflect on his life, but did not see it as an exercise in creative writing. S3’s approach to the case-study activity reflected attitudes he conveyed later in the interview: first, his aim of expressing himself in written Italian with the same sophistication as in English; and second, his view of grammar as the essence of this, and the key to success in his previous language-learning experiences. In enriching the text he added a six-sentence paragraph, paying considerable attention to vocabulary choices and complexity of sentence structure, and also replaced a couple of adjectives in the existing paragraphs. In the process, he conducted eleven find-an-Italian-equivalent operations—five with the dictionary alone and six using the dictionary and CWIC—and was satisfied with the outcomes of all but two. He also used the corpus alone for two successful pattern-defining operations (see Figure 3), but not for pattern-hunting. In the interview S3 stated that the bilingual dictionary “naturally remain[ed] the first point of reference” when searching for Italian equivalents to English words, but that CWIC had become his first choice for answering specific questions about lexico-grammatical patterns (i.e., pattern-defining). A characteristic of his reference-resource behaviour was the use of CWIC in find-an-Italian-equivalent operations, in order to expand on the dictionary information or seek corroboration of his interpretation of it. This technique had not been practised in class during the apprenticeship but he had developed it for himself very effectively. He listed several valid reasons for complementing a dictionary search with corpus searches: If I don’t completely understand it from the dictionary but can see it in use in CWIC then it makes it a lot clearer…. [Or] I check to see how common it is10 or if I’ve interpreted it right…or if you need certain prepositions or conjunctions after it…to get a bit more of the context. Although he was curious about words, and found the corpus appealing for that reason, S3 had not taken up pattern-hunting. In part it seemed that, like S2, he had not perceived it as a general strategy we were proposing, and he was not very inclined to use the corpus as an aid to his imagination anyway, because he focused on trying to convey in Italian exactly what would have said in English. What was most striking about S3’s work with the corpus was the set of attitudes he expressed and manifested that evidently helped make him confident and his work effective. First, he saw mastering CWIC as a long-term, individual process for which he was responsible: “I wouldn’t always draw the right conclusion from what I’d found… I guess it’s something you gain through experience, as you go along….” Second, he appreciated that working with CWIC meant accepting the uncertainty of finding answers: Sometimes you just can’t get your head around it. … Sometimes things would just kind of leap out at you and other times you’d be muddling around with it for fifteen minutes and feeling like you’re getting nowhere… Grammar is so complicated, to find the right answers you need to know the right questions to ask of it. And… if you don’t understand it completely then it’s hard to know what the right questions are.... Third, he appeared to treat each unsuccessful operation as a specific case, rather than as an indicator of any general inadequacy on his part or that of the corpus. In the case-study activity he was not demoralized


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or flustered when his searches failed to generate useful examples, or produced examples he was unable to interpret confidently. Insights from the case studies regarding corpus-consultation literacy The three participants used the resources in such different ways that we perceived them to have individual “reference-resource-using styles.” Each had become a sophisticated and confident user of her/his preferred resource(s) for selected functions. Notably, S1 and S3 had developed their own range of strategies for using CWIC in pattern-hunting and finding Italian equivalents, respectively. All three made the point that the essence of mastering CWIC was “making it your own,” and S1 and S3 both felt rewarded by having done so through experimenting with it independently. Although we cannot pretend to generalize from these three cases to categories of reference-resource users, we find it highly suggestive that the two students who put a premium on correctness in their written Italian, and at conveying exactly what they set out to say in their autobiography (S2 and S3), engaged frequently in finding Italian equivalents and pattern-defining but not pattern-hunting, while the student who was most personally engaged with the autobiography task, and most inclined to see it as creative writing (S1), gave priority to discovering new patterns over solving predefined problems. S3’s attitude to grammar as what made language learning effective seemed to have predisposed him to appreciating the corpus as a tool for getting at the detail of the ways words combine to convey meaning, and therefore as a welcome addition to his resource kit for achieving sophisticated use of the language. For S2, by contrast, the exposure to the corpus in our apprenticeship had not sufficed to erode her equation of reference resources with the traditional functions of the dictionary and grammar book, so that the corpus remained an unnecessary extra. Given the individual nature of these students’ approaches to reference resources, we must accept that we may not be able to convince all students to use CWIC in all the ways we would like. The case studies have nevertheless shown us ways in which we may be able to improve the apprenticeship so as to ensure the students have a better grounding on which to base their individual responses to the corpus. The principal practical finding is that we need to convey the value of pattern-hunting better, ensuring the students see it as a function in its own right, albeit not the type of function they may have previously associated with reference resources. More generally, in analysing the three students’ work, we have come to see the process of “making the corpus your own” as a matter of developing not only skills in conceptualizing and executing searches and interpreting examples, but also appreciation of a set of principles that underpin effective use of the corpus and reference resources in general. In future, through class discussion around corpus-based activities we will seek to make these principles explicit, in order to help the students become more rigorous in their reference resource use, whatever their individual style. The first principle is that we should think in terms of having a set of distinct reference-resource functions at our disposal, rather than simply a suite of reference resources, for what matters is not mastery of a resource but of the function(s) it can be used for. In future, we will stress that by taking up the corpus the students are extending their repertoire of reference-resource functions, to include one that is peculiar to the corpus (pattern-hunting), one that is also a function of the dictionary and grammar book but that can be carried out more efficiently with the corpus in many cases (pattern-defining), and one that sees it used in conjunction with the dictionary (finding-an-Italian-equivalent). We will seek to prevent their forming vague notions about the corpus as complementing the traditional resources, by labelling each corpus function as it is introduced, and encouraging the students to refer to all reference-resource functions by name so as to distinguish them from each other. Furthermore, we will dedicate more discussion and practice time in class to the importance of, and factors in, choosing the appropriate resource-and-function combination for the problem at hand. Linked to this is the second principle: the importance of understanding the way the functions are linked to the characteristics of the resource. This will be especially important in supporting our greater emphasis on pattern-hunting: we will stress that the value of pattern-hunting derives precisely from the unmediated and monolingual nature of the corpus. We will seek to raise students’ awareness of both its practical value— Language Learning & Technology

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access to patterns we would not think to look for, or would not necessarily find, in a find-an-Italianequivalent operation—and the significance of the underlying concept of non-correspondence between ways of expressing oneself in English and Italian. The third principle is also a corollary of the first: that it is necessary to examine the limitations of reference resources, and one’s own limitations in using them, with respect to specific functions, and specific problems they are used to address, rather than the resource itself.11 All three case-study participants showed awareness that CWIC was too small to necessarily provide useful examples for any given problem, but their statements on this suggested there was a risk they might see all conclusions drawn from corpus operations as therefore tentative or incomplete, whereas we can have a high degree of confidence in answers obtained from CWIC to many types of questions. As far as users’ limitations are concerned, failure to understand all the examples displayed by a corpus search might sabotage an investigation aimed at deriving a rule and the details of its exceptions, but in pattern-hunting it is perfectly legitimate to work only with examples that are easily understood, as the aim is not to find all relevant patterns. Where pattern-defining and finding an Italian equivalent are concerned, again it may not be necessary to understand many examples to obtain an answer: a small number can suffice as long as they provide close enough models to the case being investigated. The fourth principle is that working with corpora requires greater preparedness to proceed by trial and error than work with other reference resources, and acceptance of the uncertainty of finding a satisfactory answer. Admittedly, acceptance of uncertainty can be difficult to acquire in many of life’s circumstances, but at least we can aim to raise the students’ consciousness, through discussion and practical examples, regarding the validity of giving up on an operation that seems to be getting nowhere. Abandoning a reference-resource operation has to be understood as a strategic decision, consistent with a trial-and-error approach to a problem, rather than as a failure. The fifth principle is that the development of skills in corpus use is a long-term process, as it is for other reference resources. We teachers, as much as the students, need to acknowledge this, contain our expectations of the outcomes of a one-semester apprenticeship, and continue to actively support the development of these skills in subsequent courses. After all, our students’ relative confidence in using bilingual dictionaries for finding Italian equivalents is the fruit of long experience: most have been using monolingual dictionaries for help with their native language since primary school and bilingual dictionaries in foreign language learning since high school. We think it may accelerate the integration of CWIC into our students’ learning environment if we try to enhance its legitimacy by drawing their attention to other Italian corpora and to the extensive use of English corpora around the world in ESL learning contexts. For it seems that the fact that CWIC was the only corpus they had ever encountered, combined with the knowledge that it was of our own creation, gave some students the impression it was a one-of-a-kind, experimental resource. Meanwhile, the legitimacy of dictionaries and grammar books in the students’ eyes may be partly due to the existence of numerous brands, each providing the same functionality. In addition to the various planned enhancements to our apprenticeship noted above, we intend to introduce an individual tutorial session for each student, towards the end of the semester. This will be similar to the interviews conducted with the case-study participants, which they found particularly valuable. At one level there are the practical benefits to students of clearing up misconceptions and being reminded of certain features and functions. But there are also the benefits that come from taking time to reflect on and discuss their use of the resources and attitudes to them that a one-to-one session allows. CONCLUSION These three case studies have provided a starting point for defining what is entailed in developing corpusconsultation literacy in our learning context. We now see it as a matter of promoting not only skills in using corpora for certain functions—at intermediate level: pattern-hunting, pattern-defining, and expanding on dictionary information in seeking an Italian equivalent—but also appreciation of certain principles underpinning effective reference-resource consultation and their implications. Language Learning & Technology

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The main thrust of the change we are making to our apprenticeship for the future is to work on raising the students’ consciousness in relation to the five principles set out in the previous section, through discussion in class and in individual tutorial sessions. We will also be taking practical steps, again informed by the case studies: giving greater prominence to pattern-hunting, paying particular attention to technical training for the students who are not search-engine savvy, labelling reference-resource functions to help students recognize them as distinct, and further integrating work with the corpus into compulsory homework items in order to encourage the students to experiment for themselves. We will draw on the interviews with the case-study participants for specific insights to pass on to future cohorts, such as S1’s techniques for pattern-hunting and S2’s recommendation of a particular dictionary. In light of our view of reference resources as providing an aid to the learners’ imagination as well as to their achievement of accuracy, we have come to see our students in this apprenticeship as perhaps better represented by the metaphor of “learner as chef” than “learner as researcher” or “learner as traveller.” An apprentice chef expects to develop expertise both from recipes and from the observation of master chefs’ manipulations of ingredients and their outcomes, and seeks—from both sources—not only rules but stimuli to creativity. This is the overarching theme under which we will conduct our revised apprenticeship in future, and it will constitute a further key topic for discussion with the students.12

NOTES 1. The search engine was implemented by John Jeffery of Software Projects P/L, Brisbane, to whom we are extremely grateful. 2. The word “pattern” is used here to mean any kind of grouping of one or more words, including set phrases, idiomatic expressions and words in a relationship of collocation or colligation. 3. Frankenberg-Garcia (2005) used the term “unmediated” to refer to resources that require the user to interpret data, as opposed to “mediated” resources that provide the user with explanations or answers. 4. The possible grades for each course are: High Distinction, Distinction, Credit, Pass, Fail. 5. Our justification in proposing this as a worthwhile exercise was that the texts had been written, and corrected in response to the teacher’s feedback, three months previously, in the first weeks of semester. Since then the students had not only been introduced to a new resource in the corpus but had greatly extended their command of Italian through writing the autobiography, reading short stories in the other strand of the same course, and the various components of the companion course in spoken Italian. 6. Our use of the term “function” differs from our use of “lookup” or “search” in that carrying out a single function may involve more than one lookup or search, possibly using more than one resource. 7. We excluded from consideration in the discussion the few quick lookups of a bilingual dictionary or the corpus to check spelling or gender, and verb books or dictionaries to find specific verb conjugations. 8. S1 said in the questionnaire: “I loved this assessment…. a chance to write something I wanted to…. I don’t [usually] have a lot of time to reflect on my past…. I realized how much I miss my friends…” and later: “I really liked it because we get to use so many new words, we improve…our writing skills overall.” 9. For example, this dictionary includes an indexed, bilingual supplement containing models of letters, emails, faxes, and phone call dialogues for various personal and business purposes from which S2 had borrowed—“copying bits and pieces”—in carrying out two authentic tasks she had set herself during semester: a letter to Italian acquaintances and an email to an Italian hotel to make an enquiry. 10. Evidently, for S3, a sufficient condition for a pattern to be considered as in common use, and therefore appropriate for his autobiography, was that it occurs a few times in CWIC. We find that reasonable as a rule of thumb, although checking the text type(s) it occurs in can be advisable too. We make no claim that


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occurring in CWIC is a necessary condition for a pattern to be considered as in common use, but S3 did not seem to either. 11. Here we are leaving aside limitations in relation to access, which apply to the resource itself. These may be a matter of the user’s individual perception. For example, for S2, a limitation of the corpus was that it is not portable like her printed dictionary. But the opposite view was held by several of our young students, who were more likely to be online, especially if engaged in writing something, than to have a printed dictionary on hand. 12. Our initial ideas on this theme were presented at the Fourth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies in July 2007 (see www.acis.org.au/fourth_bienConf.html) and are being further developed in a paper currently in progress.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are most grateful to the three reviewers for valuable suggestions that led to significant improvements in this paper.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Claire Kennedy is Cassamarca Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at Griffith University. Her current research interests are computer-assisted language learning and motivation in language learning. E-mail: [email protected] Tiziana Miceli is a Lecturer in Italian Studies in the School of Languages and Linguistics at Griffith University. Her research interests include computer-assisted language learning, including electronic corpora, blogs and wikis; language learning strategies; and language teaching methodology. E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Aston, G. (2001). Learning with corpora: An overview. In G. Aston (Ed.), Learning with corpora (pp. 745). Bologna: CLUEB. Bernardini, S. (2000). Competence, capacity, corpora. A study in corpus-aided language learning. Bologna: CLUEB. Bernardini, S. (2004). Corpora in the classroom: An overview and some reflections on future developments. In J. Sinclair (Ed.), How to use corpora in language teaching (pp. 15-36). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Braun, S. (2007). Integrating corpus work into secondary education: From data-driven learning to needsdriven corpora. ReCALL, 19(3), 307-328. Chambers, A. (2005). Integrating corpus consultation in language studies. Language Learning and Technology, 9(2), 111-125. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol9num2/chambers/default.html Chambers, A. (2007). Popularising corpus consultation by language learners and teachers. In E. Hidalgo, L. Quereda, & J. Santana (Eds.), Corpora in the foreign language classroom. Selected papers from TaLC 2004 (pp. 3-16). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Chambers, A., & Bax, S. (2006). Making CALL work: Towards normalisation. System, 34(4), 465-479. Language Learning & Technology

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Chambers, A., & O’Sullivan, Í. (2004). Corpus consultation and advanced learners’ writing skills in French. ReCALL, 16(1), 158-172. Cheng, W., Warren, M., & Xun-feng, X. (2003). The language learner as language researcher: Putting corpus linguistics on the timetable. System, 31(2), 173-186. Davies, M. (2004). Student use of large, annotated corpora to analyze syntactic variation. In G. Aston, S. Bernardini, & D. Stewart (Eds.), Corpora and language learners (pp. 245-270). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Frankenberg-Garcia, A. (2005). A peek into what today’s language learners as researchers actually do. International Journal of Lexicography, 18(3), 335-355. Gabrielatos, C. (2005). Corpora and language teaching: Just a fling, or wedding bells? TESL-EJ 8(4), A1, 1-37. Retrieved from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/ Gavioli, L. (1997). Exploring texts through the concordancer: Guiding the learner. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery, & G. Knowles (Eds.), Teaching and language corpora (pp. 83-99). London: Longman. Granger, S., & Meunier, F. (2008). Phraseology in language learning and teaching: Where to from here? In S. Granger & F. Meunier (Eds.), Phraseology in foreign language learning and teaching (pp. 247-252). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johns, T. (1988). Whence and whither classroom concordancing. In T. Bongaerts, P. De Haan, S. Lobbe, & H. Wekker (Eds.), Computer applications in language learning (pp. 9-27). Dordrecht: Foris. Johns, T. (1991). Should you be persuaded: Two samples of data-driven learning materials. English Language Research Journal, 4, 1-16. Kennedy, C., & Miceli, T. (2001). An evaluation of intermediate students’ approaches to corpus investigation. Language Learning and Technology, 5(3), 77-90. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol5num3/kennedy/default.html Leech, G (1997). Teaching and language corpora: A convergence. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery, & G. Knowles (Eds.), Teaching and Language Corpora (pp. 1-23). London: Longman. Milton, J. (1999). Lexical thickets and electronic gateways: Making text accessible by novice writers. In C. Candlin & K. Hyland (Eds.), Writing: Texts, processes and practices (pp. 221-243). London: Longman. O’Sullivan, Í. (2007). Enhancing a process-oriented approach to literacy and language learning: The role of corpus consultation literacy. ReCALL, 19(3), 269-286. O’Sullivan, Í., & Chambers, A. (2006). Learners’ writing skills in French: Corpus consultation and learner evaluation. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15(1), 49-68. Vannestål, M. E., & Lindquist, H. (2007). Learning English grammar with a corpus: Experimenting with concordancing in a university grammar course. ReCALL, 19(3), 329-350. Yoon, H., & Hirvela, A. (2004). ESL student attitudes towards corpus use in L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13, 257-283.


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Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/liang.pdf


USING SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE PEER RESPONSE GROUPS IN EFL WRITING: REVISION-RELATED DISCOURSE Mei-Ya Liang National Central University In recent years, synchronous online peer response groups have been increasingly used in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. This article describes a study of synchronous online interaction among three small peer groups in a Taiwanese undergraduate EFL writing class. An environmental analysis of students’ online discourse in two writing tasks showed that meaning negotiation, error correction, and technical actions seldom occurred and that social talk, task management, and content discussion predominated the chat. Further analysis indicates that relationships among different types of online interaction and their connections with subsequent writing and revision are complex and depend on group makeup and dynamics. Findings suggest that such complex activity may not guarantee revision. Writing instructors may need to proactively model, scaffold and support revisionrelated online discourse if it is to be of benefit. INTRODUCTION As a learner-centered process approach to second language (L2) writing, peer response has been widely adopted and studied since the 1990s (Hyland & Hyland, 2006). The dialogic nature of peer response seems to foster multiple support systems (Hyland, 2000) and communicative behaviors (Villamil & de Guerrero, 1996). L2 research has shown that peer response can increase chances for meaning negotiation and language practice (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994), encourage collaborative reading and writing (Tsui & Ng, 2000), and promote writing revisions (Berg, 1999; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Min, 2006, 2008; Stanley, 1992). These interactive practices appear to draw upon and enhance interactional and writing skills. Recently, online peer response has also been used as an alternative to face-to-face (F2F) communication. Online peer response that blends spoken, written, and electronic communication can promote student motivation, participation, and collaboration (Warschauer, 1996, 2002), an awareness of audiences (Ware, 2004), a critical analysis of linguistic, negotiation, and writing features through the use of printouts (DiGiovanni & Nagaswami, 2001), as well as frequent use of peer ideas in revisions (Hewett, 2000; Tuzi, 2004). Applying electronic technologies in L2 writing classes, research has set out to explore such issues as effective uses of synchronous online peer responses and revisions (Hansen & Liu, 2005). While training procedures for improving revision-related discourse have been proposed in composition studies (e.g., Berg, 1999; DiGiovanni & Nagaswami, 2001; Hansen & Liu, 2005; Min, 2006, 2008; Rollinson, 2005; Stanley, 1992), relatively few studies have provided adequate frameworks for describing the nature of L2 interaction in synchronous online peer response groups. To further this research, it is necessary to understand how L2 learners interact in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). This study explores L2 students’ synchronous online peer response in an EFL writing class. Research on revision-related L2 discourse in SCMC is reviewed as are the ways that revision-related online discourse might facilitate L2 writing and revision processes. A coding scheme (Liang, 2008) is employed in analyzing peer discussions about their writing. The author concludes with suggested strategies for supporting and facilitating synchronous online peer response groups.


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Synchronous Online Peer Response Groups

LITERATURE REVIEW L2 Interaction in Face-to-Face and Online Contexts Interactive processes of L2 peer response have been characterized from two perspectives: (a) meaning negotiation and (b) collaborative learning. Meaning negotiation refers to interactive feedback (e.g., confirmation checks, comprehension checks, clarification requests) that deals with unclear messages. Varonis and Gass (1985) proposed that “the types of linguistic activities that occur in NNS-NNS conversations differ from those in other types of discourse, particularly with respect to the negotiation of meaning when there has been an actual or potential breakdown” (p. 71). During negotiation, L2 learners notice linguistic features and modify messages (Pica, 1996). Long (1996) also suggested that speaking and writing partners in an L2 environment not only provide comprehensible input, but also facilitate learner output through meaning negotiation and error correction. Foster and Ohta (2005) further found that, in L2 peer interaction, modified output in the forms of self-correction and supportive talk was more common than other-correction and meaning negotiation. Following Vygotsky, sociocultural theorists, such as Donato (1994, 2000) and Swain (2000), have highlighted peer assistance and mutual scaffolding in collaborative dialogues. Van Lier (1996, 2000) has also specified the importance of contingency in collaborative discourse through the concept of “intersubjectivity”—that is, a shared social context for interaction where “participants are jointly focused on the activity and its goals, and they draw each other’s attention into a common direction” (van Lier, 1996, p.161). He argues for the ecological value of learners’ meaningful actions in social spaces of interaction (van Lier, 2000). De Guerrero and Villamil (2000), for example, had pairs of students roleplay as writer and reviewer, helping to give them a sense of personal investment in the peer revision task. Learners may even use an L2 to establish and maintain social relationships while discussing content. By considering social contexts, sociocultural perspectives enrich our understanding of L2 learning, including speaking, writing, and collaborative dialogues. Text-based SCMC brings with it instant messaging, which leads to similar discourse functions and negotiation sequences to F2F communication (e.g., Blake, 2000; Smith, 2003; Sotillo, 2000). On the other hand, there are some differences: (a) technical actions in various forms of keyboard strokes (e.g., emoticons and punctuations) replace nonverbal cues (e.g., gestures and facial expressions) and paralinguistic features (e.g., pitch, volume, and intonation) (Negretti, 1999); (b) delayed responses to messages allow L2 learners to see and correct errors (Lee, 2001); and (c) lack of turn-taking provokes L2 students’ extensive use of communicative strategies for discourse management (Chun, 1994; Sotillo, 2000). Fitze (2006) designed an experiment to compare F2F and written electronic whole-class discussion in two intact classes and found that advanced L2 students utilized a wider variety of vocabulary and communicative strategies (e.g., clarification requests, dis/agreement statements, social formulations, topic managements) in online discussion. Several L2 studies have focused on communicative features and discourse functions unique to the temporal and spatial context established by SCMC. Analyzing chat discourse in Webchat between English nonnative speakers and native speakers, Negretti (1999) reported that the participants often used explicit and economical strategies in order to manage procedures and tasks, maintain social cohesion, and show awareness of chat features. Using the WebCT chat environment, Darhower (2002) also found that non-native learners and their teachers created a sense of intersubjective communication by means of teasing, joking, and off-topic discussion, as well as accepting, rejecting, and explaining ideas within conversations. While meaning negotiation is the essence of L2 interaction in both F2F and online conversations, researchers have also observed that L2 learners use other interactional strategies, such as technical actions, social formulations, error corrections, and discourse management more frequently than they do in F2F discussions.


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Revision-Related Discourse in SCMC L2 researchers have developed coding schemes to explore revision-related discourse in synchronous online peer response. Adapting Mendonca and Johnson’s (1994) descriptive categories, DiGiovanni and Nagaswami (2001) examined L2 students’ revision-related discourse based on four major categories— questions, explanations, restatements, and suggestions—in both online and F2F oral settings. They found that the number of negotiations was higher in F2F but that the proportion of agreement or disagreement with ideas or with the organization of ideas was higher in synchronous online peer discussion. DiGiovanni and Nagaswami’s (2001) framework, though not exhaustive, provided some key features of negotiating meaning when discussing writing. Taking Halliday’s (1994) functional-semantic view of dialogue as a basis, Jones, Garralda, Li, and Lock (2006) divided revision-related discourse into two move types— initiating moves (i.e., offer, directive, statement, and question) and responding moves (i.e., clarification, confirmation, acceptance, rejection, acknowledgement). They found that tutees asked more questions and made more statements in online interaction than in F2F peer tutoring. Specifically, they asked questions to elicit information and evaluation rather than provide explanations. Jones et al. (2006) further investigated the area of online peer response. They discovered that the EFL students in a first year writing class were more likely to discuss textual issues (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, and style) in F2F sessions, but chose to focus on global concerns (e.g., content, organization, topic, and thesis) and relational communication in synchronous online sessions. Jones et al.’s finding contradicts Liu and Sadler’s (2003), in which computer-enhanced groups tended to focus on local revisions, whereas the F2F group covered both local and global revisions. These L2 writing studies suggest different functions of peer comments in the two modes of communication. While DiGiovanni and Nagaswami (2001) and Jones et al. (2006) have put emphasis on interactional dynamics that facilitate collaborative responses, another line of research has turned the focus to revision and has questioned the quality of peer response in SCMC. For example, Braine (2001) and Liu and Sadler (2003) have noted disjointed discourse and offtask messages in simultaneous online composing. A few investigators have attempted to develop a framework specific to CMC contexts to discuss types of revision-related discourse and areas of revision resulting from synchronous online conferences. Using an electronic whiteboard in synchronous online conferencing, Hewett (2006) examined the types of communicative utterances (e.g., content, form, process, context, and phatic) in her first year English classes. The results showed that half of the talk was for interpersonal connections, interaction facilitation, and workspace discussion. Regarding students’ revision-related discourse, 25% focused on content and context of writing, 62% on writing processes and problems (e.g., thesis, supporting ideas, organization), and 13% on formal concerns (e.g., grammar, mechanisms, citation practices). Comparing revision-related discourse and revision changes, she further found that most of the online interactions could be connected with writing and revision. Although none of the students’ essay drafts had formal connections related to the synchronous conferences, Hewett’s study has shown that synchronous online conferences could result in new writing practices and revision changes in an L1 writing context. Relationships among types of interaction and their connections to revision, however, remain unclear in L2 contexts. Drawing upon studies on both meaning negotiation and collaborative learning in L2 contexts and in SCMC, Liang (2008) proposed a framework which outlines six major types of synchronous online interaction to explore L2 peer groups’ engagement in a summary writing and revision task. They are (a) meaning negotiation, (b) content discussion, (c) error correction, (d) task management, (e) social talk, and (f) technical action. In the 2008 study, the patterns observed across the six groups showed that the total percentage of turns for meaning negotiation, error correction, task management, and technical action was very low and that two-thirds of the turns were spent on social talk and content discussion. This framework seems to be adequate to reveal the relative contributions among different types of interaction. The current study investigates peer response in SCMC through which writing and revision resulting from revisionrelated discourse or other important interactional processes in SCMC can be traced and considered. Language Learning & Technology

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THIS STUDY As part of a larger research project that explores online interaction impacts on EFL university students’ L2 development, this study focuses on the use of synchronous online peer response groups in EFL writing. Specifically, this study asks two questions: 1. What are the different types of interaction in synchronous online L2 discourse? 2. How does synchronous online peer revision-related discourse facilitate subsequent writing and revision? Course Context This study involved a sophomore EFL writing course during the fall semester of 2008 at a major university in Taiwan. The course was open to English majors and minors. The course took a process writing approach and focused on expository writing. The goal was for students to help each other write clear and well-reasoned prose. Students used a variety of print and electronic resources to discuss ideas, compose multiple drafts, and edit and revise texts. The class met 3 hours per week for 18 weeks. Course grades were determined by class participation and several writing assignments: an issue paper, annotations and peer comments, exam essays, reflective essays, a book review, and a research paper and presentation. Each assignment was evaluated based on (a) title and thesis, (b) main and supporting ideas, (c) organization and style, (d) word choice and grammar, and (e) editing and revision. In the class meetings, through both print and multimedia writing prompts (e.g., videos, audio clips, films, artworks, advertisements, etc), the instructor led the class to practice peer response strategies in their discussion about how to improve writing. The class discussions on revision-related strategies were organized around the following topics: (a) reading-writing connections, (b) quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing, (c) text structures in expository writing, (d) coherence and cohesion, and (e) weak reasoning and errors of logic. Students also participated in synchronous online peer response sessions in a computer lab during the class time as part of the class requirement. They were placed in three groups. The online sessions offered students opportunities to discuss and review peer drafts at different stages of the writing process: •

Prewriting and Drafting. There was one 2-hour online session in the second week. Students brainstormed ideas for their issue papers. During the process, students collected all their resources to compose topic sentences and thesis statements as well as to outline paragraphs in their essays. After students posted issue papers in their blogs, the instructor left comments on each student’s post.

•

Revising and Editing. There were four 2-hour online sessions on the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 13th weeks. Before class meetings, students posted their drafts of annotations in their personal blogs. In class, they shared ideas in drafts by asking questions or by making suggestions and comments about unclear ideas. After each synchronous online peer session, students reviewed the transcripts, left comments on their peers’ blogs, and posted their own revised drafts.

•

Presentation and Submission. There were two 2-hour sessions on the 15th and 17th weeks. The first was a collaborative writing of book review task, in which students reviewed writing strategies and discussed what to write. The second was a research paper presentation task. Students posted their drafts before class. During class, they reviewed ideas and evaluated writing. After that, students compiled and submitted their work for grading.

Participants The participants for this study were 12 university students (10 females and 2 males) who took Sophomore Composition in the department of English. According to the results of a pre-course questionnaire, three Language Learning & Technology

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students had studied English for 8 years and the other 9 students had had more than 9 years of previous English study. Based on their self reports, six students had passed the Intermediate-level GEPT (i.e., a general English proficiency test developed in 1999, commissioned by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, see Roever and Pan, 2008), and three had achieved the High-Intermediate level. The other three students did not specify or take any GEPT, but their English level was approximately TOEFL CBT 193250. At the beginning of the semester, students were also asked to specify which aspects of their writing in English needed further improvement. The results from the questionnaire show that most of the students wished to improve writing skills in global idea development and organization, such as having a clear main idea in the paragraph, developing additional support for main points, writing a good concluding paragraph, and having smooth connections and transitions between sentences. The results of the two questionnaires are in Appendix A. Revision-Related Discourse Training Procedures The students were asked to form three groups of four. Both Group 1 and Group 2 were composed of English majors, whereas Group 3 consisted of 2 English majors, 1 Chinese major, and 1 French major. The English majors had taken the author’s “Freshman English” course in the fall semester of 2007. In the course, students also formed small groups and discussed electronic and print texts in both F2F meetings and online interaction. Given example sentences, students in small groups had practiced group collaborative skills by negotiating meaning (e.g., “What does this word/idea mean?” “Are you saying ...?” “Do you mean that…”), discussing content (e.g., “I don’t understand because…” “A/Another reason for this might be...” “It’s not the point. The main point is …”) and managing tasks (e.g., “What might be important here...?” “How is this task related to...?”). Students were also asked to correct errors and manage tasks as well as to clarify and comment on messages by using a checklist: •

Is the title or topic attractive?

•

Are the words in the essay appropriate?

•

Does the essay cover important points of an issue?

•

Is the essay written in the writer’s own words?

•

Does the essay include mistakes in spelling and grammar?

•

Does the essay include multimedia aids that serve clear purposes or make the stories more interesting?

In the writing class, students received additional training procedures in the writing process. At the prewriting and drafting stage, the instructor adopted Rollinson’s (2005) suggestions: (a) explaining the potential benefits of peer feedback, (b) discussing with students the purposes of peer responses and the role of the reviewer in reader-writer dialogues, and (c) modeling comments and coaching synchronous peer response on sample paragraphs in class. Two F2F teacher-student conferences were held in the 7th and 14th weeks to review and discuss students’ writing drafts and peer revision. After each conference, students posted reflections on their blogs. As students progressed toward the later stages of editing, revisions, and presentations, the instructor summarized important writing and revision strategies that had been discussed during class time. To guide revision and possibly facilitate synchronous online peer revision-related discourse, the following list of questions was also posted on the class blog: •

Why are you writing this paper?

•

Do the title and keywords forecast an issue or an attitude toward the subject?

•

Do the library and Web sources provide sound reasons and proper evidence for the issue?


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•

Do you share experiences, emotions, or cultures to support your opinions?

•

Do you organize the ideas with a smooth connection and transition between sentences?

•

Do you quote some words, phrases, or sentences or paraphrase them?

•

Do you adopt your peer’s opinions?

•

Do you polish your language and check grammar (e.g., verb tense, subject-verb agreement, word form, run-on sentence, informal register, etc.)?

•

Do you find weak reasoning and errors of logic (e.g., irrelevant, oversimplification, overgeneralization, false analogy, undefined terms, etc.)?

•

Do you change your question or problem during the course of study?

Data Collection and Analysis Through MSN Messenger (tw.msn.com), the EFL university students participated in synchronous online peer response group activities. On their personal blogs, they posted their writing assignments. Data were collected from the online chat sessions, student blogs, and two corresponding writing assignments: the book review and research paper tasks. The following directions were listed in the course syllabus: •

Book review (Group work). Provide a brief description of the main ideas and provide an appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Your review should include your group members’ opinions about the book. It should range from 500-750 words.

•

Research Paper. Use your annotations to support your points of view by the evidence. Provide the reasons why you choose this issue as the focus of your paper. Write questions on the issue and contrast two or more competing perspectives. Write an 8-10 page research paper (2000-2500 words) with supporting citations in APA format.

During the online sessions, the instructor was present in the computer lab to assist with computer problems and remind students of the task requirements. Otherwise students engaged in group discussions and made progress with the two assignments without instructor participation. Following Liang’s (2008) coding scheme, the author first identified participants’ discourse types. The taxonomy of revision-related discourse includes four categories: (a) meaning negotiation, (b) content discussion, (c) error correction, and (d) task management. Additional codes were included to accommodate the (e) social talk, and (f) technical action that were not directly related to student writing. Definitions and examples for each coding category are presented in Appendix B. The units of analysis to describe L2 learners’ co-constructed online discourses are “turns.” Using the taxonomy, the author and a trained research assistant coded chat data independently and then reviewed all cases of disagreement and resolved differences together. Almost all of the turns included only one type of interaction per turn, but a few turns (less than 10 cases in this study) that included two types of interaction were counted as two turns. χ2 Goodness of Fit Tests were then performed in order to check for differences across discourse types and groups. The process of investigating the connections between the chat and subsequent writing and revision was recursive and iterative. For the book review task, students’ collaborative texts were examined by the research assistant and the author. We highlighted the words and phrases that were used in the revisionrelated discourse in each of the three groups’ transcripts. For the research paper, students’ revision changes between drafts were also highlighted and then their chat transcripts were read to look for signals of relationships between revision-related online discourse and individual students’ revised work (for samples, see Appendices C and D).


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RESULTS Book Review Table 1 shows the number and percentage of turns in the L2 learners’ co-constructed online discourse for the book review task. Overall, the three groups produced similar patterns. The rates of meaning negotiation (i.e., comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests), error correction, and technical actions were very low; most of the turns were spent on content discussion, task management, and social talk. The results of the χ2 tests show that there were no statistically significant differences among the three groups for both revision-related and non-revision-related discourse types. In other words, the three groups produced similar proportions of revision-related and non-revision-related discourses. Table 1. Revision-Related and Non-Revision-Related Discourse by Groups for the Book Review Task Revision-Related Meaning Negotiation Content Discussion Error Correction Task Management TOTAL Non-Revision-Related Social Talk Technical Action TOTAL

Group1 2 (1%) 115 (37%) 3 (1%) 96 (30%) 216 (69%) Group1 96 (30%) 3 (1%) 99 (31%)

Group 2 17 (7%) 64 (26%) 9 (4%) 73 (30%) 163 (66%) Group 2 76 (31%) 7 (3%) 83 (34%)

Group 3 9 (4%) 79 (40%) 1 (0%) 11 (6%) 100 (50%) Group 3 97 (49%) 3 (1%) 100 (50%)

p ns ns ns .000 ns p .044 ns ns

On the other hand, there were statistically significant differences in percentage distribution by groups. First, higher proportions of revision-related discourse than of non-revision-related discourse were produced in Group 1 (χ2 = 14.44, df = 1, p = .000) and Group 2 (χ2 = 10.24, df = 1, p = .001), whereas there was no difference between the two major discourse types for Group 3. Second, Group 3 produced a higher proportion of social talk than did Groups 1 and 2 (χ2 = 6.24, df = 2, p = .044). Third, Groups 1 and 2 spent a higher proportion of turns on task management than did Group 3 (χ2 = 17.76, df = 2, p = .000). Table 2 presents the number and percentage of sentences that each group composed after the chat. Groups 1 and 3 composed most of the sentences in the book review based on the discussion content, whereas only 32% of the sentences were adapted into Group 2’s book review. It is noted that Group 3 yielded the most social talk among the three groups and incorporated the most content from the chat. As Appendix C shows, Group 3 transferred almost all content discussion into their book review through editing and revision operations, such as spelling and grammar corrections, insertions and deletions of transitions, and sentence combinations and re-arrangements. Table 2. Sentences and Percentage of Peer Content in the Book Review Task Peer Content Non-Peer Content TOTAL

Group1 34 (92%) 3 (8%) 37

Group 2 11 (32%) 23 (68%) 34

Group 3 32 (97%) 1 (3%) 33

Group 1 also edited and revised most of their content discussion into coherent passages through transitional words (e.g., firstly, thus, besides, etc), while they added an introductory paragraph to the book review. By contrast, Group 2 abandoned many ideas in the chat. Both Group 1 and Group 2 produced


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more revision-related discourse than non-revision-related discourse, but yielded different writing and revision outcomes. Groups 1 and 2 addressed the issue of the reader’s role, whereas they showed diverse group dynamics in their discussions. In Group 1, members conversed about the topic by acknowledging, repeating, and revising a prior message. As shown in the following excerpt, SA started the topic about the readers: SA: CE: CE: EA: EA: SA: SA: EA: CE: JE: JE: JE: SA: EA: SA:

By the way, we have to know who are the readers To interest the readers~ with your own topic! You need to make your readers be convinced Some experiences can support your perspective. You are right So we have to choose our subject carefully Also, choose to describe things in objective or subjective way. And supporting our ideas with some research. yeah and try to convince audieane audience you really did point out the point Make readers see what you have found out and feel as your feeling. Yeah, things that can move us can have stonger impact in our heart

The topic “the readers” was soon taken over by CE. She added, “to interest the readers with your own topic.” Another student, OE, also joined the discussion by suggesting “You need to make your readers be convinced. Some experiences can support your perspective.” The initiator, SA, then facilitated communication by showing her agreement—“You are right”—and advanced the discussion by connecting with CE’s ideas: “we have to choose our subject carefully.” In the subsequent turns, the group rephrased and elaborated previous messages to fine tune the language and content of discussion on the topic. Accordingly, Group 1 successfully shared the initiated contexts and incorporated the group’s ideas in their book review. By contrast, Group 2 seems to produce some interpersonal conflicts over discussion content: CY: VI: RY: RY: CY: CY: CY: VI: CY: RY: CY: CY: VI: CY:

first of all, we have to know who are the readers I think the author tend to pick some good article to teenagers just like us!!! because all of there aeticles are good examples to us these and then make outlines of it to draft brainstorming I do not understand what you mean I mean before you write an essay discussing together you have to organize it do you get it so…did we discuss what kind of readers of article? there are some misunderstanding…

One student, CY, initiated the topic of knowing who the readers are. Her group member, VI, took over the topic by joking that they were teenagers, “I think the author tend to pick some good article to teenagers just like us!!!” Another student, RY, picked up on the topic and explained the message. In the subsequent turns, CY refocused the group by suggesting the group should follow the procedures: “and Language Learning & Technology

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then make outlines of it,” “to draft,” and “brainstorming.” VI did not seem to appreciate the direction CY was taking; instead she requested for explanations. Even though her group members attempted to negotiate meaning and procedures during the chat, without mutual understanding, the exchange of the meaning of messages did not lead to collaborative peer content. In the end, Group 2 did not address the topic in their book review. Research Paper Table 3 shows the number and percentage of turns in the L2 learners’ online discourse for the research paper presentation. Like the book review task, the three groups yielded a similar pattern. The rates of meaning negotiation, error correction, and technical actions were very low; most of the turns were spent on content discussion and social talk. The results of the χ2 tests show that there were no differences among the three groups for both revision-related and non-revision-related discourse types. Table 3. Revision-Related and Non-Revision-Related Discourse by Groups for the Research Paper Task Revision-Related Meaning Negotiation Content Discussion Error Correction Task Management TOTAL Non-Revision-Related Social Talk Technical Action TOTAL

Group1 9 (4%) 130 (52%) 5 (2%) 13 (5%) 157 (63%) Group1 57 (23%) 35 (14%) 92 (37%)

Group 2 5 (2%) 80 (36%) 3 (1%) 43 (20%) 131(59%) Group 2 74 (34%) 16 (7%) 90 (41%)

Group 3 9 (2%) 116 (30%) 3 (1%) 39 (10%) 167 (43%) Group 3 216 (55%) 6 (2%) 222 (57%)

p ns .037 ns .007 ns p .001 .009 ns

There were statistically significant differences in percentage distribution by groups. First, Group 1 produced more revision-related discourse than non-revision-related discourse (χ2 = 6.76, df = 1, p = .009), whereas there were no differences between the two major discourse types for Groups 2 and 3. Second, compared to the other groups, Group 1 spent higher proportions of turns on content discussion (χ2 = 6.57, df = 2, p = .037) and technical actions (χ2 = 9.47, df = 2, p = .009). Third, Group 3 produced a higher proportion of social talk than did Groups 1 and 2 (χ2 = 14.16, df = 2, p = .001). Fourth, Group 2 spent a higher proportion of turns on task management than did Groups 1 and 3 (χ2 = 10, df = 2, p = .007). Group 3’s social talk shows that they frequently exchanged course information with one another. Group 1 yielded a relatively higher rate of technical actions because they copied and pasted texts from their blog posts to chat. These technical actions feature a series of monologues which are different from the typical simultaneous and sometimes interrupted writing in synchronous online peer discourse: EA: EA: EA:

EA: EA: EA: EA:

Abortion: A Serious Challenge between Morality and Women’s right key words: abortion, women's human rights I search the information on internet database with these words in English way. Because I want to know more about the cases and the world trend of abortion. By using the keywords, I do find many information and some of them support to my opinion. 1. Women's consideration (Reasons for abortion) 2. Human rights (Research about the abortion laws) 3. Looking from another standpoints ( the thoughts of those who anti-abortion) That's the outlines of my paper. 2. Topics/themes in four annotations and their intended audiences 1) The first annotation is videos about the opinions of Obama, the president-elect in America. He thinks that limit the liberty of abortion may


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harm women's human right. Audience: People who care about the relationship between abortion and government. Chat content reveals that all groups tended to focus on the development and organization of their writing over local revision. Specifically, 11 students made revisions in global areas by restating main points and providing supporting sentences. Only six students made revisions in local areas, such as adding, deleting, substituting, and rephrasing words, phrases, and clauses. Above all, Group 1 spent the highest proportion of turns on revision-related discourse and, in particular, on content discussion. However, they either skipped language issues in the peer discussion or left editing and local revisions to individuals to manage, as shown in the following excerpt: CE: EA: SA: SA: JE: JE: EA: SA: CE:

Do you have coherence between the paragraph? Some conjunctions I...am not sure about that i think i did....吧 do make the mistake as same as me don't Well. You can do it better when you looking your sentence again. ok Check it again!

It is also noted that four students had posted only short drafts or outlines before making their presentations. To fulfill the length of the research paper at the presentation and submission stage, these students focused on adding new paragraphs. For the eight students who had posted full-length papers before the peer response session, the connections between revision-related discourse and revision changes are not apparent. While some portions of their global revisions could be related to revision-related discourse, no local revisions can be textually traced back to the chat. As shown in Appendix D, WY and RY provided suggestions on CY’s paper, while CY sought opinions for developing and refining her writing (CY13). During synchronous online peer response sessions, WY and RY attempted to redirect CY’s attention to “pets” as a subject of writing about the issue of animal welfare (WY4, WY9, RY1, RY2, RY3) and CY restated her main points in this paper (CY4, CY5). After that chat, she inserted two paragraphs and three sentences in her revised paper. Among the five insertions, one that she inserted in the first paragraph ties into revision-related discourse (CY4, CY5). For example, revision-related discourse, such as “most of your annotations talk about the stray dog” (WY1) could tie into CY’s later comment of, “I think I will put emphasis on dogs” (CY5), and that is actually a revision in the text. There were other possible links, but their connections were not textually traceable. For example, CY added one paragraph (i.e., the third insertion) about her missing dog experience, which might be related to the revision-related discourse (WY3, WY9). Besides content discussion, Group 2 also spent a higher proportion of turns on task management than did the other two groups. They phrased responses and actions about the writing assignment during the chat: CY: CY: WY: CY: RY: VI:

i think maybe you can ask more culture shocks in other aspect such as food here since you are talking about discrimination the landscap here, the life style and after this discussion I have to interview a 外籍新娘 [denizen bride].


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Even though group members did ask questions and provide suggestions, the writer, VI, incorporated one new idea—the denizen bride—in writing about the topic “racial discrimination” without exploring it sufficiently in the group discussion. Instead, she used the shared first language (Chinese) to express her actions in carrying out the assignment. Nevertheless, this instance of task management resulted in her expansion of the research paper by adding three paragraphs as a supporting example in which she described her interview with a denizen bride in a local New Immigrant Center for Learning. DISCUSSION The following discussion of these results is amplified by insights and findings from research in L2 interaction, SCMC, and L2 writing with respect to relationships between online revision-related discourse and subsequent writing and revision by these twelve EFL students. Relationships among Different Types of Interaction Overall, no differences were found in this study among the three groups in two genres of writing based on the revision-related and non-revision-related taxonomy. In terms of revision-related discourse, meaning negotiation and error correction were less frequent than content discussion and task management. Similar to Liang’s (2008) and DiGiovanni and Nagaswami’s (2001) findings, students in this study tended to focus more on content discussion than on meaning negotiation. As an alternative to F2F feedback, this specific pattern of interaction could be generated due to the temporal and spatial context of SCMC. Regarding non-revision-related discourse, social talk occurred more frequently than technical actions. Specifically, an environmental analysis of the key components of interaction allows us to understand various interactional processes interdependent with linguistic negotiations and their relative contributions to synchronous online peer response. For instance, in the book review task, students in Group 3 produced the highest proportion of social talk among the three groups while engaging in meaningful content discussion. By contrast, Group 2’s meaning negotiation failed to create a shared text and context by achieving mutual understanding beyond repair in the chat. In other words, the nature of online synchronous peer response could not be fully described by previous L2 writing studies that value revision-related discourse and disregard non-revisionrelated discourse as off-task messaging (e.g., Liu & Sadler, 2003) or simultaneous composing as a communication problem (e.g., Braine, 2001). Despite possible challenges due to the lack of nonverbal cues and turn-taking, certain types of interaction cannot be confined to labels, such as “incoherent discourse” and “communication problems.” Largely corroborating the results of Darhower (2002), this study also found that students could co-construct meaning and content while enjoying social talk in dynamic Internet discourse. It also appears that different compositions of groups generate different proportions of interactions. The study was conducted in a monolingual context with three diverse groups—two groups with only-English majors and one with mixed majors. Among the three groups, Group 3 yielded the largest amount of social talk in both tasks. Since the members in Group 3 were from different departments, they may have felt the need to create a shared social context by exchanging course information and background knowledge. By contrast, Group 1 and 2 spent most of their turns on content discussions or task management probably because they had already established familiarity. Group 2 spent a higher percentage of turns on task management in both tasks. In particular, their chat episodes show non-English codes, such as Chinese characters and other symbols (e.g., ). As those found in Negretti’s (1999) and Darhower’s (2002) studies, they were not used as compensation strategies for better comprehension, but as deliberate strategies for managing chat discourse. Future studies might explore these management moves in synchronous online peer discussions.


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Additionally, the nature of the writing task could have influenced the results of the study. In both tasks, participants sought opinions from peers, but the task requirements for the two types of writing were different. The book review task required each group’s collaborative writing of a common text. The research paper presentation task asked students to revise individual work. Regarding task implementations, Group 1, for example, spent a higher proportion of turns on task management in the book review, but produced a higher proportion of technical actions in the research paper presentation. With drafts in blogs, Group 1 copied the instructor’s guidelines and their writing from the blogs and pasted them on chat screens. As a result, the availability of the two communication tools—blogging and chatting—in the research paper task may have influenced the amount and types of interaction. Revision-Related Discourse and Student Writing and Revision Further analyses have shown that the relationships between online peer discourses and subsequent composing and revision actions are complex and dynamic. In linking group participation in revisionrelated discourse with writing outcomes, one sees that certain types of synchronous online peer interaction facilitate subsequent writing and revision, though admittedly this depends on the group’s coconstructed interactional context for coherent discussion and communication. For example, in the book review task, Groups 1 and 3 were able to engage in revision-related discourse and undertake discourse-related revision. With reference to the amount and type of interaction, a large proportion of social talk in Group 3 did not interfere with their joint construction of meaning and content, whereas the negotiation of meaning in Group 2’s discourse did not facilitate meaning generations or more adoption of peer content into subsequent writing. A further comparison of the chat discourse between Group 1 and Group 2 also shows that differences in the quality of their peer interaction (i.e., collaborative efforts on reaching mutual understanding) led to different writing outcomes, despite similar amounts and types of interaction. Inspired by sociocultural researchers, such as de Guerrero and Villamil (2000) and van Lier (1996, 2000), the author suggests that students’ engagement and shared perspectives in the collaborative process of reaching intersubjectivity may impact subsequent writing and revision. In the research paper presentation task, students’ revision-related discourse focused on talking about writing procedures and assignments or requesting and providing information, which could facilitate individual students’ developing and refining ideas in writing. Accordingly, most of the students made global revisions. These findings appear to correspond with the results of Jones et al.’s (2006) study, but differ from those found in Liu and Sadler’s (2003) research. There are possible reasons for the differences observed. It may be that synchronous online conferencing does not allow time for correcting errors or clarifying meanings in writing as compared to other forms of electronic peer response, such as peer comments on blogs and Word documents. It does, however, allow instant support (Hyland, 2000) and more dynamic communicative behaviors (Chun, 1994; Fitze, 2006; Villamil & de Guerrero, 1994) for expressing opinions and developing ideas. Given differences in individual competence (e.g., L2 proficiency, content knowledge, and group skills) and task requirement (e.g., short essays versus long research papers), certain students may not be able to adopt peers’ suggestions in revision. In this study, revision-related discourse in the two writing tasks facilitated students’ writing and revision of alternative positions to varying degrees, but groups that differed in quantity and types of interaction may have influenced the collaborative writing and revision process. In the book review task, two out of the three groups incorporated most of the content discussion in the chat into subsequent collaborative writing texts. By contrast, in the research paper task, a relatively lower proportion of revision could be textually linked to revision-related discourse. Specifically, no surface formal revision could be connected with the online discourse but some of the idea development changes were related to revision-related discourse, which echoes Hewett’s (2006) findings. Other revision changes could also result from the writer’s own decisions and from other sources stimulated by the other types of interactional processes within their groups. Language Learning & Technology

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CONCLUSION Using peer response groups in EFL writing enables students to collaboratively brainstorm, share, and review texts. Synchronous Web technology adds a valuable tool for facilitating and recording the dynamics of group interaction. On the other hand, there are possible reasons why synchronous online peer response groups might be fun, but not very effective. The revision-related and non-revision-related discourse taxonomy used in this study can give an overall view of online interaction from which instructors can proceed to make task implementations more consistent and the results correspondingly stronger. For example, writing and revision processes can be improved by asking students to concentrate on revision-related discourse and to play down non-revision-related discourse. However, the results of this study have also shown that the relationships between revision-related discourse and discourse-related revision are not straightforward. If we consider the ecological nature of online interaction, we will encourage students to make meaningful use of overall online interactional features in the collaborative process for better composition and revision. To maximize learner-centered, collaborative opportunities for L2 learning, writing, and communication, training procedures and support systems should be employed according to group interaction and task performance along with students’ progress in the writing process. Modeling peer response strategies at the beginning of the course can prepare students at different L2 proficiency levels for online negotiation and discussion. Training should focus on connecting students’ prior experiences with current writing pedagogy. During the revising and editing process, teachers might draw attention to student variation and group interaction. Chat transcripts and selected episodes can be reviewed to help less experienced students learn diverse ways of interaction and locate revision-related discourse. At the presentation and submission stage, while students might feel under pressure as writing tasks are developed into final products, they still need to demonstrate a range of communicative strategies in order to accomplish various learning goals. To revise their writing after the peer response session, these L2 writers can continue the process of negotiating with various resources and audiences either inside or outside the writing class. In short, revision-related online discourse in small-group synchronous writing tasks can provide potentially useful pedagogical insights and tools for the teaching of writing.


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APPENDIX A. Student Demographics and Writing Concerns Group Student

Group 1 SA

Gender Male Female Major Chinese English French Prior English Study 8 years or less 9 years or more GEPT Intermediate High-Intermediate MSN Use Frequent user Non-frequent user Writing Concerns Title Topic sentence Thesis statement Main idea Additional support Conclusion Off-topic message Paragraph unity Logic point Transition Paraphrasing Word order Spelling Run-on sentence Vocabulary choice Punctuation Grammar Editing and revision Style Catching readers


Group 2

JE EA CE

CY

WY

Group 3

RY

VI

BY

ON JU √

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DI

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APPENDIX B. SCMC Interaction Analysis Framework Content Code Meaning Negotiation

Descriptions Participants check understanding, ask for confirmation, or probe for explanations of messages.

Examples SA: baby’s psychological problem CE: It’s psychological problem of women JE: i agree with SA CE: Do you mean that I should develop baby's psychological problem? CE: Then I can try. SA: no

Content Discussion

Participants propose thoughts, elaborate or make comments and suggestions on messages.

WY: i think you can find other aspects of this issue WY: why this is not legal in some of the countires WY: that must have its reason RY: That’s a good suggestion!

Error Correction

Participants make target-like reformulations of all or part of incorrect messages.

CY: you’ve mentioned that the keywords you used to search WY: sorry, that is adaptation not adaption VI: thanks a lot WY

Task Management

Participants talk about task procedures and assignment requirements

JE: the most important thing is you need to paraphrase them in your own ideas JE: did you do that?(attacking) SA: (i can feel that SA: it's hard to say it over here

Social Talk

Participants check attendance, signal presence, inform acknowledge, or express humor

BY: hahah ON: JU??? DI: great she’s back ON: come out come out wherever you are~~

Technical Action

Participants use chat room commands or online tools, or copy, paste, or link messages.

JU: I give you a web DI: i should have researched more in the sex center JU: http://intermargins.net/

Note. The target sentences are in bold.


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APPENDIX C. Book Review Linking to Revision-Related Discourse Excerpt of SCMC Interaction Excerpt of Book Review from these student essays, we can know how From these student essays, we can know how to revise our problems to revise our problems. Just like our discussion in class before, we compare two articles and BY: yeah then we can notice which one is better. And BY: and when this book talk about paintings when this book talks about paintings, it would BY: it would give us many paintings give us many paintings for students to BY: for students to practice practice. It provides students with essays, JU: just like our discussion in class before, we compare two articles which encourage students to write as good as them and sympathize with them since they JU: and then we can notice which is better make similar mistakes. What’s more, this DI: It provides students essays, which encourage students to write as good as them and book is endowed with vivid illustrations sympathize them since they make similar helping readers understand its words. Its mistakes. wording and typesetting are impeccable with different colors and sizes of words. We think DI: This book is endowed with vivid illustrations helping readers understand its words. in the book, it provides many question to think after reading the article. And it is very DI: Its wording and typesetting are impeccable. With different colors and sizes of words. important because we can realize some points which we ignore before. We find that the BY: yeah questions the book provides after the article BY: because sometimes we do not know how to are the key point. use words well DI: here he is JU: I think in the book, it provide many question to think after reading the article ON: haha ON: hi~everybody~ ON: I am here~~~ JU: it is important because we can realize some point which we egnore before ON: so what's now? DI: have discussed a lot~~~ DI: i’ll give u our record and DI: u could tell us about your thoughts ON: thanks for yor kindness BY: you have to write the article DI: we then discuss~~ BY: haha ON: oh haha JU: welaom JU: welcome BY: ok le us continue ON: THNAKSSS!!!!!!!! ON: ok JU: ok ON: go ahead JU: I had talked about the question after the article BY: so what the bad points do you think of this book? JU: I find that the question the book provide after the article is the key point Note. The words used in both the SCMC interaction and the book review are highlighted. JU:


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APPENDIX D. Revision in Research Paper Linking to Revision-Related Discourse Excerpt of SCMC Interaction Excerpt of Book Review WY1: most of your annotations talk about the 1st Insertion stray dog In my issue paper, I will put my emphasis on dogs by using some news articles, film clips CY1: ok, don’t read the avove and journal articles to provides some useful CY2: above WY2: and what kind of thing they will encounter information and thus support my points. CY3: i will talk each annotation briefly 2nd Insertion WY3: maybe you can find some other things It happened with “101 Dalmatians,” when about dog to explain why you want to talk people caved in to their kids and bought about animale walfare Dalmatians, and then found out they were not WY4: recently, more and more people would cast as cute as they had thought before. Then, physical abusement upon their pets Dalmatians got dumped at animal shelters. It CY4: I’ve used a film clip, a piece of news, a happened with “Babe” –so cute, so smart, so wikipedia resources, and a research paper not suited to many owners. Dump them at the WY5: this kind of law, animal welfare, can give animal shelter. To ban on that kind of movies them a chance to survive is impossible. The government and the movie RY1: well. I think that some welfare are just makers should appeal to the idea of adopting suitable for the “pets” dogs from animal shelters. It’s a lot cheaper WY6: umm that is useful than buying a dog from pet shops. If so, the WY7: what do you think about my opinion, CY owners of puppy mills will not make so profits. RY2: but not all the animals Thus the mother animals will not be compelled WY8: or do you have any questions to death. CY5: i think i will put emphasis on dogs RY3: some people are just worry about their pets 3rd Insertion CY6: because i use the movie dogs trend to start The above film clips remind me of my dog － Dodo. In March this year, my little dog was my essay CY7: and then bring the topic to animale welfare missing because my mom did not pay attention WY9: yes i mean some dogs people keep in house when she took Dodo out for a walk. As soon as I knew about it, I burst out crying, and was also have this problem anxious whether Dodo was safe or not. I was WY10: ok, that is find afraid she would be bullied by bad guys or CY8: usually, i search in English other dogs or even worse, dead. Fortunately, a WY11: fine nice woman saw it on the street and took her CY9: and i also quote some sentences from the home. Upon seeing the flyer which I spend a annotation lot of time on the street pasting them alone the CY10: it is for sure! road, she called me and gave Dodo back to us. CY11: umm...i think this is the end of my After that, I pay much attention when I take her presentation out, because she is already a member of our CY12: thanks family. How will you feel when your family RY4: fine member get lost and never come back? WY12: it is good CY13: do you have any ideas about my issue 4th Insertion paper? Do they have souls or consciousness? RY5: did you try to find some laws of animal 5th Insertion welfare to support the opinion? CY14: umm... i remember it mentions a little in it To continue the question, “Do animals have RY6: It’s an interesting topic haha souls or consciousness?” Note. The words used in both SCMC interaction and the revised research paper are highlighted.


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study is funded by the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC97-2410-H-008-037). I would like to thank Shi-Wei Yang and Chang-Pei Tsai for their assistance in coding data. I am grateful to Dr. Curtis Bonk and Dr. Anthony Lichi for reading earlier versions of this paper and to the reviewers and the editors of this journal for providing valuable suggestions. Special thanks go to Dr. Carla Meskill for her advice on the final drafts of this paper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mei-Ya Liang is an associate professor in the Department of English at National Central University, Taiwan. Her current research focuses on the use of technology in the teaching of English. E-mail: [email protected]

REFERENCES Berg, E. C. (1999). The effects of trained peer response on ESL students’ revision types and writing quality. Journal of Second Language Writing, 8, 215-241. Blake, R. (2000). Computer mediated communication: A window on L2 Spanish interlanguage. Language Learning & Technology, 4 (1), 120-136. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num1/blake/default.html Braine, G. (2001). A study of English as a foreign language (EFL) writers on a local-area network (LAN) and in traditional classes. Computers and Composition, 18, 275–292. Chun, D. (1994). Using computer network to facilitate the acquisition of interactive competence. System, 22(1), 17-31. Darhower, M. (2002). Interactional features of synchronous computer-mediated communication in the intermediate L2 class: A sociocultural case study. CALICO Journal, 19 (2), 249-277. Donato, R. (1994). Collective scaffolding in second language learning. In J.P. Lantolf & G. Appel (Eds.), Vygotskian approaches to second language research (pp. 173-193). Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Donato, R. (2000). Sociocultural contributions to understanding the foreign and second language classroom. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 27-50). Oxford University Press. de Guerrero, M. C. M., & Villamil, O. S. (2000). Activating the ZPD: Mutual scaffolding in L2 peer revision. The Modern Language Journal, 84(1), 51-68. DiGiovanni, E., & Nagaswami, G. (2001). Online peer review: An alternative to face-to-face? ELT Journal, 55(3), 263-272. Fitze, M. (2006). Discourse and participation in ESL face-to-face and written electronic conferences. Language Learning & Technology, 10(1), 67-86. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol10num1/fitze/default.html Foster, P., & Ohta, A. S. (2005). Negotiation for meaning and peer assistance in second language classrooms. Applied Linguistics, 26, 402–430. Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold. Hansen, J. G., & Liu, J. (2005). Guiding principles for effective peer response. ELT Journal, 59(1), 31-38. Language Learning & Technology

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Hewett, B. (2000). Characteristics of interactive oral and computer mediated peer group talk and its influence on revision. Computers and Composition, 17, 265-288. Hewett, B. (2006). Synchronous online conference-based instruction: A study of whiteboard interactions and student writing. Computers and Composition, 23, 4-31. Hyland, F. (2000). ESL writers and feedback: Giving more autonomy to students. Journal of Language Teaching Research, 4(1), 33-54. Hyland, K. & Hyland, F. (2006). Contexts and issues in feedback on L2 writing. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jones, R. H., Garralda, A., Li, D. C. S., & Lock, G. (2006). Interactional dynamics in on-line and face-toface peer-tutoring sessions for second language writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 1-23. Lee, L. (2001). Online interaction: Negotiation of meaning and strategies used among learners of Spanish. ReCALL, 13(2), 232-244. Liang, M. Y. (2008). SCMC interaction and EFL writing revision: Facilitative or futile? Proceedings of E-learn 2008 (pp. 2886-2892). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Liu, J., & Sadler, R. W. (2003). The effect and affect of peer review in electronic versus traditional modes on L2 writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2, 193–227. Lockhart, C., & Ng, P. (1995). Analyzing talk in ESL peer response groups: Stances, functions, and content. Language Learning, 45(4), 1-51. Long, M. H. (1996). The role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. In W. Ritchie & T. Bhatia (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413-468). New York: Academic Press. Min, H-T. (2006). The effects of trained peer review on EFL students’ revision types and writing quality. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 118-141. Min, H-T. (2008). Reviewer stances and writer perceptions in EFL peer review training. English for Specific Purposes, 27, 285-305. Mendonça, C. O., & Johnson, K.E.(1994). Peer review negotiations: Revision activities in ESL writing instruction. TESOL Quarterly 28, 745–769. Negretti, R. (1999). Web-based activities and SLA: A conversation analysis research approach. Language Learning & Technology, 3(1), 75-87. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol3num1/negretti/index.html Pica, T. (1996). Do second language learners need negotiation? International Review of Applied Linguistics, 34(1), 1-19. Roever, C., & Pan, Y-C. (2008). GEPT: General English Proficiency Test. Language Testing, 25(3), 403418. Rollinson, P. (2005). Using peer feedback in the ESL writing class. ELT Journal, 5(1), 23-30. Smith, B. (2003). Computer-mediated negotiated interaction: An expanded model. The Modern Language Journal, 87(1), 38-57. Sotillo, S. (2000). Discourse functions and syntactic complexity in synchronous and asynchronous communication. Language Learning & Technology, 4(1), 82-119. Retrieved from http://llt.msu.edu/vol4num1/sotillo/default.html


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Stanley, J. (1992). Coaching student writers to be more effective peer evaluators. Journal of Second Language Writing, 1, 217-233. Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 97-114). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsui, A. B. M., & Ng, M. (2000). Do secondary L2 writers benefit from peer comments? Journal of Second Language Writing, 9(2), 147-170. Tuzi, F. (2004). The impact of e-feedback on the revisions of L2 writers in an academic writing course. Computers and Composition, 21, 217-235. van Lier, L. (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum: Awareness, autonomy and authenticity. New York: Longman. van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 245-260). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Varonis, E. M., & Gass, S. (1985). Non-native/non-native conversations: A model for negotiation of meaning. Applied Linguistics, 6(1), 71-90. Villamil, O. S., & de Guerrero, M. C. M. (1996). Peer revision in the L2 classroom: Social-cognitive activities, mediating strategies, and aspects of social behavior. Journal of Second Language Writing, 5(1), 51-75. Ware, P. D. (2004). Confidence and competition online: ESL student perspectives on web-based discussions in the classroom. Computers and Composition, 21(4), 451-468. Warschauer, M. (1996). Comparing face-to-face and electronic discussion in the second language classroom. CALICO Journal, 13(2), 7-26. Warschauer, M. (2002). Networking into academic discourse. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 1(1), 45-58.


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Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/winkegasssydorenko.pdf


THE EFFECTS OF CAPTIONING VIDEOS USED FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE LISTENING ACTIVITIES1 Paula Winke, Susan Gass, and Tetyana Sydorenko Michigan State University This study investigated the effects of captioning during video-based listening activities. Second- and fourth-year learners of Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Russian watched three short videos with and without captioning in randomized order. Spanish learners had two additional groups: one watched the videos twice with no captioning, and another watched them twice with captioning. After the second showing of the video, learners took comprehension and vocabulary tests based on the video. Twenty-six learners participated in interviews following the actual experiment. They were asked about their general reactions to the videos (captioned and noncaptioned). Results from t-tests and two-way ANOVAs indicated that captioning was more effective than no captioning. Captioning during the first showing of the videos was more effective for performance on aural vocabulary tests. For Spanish and Russian, captioning first was generally more effective than captioning second; while for Arabic and Chinese, there was a trend toward captioning second being more effective. The interview data revealed that learners used captions to increase their attention, improve processing, reinforce previous knowledge, and analyze language. Learners also reported using captions as a crutch. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to investigate L2 learners’ use of captions2 while watching videos in a foreign language. Audiovisual materials enhanced with captions are powerful pedagogical tools that are believed to help improve L2 listening and reading comprehension skills (Borras & Lafayette, 1994; Danan, 2004; Garza, 1991; Markham & Peter, 2003). Captions facilitate language learning by helping learners visualize what they hear, especially if the input is slightly beyond their linguistic ability (Danan, 2004). Captions may also serve to increase language comprehension by facilitating additional cognitive processes, such as greater depth of spoken-word processing (Bird & Williams, 2002). Captioned video is increasingly used in foreign language classes, most likely because of the recent accessibility of authentic videos (e.g., via DVD, YouTube, ViewPoint) which, if not already captioned, can be easily captioned by teachers and curriculum developers using software such as Adobe Premier, iMovie, or ViewPoint. Many universities, overwhelmed by increased interest in foreign language learning (Welles, 2004), are turning to online foreign language course offerings, normally by implementing hybrid or blended-instruction courses, in which part of the instruction is in the classroom and part is conducted independently online (Blake, 2005; Chenoweth & Murday, 2003; Chenoweth, Ushida, & Murday, 2006; Sanders, 2005; Scida & Saury, 2006). Such classes incorporate more online and automated content, which often includes captioned videos. It is especially true for language programs such as Arabic and Chinese, mostly because it is difficult to find enough qualified instructors (Dahbi, 2004; Freedman, 2004), and because videos are a good resource for presenting native speaker voices. Captioning may be a bonus because it helps language learners connect auditory to visual input (Garza, 1991), which may aid form-meaning mapping,3 an essential process for foreign language acquisition (Doughty, 2004). With regard to the present study, the mapping of form to meaning is facilitated since captioning helps identify word boundaries. In other words, it helps learners segment what might otherwise be an incomprehensible stream of speech. However, a question that concerns both theory and pedagogy is what learners actually do with captions when they are presented with them. We do not know Copyright © 2010, ISSN 1094-3501

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Paula Winke, Susan Gass, and Tetyana Sydorenko

Effects of Captioning Videos

whether they read captions fully or only in part, and if in part, what part. In other words, where is the learner’s attention focused? How do learners balance the intake of audio, video, and text? Another question concerns the level of proficiency required to make captions beneficial. Past research has found that captions are more of a distraction than help for lower-level learners (Taylor, 2005), but that lowerlevel as well as upper-level learners have positive attitudes toward captions.4 Could teachers simplify captions for certain learners (for example, only present key words or italicize or embolden key words within the text) to make them more salient? A final important area that has not been addressed is how learners of languages with non-Roman scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, process captions. It is for this reason that this study investigated the use of captions by learners of Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish to understand better how captions aid comprehension. The present study also investigated how the support captions provide may be mediated by the target language script and/or by the proficiency level of the learners. LITERATURE REVIEW Four areas of research on captions informed this study. The first area involves investigations into whether and how captions increase the depth of processing for language learners. When captioning was first introduced for use in foreign language classrooms in the 1980s, it was thought to be a way to increase learners’ attention, reduce anxiety, give students instant confirmation of their understanding of what was heard, and increase motivation (Burger, 1989; Froehlich, 1988; Grimmer, 1992; Vanderplank, 1988). Following that initial period, the bulk of studies that investigated captioning looked at whether captioned video is more beneficial than noncaptioned video (Baltova, 1999; Danan, 1992; Garza, 1991; Markham, 1993, 1999; Neuman & Koskinen, 1992). The general consensus was that captioning leads to superior performance on subsequent comprehension and vocabulary tests. One of the most robust experiments along this line was conducted by Bird and Williams (2002), who investigated the claim that captioning is a beneficial language learning tool by looking at how a bimodal presentation (aural and visual) of novel words would affect the learning of the words. In their study, vocabulary was presented to advanced learners of English under three conditions: (a) text with sound, (b) text without sound, and (c) sound without text. Bird and Williams considered the effects of these conditions on word learning, as measured by both improvements in spoken word recognition efficiency (how long it took the learners to remember the words) and recognition memory. Results showed that vocabulary presented with text and sound resulted in better recognition memory for spoken words and nonwords when compared to the other two presentation modalities. The researchers concluded that bimodal presentation aids novel word learning, as suggested by previous studies, by increasing or facilitating spoken-word processing. They further concluded that their results provide evidence that cognitive systems dealing with auditory and visual processing are indeed interactive and interconnected, thus suggesting that captions aid comprehension because they increase processing depth. The second line of research that informed this study concerns the level of proficiency at which learners benefit most from captions. The results of past research are mixed. For example, Markham (1993) found that captions were more helpful to advanced learners when the video materials were more abstract or complex. He concluded that for intermediate to advanced learners, captioning should be used only when the video material is difficult for the learners. Guillory (1998) found that captions are beneficial for beginning-level learners. However, she found that beginning-level students benefit more when only key words are presented as captions, rather than having entire sentences (i.e., the full text of what was spoken) presented on screen as captions. She noted that key-word captioning might be better for beginning-level learners because it may not impose as large of a cognitive load. Taylor (2005) looked at whether captioned video was beneficial for beginning-level learners. Two groups of Spanish learners, one in their first year of Spanish and one with three or four years of Spanish, watched a Spanish-language video with or without Spanish captioning. The groups’ comprehension scores were compared. Third- and fourth-year students who viewed the videos with captions performed better than first-year students who also used Language Learning & Technology

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captions, but scores for those who did not view captions did not differ regardless of level. Taylor interviewed the learners and found that those who used captions were able to describe how they used the pictures, sound, and captioning to understand the video. First-year students reported that they found the captions distracting and made it difficult to attend to sound, image, and captions. At the same time, like the third- and fourth-year learners, the first-year students expressed a positive attitude toward captions. The issue Taylor raised is whether, with exposure and practice, captioned video could become a valuable comprehension aid for beginning language learners’ comprehension. The third research area that informed this study concerns the individual strategies used by learners when watching captioned video. Vanderplank (1990) examined how learners of English used captions over a three-month period. Those who took notes while watching captioned videos produced more accurate language on subsequent comprehension exercises. Those who did not take notes comprehended as well as the note-taking group (according to self-reports), but did not retain specific language used in the videos. Vanderplank concluded that attention (form-focused) and processing (meaning-focused) are important for the intake and long-term retention of forms through captions. Even though captions attract attention, more specific strategies that involve rehearsal or practice (processing) of what is taken in through the captions are also important and can make captions more beneficial. Danan (2004) reviewed the benefits and limitations of audiovisual materials as well as strategies that might optimize the use of captioned material. She suggested that researchers look at more successful language learners as models because they seemed better able to process information through captions. She noted that overall caption use improved over time. The general conclusion was that captions can lead to significant improvement in learners’ listening comprehension as long as they are taught to take advantage of relevant strategies. Several newer studies have looked at the effects of caption availability on foreign language learning. In Web- and computer-based multimedia environments, learners and teachers can switch captions on or off. Markham (2001) investigated whether the presence of captions affects learning. He also explored whether familiarity with the content of the video differentially affects the usefulness of captions. He presented Muslim, Buddhist, and non-Muslim/Buddhist ESL students with videos in English about their respective religions. Within each of the three groups, half of the students were shown the videos with captions, and half without. Results revealed that both background knowledge and captions contributed substantially to the learners’ comprehension of the videos. Grgurović and Hegelheimer (2007) conducted an empirical study to explore whether captions or transcripts were more effective in a multimedia video environment. They found that students who used captions used them more frequently and for longer periods of time than those who used transcripts. They concluded that an important challenge in investigating video options lies in finding ways to promote the appropriate use of those options. Similarly, Pujola (2002) researched the strategies used by Spanish-speaking ESL learners who used Web-based multimedia videos. She tracked whether the learners chose to use captions or transcripts when watching videos and found that those with poorer listening skills used captions and transcripts more for help with comprehension. On the other hand, the learners generally had better experiences with captions than with transcripts because they felt that their listening was improving along with caption use, whereas with transcripts they were only practicing their reading. Pujola concluded that some learners based their listening comprehension on reading instead of listening. She stressed that this “misuse” of captions can potentially inhibit the development of listening strategies, and explained that students need to be advised when to use captions (2002, p. 252). It is difficult to generalize the findings of the studies reviewed above. First, several studies did not group subjects by proficiency levels. Thus, differences in comprehension may have been more related to proficiency than to effective use of captions. Second, the types of tests used to measure the effects of language learners’ processing of captions varied widely. Most researchers used listening or reading comprehension tests and/or various forms of vocabulary tests. The use of comprehension and vocabulary tests may demonstrate that captions were beneficial and were processed by the learners, but we still do not Language Learning & Technology

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know how captions were processed by the learners. Results from these past studies only indicate that the captions were of beneficial use. Third, with one exception (Garza, 1991),5 none of the studies involved the acquisition of less-commonly taught languages with non-Latin scripts. Notably absent were studies on the captioning and the acquisition of Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. This is important because we do not know if the conclusions from the studies above are generalizable to the learning of languages with orthographies that differ from those of the native language of the participants. And finally, a pedagogical question that has been raised by several researchers but has not been investigated is when learners should be exposed to captioning. We know from research by Pujola (2002) that captions, even though beneficial, can be overused. Some researchers suggested that to avoid overuse of captions, videos can be played once with captions and once without. However, the ordering effects of captions have not been investigated, that is, should captions be used on the first or on the second exposure? LITERATURE SUMMARY AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS In sum, captioned videos for foreign language learning are becoming more common because they are more accessible, easy to produce, and fit well into online course offerings. They are viewed as an important pedagogical tool because they bring more native voices into the learning environment and help learners integrate written and aural information, which supports language acquisition. Robust research needs to be conducted to understand (a) the ordering effects of captions (captions shown during the first or second viewing), and (b) what the processing issues surrounding captions are and how those issues may be tied to learners’ individual differences in proficiency and/or the target languages, especially those with non-Latin scripts. The following research questions guide the present study. Languages used to address each question are given in parentheses. 1. Do captioned videos result in better comprehension of video content and learning of vocabulary than noncaptioned ones? (Spanish) 2. When a video is viewed twice, is captioning more effective (as measured by comprehension tests and vocabulary learning tests) when the first viewing is with captions or when the second viewing is with captions? (all languages) 3. Are there different benefits derived from captioning order depending on the target language? (all languages) 4. Do proficiency differences affect the benefits of captioning derived from captioning order? (Russian and Spanish) Based on prior research, the first hypothesis is that captioning will result in comprehension and vocabulary gains. We cannot hypothesize, based on prior literature, (a) the ordering effects of captions, (b) the differential benefits of captioning order depending on the target language, or (c) whether proficiency differences affect any benefits derived from the ordering of captions. Thus, in relation to the last three research questions, we assume null hypotheses, that is, that there is no ordering effect of captions, no differential effects from captioning order in relation to the language being learned, and that proficiency will not affect the benefits of any ordering effect of captions. METHOD Participants One hundred fifty foreign language learners from a large Midwestern university in the U.S. participated in the current study. They were second- or fourth-year learners of Spanish (N = 67) and Russian (N = 41) and second-year learners of Arabic (N = 29) and Chinese (N = 13). Because we relied on volunteers, the participant pool is not balanced across languages. In Table 1 we present a summary of the participant data with regard to age, gender,6 and distribution by language and proficiency.7 Language Learning & Technology

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Table 1. Information about Participants Language

N

Male

2nd

47

13

34

20

4th

20

2

18

21

2nd

24

13

11

20

4th

17

10

7

22

Arabic

2nd

29

12

17

22

Chinese

2nd

13

9

4

21

150

59

91

Spanish

Russian

Year of study

Total

Female

Average age

All participants, except one who spoke Kannada, were native speakers of English. Some had also studied German, French, Polish, Finnish, Spanish, Farsi, and Korean. Heritage learners or those learners whose L1 was the same as the target language were not included in the study. Learners of Spanish participated in the study outside of class and received extra credit for their participation; all other learners participated in the study during their regular class. Materials Videos Videos for this project were prepared from three short English-language documentaries about three animals: salmon, bears, and dolphins.8 Each video, approximately 3-5 minutes in length, had a single narrator who described the scene and told the story. The original English-language videos were transcribed, translated,9 and then dubbed into the four target languages, with the original background music and sounds preserved. Female native speakers recorded the sound tracks for the 12 videos. Target language captions were added to the videos using iMovie on a Macintosh computer. The videos were converted to DVD using Apple iDVD, with the final outcome being 12 videos with captions, and the same 12 videos without captions. Vocabulary tests There were two vocabulary tests for each target language.10 Each test had the same key target language vocabulary words from the videos. None of the key words had English cognates. On each test, half of the vocabulary words were presented in their written form. The other half were presented aurally via voice recordings on the Web. There were two versions of the vocabulary tests, A and B. Words in written form on version A were presented aurally on version B, and vice versa. Each participant was given either version A or B at random with an equal distribution of A and B tests across groups. The participants were asked to translate the target words into English. They could read the written words and listen to the recorded words as many times as they wanted. When presenting and discussing results from the vocabulary tests, we will refer to the modality of the presentation of the vocabulary on the tests— vocabulary input that was written or aural.


69



Test of prior knowledge of key vocabulary A test of prior knowledge of the key vocabulary targeted in this study was used to identify participants’ knowledge of the key words prior to watching the videos. For each key word the learners were asked to respond to the following scale: 1 = I didn't know this word before watching the video. 2 = I don't think I knew this word before watching the video. 3 = I have no idea if I knew this word before watching the video. 4 = I think I knew this word before watching the video. 5 = I definitely knew this word before watching the video. Comprehension tests There was a comprehension test after each video. Each test included multiple-choice questions in English about the main points of the stories. Procedure The study took place in a computer lab. The participants first filled out a background questionnaire,11 followed by a presentation explaining the order of the tasks. They then watched a series of three videos. Each video was shown two times, once with captioning and once without. For each target language, one group saw captions during the first viewing of the video and another saw captions during the second viewing. The Spanish cohort included two extra groups, one which saw the videos twice without captions and one which saw them twice with captions. After the second viewing of each video, participants took the comprehension test and two vocabulary tests. Following Al-Seghayer (2001), Bird and Williams (2002), and Danan (1992), the prior knowledge test for each video was not given before the study so as not to cause the subjects to pay special attention to these words. Rather, this test was given after the vocabulary test but before the comprehension test. After the video and testing sessions, 26 learners (12 who saw the captioned videos first, 11 who saw them second, and 3 who saw them both times) volunteered to participate in a stimulated recall protocol, following procedure used in Gass and Mackey (2000). This was followed by an oral interview, in which general questions were asked relating to the usefulness of captions. These data were used as a way of further understanding our research questions, although in this paper we only report on the interview data. In the interview, the participants were asked about their experience watching the videos and what they did when the captions were presented on screen. The participants’ responses were audiotaped and transcribed. As mentioned above, these data were intended to further elucidate the quantitative results. The goal was to learn how learners dealt with captions in the input and how they perceived issues of ordering effects. The following questions were asked: • What did you think of the videos? • What did you think of when you saw the video for the first/second time? • Were you able to learn new vocabulary from the videos? Why or why not? Did the captions help in learning vocabulary? If so, why do you think they helped? • Did you like the captioning? • Do you prefer seeing the video with subtitles first or second? A flowchart of the data collection procedure is shown in Figure 1.


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Figure 1. The study procedure. Scoring Vocabulary tests Exact translations or synonyms received full credit (1 point), for example, put eggs instead of lay eggs. Translations which were not synonyms but from the same semantic field received partial credit (.5 point), for example, sleepy instead of tired. Incorrect translations were given no credit (0 points). Test of prior knowledge of key words Learners were presented with all vocabulary from the vocabulary tests and were asked to rate the words as to if they knew the word before seeing the videos. Based on the results, for each student, a list of previously unfamiliar words was established. Points for unfamiliar words translated correctly or almost correctly on the vocabulary tests were summed to obtain a raw vocabulary score. For data analysis, the raw vocabulary score was divided by the number of unfamiliar words, following Smith (2004). Comprehension test For the comprehension test, one point was given for each correct answer. No partial credit was given. Analysis Independent t-tests and two-way ANOVAs were used to compare group means. For the t-tests, Levene’s test for equality of variances was used. The results reported in Table 2 reflect the appropriate t-value according to whether equal variances could or could not be assumed. The alpha level for all tests was set at p < .05.


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RESULTS Quantitative Table 2 presents the number of participants and their mean scores on the vocabulary and comprehension tests, grouped by language, proficiency level, and captions order. Table 2. Language, Proficiency Level, and Captions Order Vocabulary Tests Language Arabic

Proficiency Level 2nd year

Captions Order Captions first

Captions second

Total

Chinese

2nd year

Captions first

Captions second

Total

Spanish

2nd year

Captions first

Captions second

No captions

Captions both times

Total Language Learning & Technology

N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N

Written input 16 .05 .05 13 .06 .03 29 .05 .04 8 .03 .04 5 .04 .08 13 .04 .06 14 .15 .12 16 .14 .08 8 .04 .02 9 .17 .11 47

Aural input 16 .03 .02 13 .02 .02 29 .03 .02 8 .03 .02 5 .04 .04 13 .03 .03 14 .11 .09 16 .07 .06 8 .04 .04 9 .14 .10 47

Comprehension Test 16 .35 .09 13 .40 .11 29 .37 .10 8 .38 .09 5 .36 .08 13 .37 .08 14 .49 .11 16 .49 .13 8 .36 .12 9 .53 .18 47 72



Table 2. Language, Proficiency Level, and Captions Order (continued) Vocabulary Tests Language

Proficiency Level

4th year

Captions Order

Captions first

Captions second

Total

Total

Captions first

Captions second

No captions

Captions both times

Total

Russian

2nd year

Captions first

Captions second

Total


M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD

Written input .13 .10 10 .28 .15 10 .18 .14 20 .23 .15 24 .21 .14 26 .15 .11 8 .04 .02 9 .17 .11 67 .16 .13 11 .10 .07 13 .07 .06 24 .08 .07

Aural input .09 .08 10 .30 .17 10 .17 .17 20 .24 .18 24 .19 .16 26 .11 .12 8 .04 .04 9 .14 .10 67 .14 .13 11 .08 .07 13 .03 .03 24 .05 .05

Comprehension Test .48 .14 10 .68 .11 10 .68 .12 20 .68 .11 24 .57 .14 26 .56 .15 8 .36 .12 9 .53 .18 67 .54 .16 11 .39 .11 13 .39 .08 24 .39 .09

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Proficiency Level 4th year


Captions second

Total

Total

Captions first

Captions second

Total

Total

2nd year

Captions first

Captions second

No captions

Captions both times

Total


N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD

Written input 9 .19 .15 8 .17 .08 17 .18 .12 20 .14 .12 21 .11 .08 41 .12 .10 49 .09 .09 47 .08 .07 8 .04 .02 9 .17 .11 113 .09 .08

Aural input 9 .16 .13 8 .11 .09 17 .14 .11 20 .11 .11 21 .06 .07 41 .09 .09 49 .06 .07 47 .04 .05 8 .04 .04 9 .14 .10 113 .06 .07

Comprehension Test 9 .54 .11 8 .48 .10 17 .51 .11 20 .46 .13 21 .42 .10 41 .44 .11 49 .40 .11 47 .42 .12 8 .36 .12 9 .53 .18 113 .42 .13

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Proficiency Level 4th year


Captions second

Total

Total

Captions first

Captions 2nd

No captions

Captions both times

Total

N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD N M SD

Written input 19 .24 .16 18 .17 .11 37 .21 .14 68 .13 .13 65 .11 .09 8 .04 .02 9 .17 .11 150 .12 .11

Aural input 19 .24 .17 18 .14 .14 37 .19 .16 68 .11 .13 65 .07 .09 8 .04 .04 9 .14 .10 150 .09 .11

Comprehension Test 19 .61 .13 18 .59 .14 37 .60 .14 68 .46 .15 65 .47 .14 8 .36 .12 9 .53 .18 150 .46 .15

Research question 1 We used the results from Table 2 to first answer our research questions. The first question that we address concerns the overall effect of captioning. To respond, we consider only the Spanish second-year students, as this group was the only one that included learners who viewed the videos twice, both times with or without captions. Learners who saw the videos with captions both times performed significantly higher on the vocabulary test with written input than those who saw the videos without captions both times according to a t-test adjusted for inequality of variances, t (9.031) = 3.33, p = .00, d = 1.6. Likewise, watching the videos with captions both times resulted in significantly higher scores on the vocabulary test with aural input than watching without captions both times, t (15) = 2.346, p = .03, d = 1.3. In line with these results, captions both times also resulted in significantly higher comprehension test scores than no captions, t (15) = 2.209, p = .04, d = 1.1.


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Research question 2 To address the second research question, which investigates the effect of the order of caption presentation, all languages were combined. Learners who saw captions during the first viewing performed significantly higher on the aural vocabulary test than those who saw captions on the second viewing according to a ttest adjusted for inequality of variances, t (124.89) = 2.12, p = .03, d = .36. The effect of order was not significant for the written vocabulary or comprehension test. Learners who viewed captions first obtained slightly higher scores on the written vocabulary test than those who saw captions second, but this difference was not significantly different, t (131) = .95, p = .34, and learners with captions first obtained approximately the same scores on the comprehension test as those who saw captions second, t (131) = -.23, p = .81. Research question 3 This question explored the differential benefits derived from the ordering effect of captioning depending on the target language. To not have proficiency level as a potential intervening variable, we only considered the results from second-year students. The results of t-tests were not significant, but there was a trend differentiating Russian and Spanish, where captions first always appeared to be more beneficial, as opposed to Arabic and Chinese, where the results are mixed, but where captions second appeared to be more effective. These trends are presented in Table 3. Table 3. The Differential Beneficial Effects of the Ordering of Captions by Language and Test Arabic

Chinese

Russian

Spanish

Vocabulary Learning, Written Input

Captions second

Captions second

Captions first

Captions first

Vocabulary Learning, Aural Input

Captions first

Captions second

Captions first

Captions first

Comprehension

Captions second

Captions first

Captions first

Captions first

Research question 4 This research question considered whether proficiency differences affect any benefits related to the ordering effects of captions. For this analysis, we consider only data from Spanish and Russian, as they were the only two languages for which there were data from two proficiency groups. A two-way ANOVA was conducted for each of the three tests. Results indicate that there were no significant interactions among language, year, or captions ordering for any test. The results are shown in Table 4. Table 4. Results of Two-way ANOVA for effects of language, caption order, and proficiency level Test

Vocabulary, Written Input

Source

hp2

p

df

F

Language

1

5.37

.06

.02*

Caption Order

1

3.07

.03

.08

Proficiency Level

1

14.03

.14

.00*

Language x Caption Order

1

.59

.00

.44


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Table 4. Results of Two-way ANOVA for effects of language, caption order, and proficiency level (continued) Test

Vocabulary, Written Input (continued)

Source

p

F

Language x Proficiency Level

1

.05

.00

.81

Caption Order x Proficiency Level

1

.64

.00

.42

Language x Capt. Order x Prof. Level

1

1.13

.01

.28

83

(.01)

Language

1

9.44

.10

.00*

Capt. Order

1

23.77

.22

.00*

Prof. Level

1

8.16

.09

.00*

Language x Capt. Order

1

1.83

.02

.17

Language x Prof. Level

1

.52

.00

.47

Capt. Order x Prof. Level

1

1.01

.01

.31


1

.86

.01

.35

83

(.01)

Subjects within-group error

Vocabulary, Aural Input

hp2

df

Subjects within-group error Language

1

29.37

.26

.00*

Capt. Order

1

.46

.00

.49

Prof. Level

1

38.58

.31

.00*

Language * Capt. Order

1

2.18

.02

.14

Language * Prof. Level

1

.27

.00

.60

Capt. Order * Prof. Level

1

.41

.00

.52


1

.41

.00

.52

83

(.01)

Comprehension

Subjects within-group error Note. Values enclosed in parentheses represent mean square errors. *p < .05.

Interview Data Using an inductive approach in which themes and patterns emerged from the data, we identified five themes underlying the interview comments: 1. Learners have a need for multiple input modalities. 2. Captions reinforce and confirm what is taken in aurally. 3. Captions affect learners’ attention to the input.


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4. Captions aid with the decomposition and/or analysis of language. 5. Captions are sometimes viewed as crutches. The first three relate to our research questions; the fourth and fifth emerged through an examination of our data even though they had not been part of our original research questions. Below we present a few select examples of learner responses by theme. The first theme that emerged from the comments relates to the role of multiple modalities. The learners in the interview sessions noted that they were aware of their own needs for listening as well as visualizing the speech. For example, in Example 1, the learner relates his experience with captions in the second video to his first-time through, where only audio (video plus audio but no captioning) was available: Example 1. “It, um, I think it, they um, reinforced what I had experienced before. I can actually see the uh, the word in the proper context.” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions second.) This was also noted by learners of languages with scripts very different from English, as in Example 2 with a second-year Russian learner and Example 3 with a second-year Chinese learner: Example 2. “Um, because you can see the words and hear the words at the same time.” (Second-year Russian learner who saw captions second.) Example 3. “Hearing it and seeing it. I don't learn very well if teachers give me a list of words and say ‘learn it,’ like I need to see what it is and hear it.” (Second-year Chinese learner who saw captions first.) Related to the role of multiple modalities is the second theme, the reinforcing role of captions. Examples 4 and 5 (Russian and Spanish learners respectively) are illustrative: Example 4. “Well, you listen first and then, you get, I don't know, you get familiar with the words first and the sound and things like that, and then with the subtitles you can, you can you can kind of verify what you were thinking first.” (Second-year Russian learner who saw captions first.) Example 5. “It, um, I think it, they um, reinforced what I had experienced before. I can actually see the uh, the word in the proper context.” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions second.) The third theme had to do with the way captions affect learners’ attention to the input. This attentiondrawing function of captions may be viewed as positive or negative by the learner. They may view captions as both beneficial and distracting (or attention depleting). This can be seen in Examples 6 through 8. Example 9 illustrates this learner’s conflicting views on captions. Example 6. “…and when the subtitles are on, I don’t really pay attention to the actual video. I’m paying more attention to the subtitles at the bottom.” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions second.) Example 7. “Um, I guess seeing it with the subtitles first, because then I know what to pay attention to, I know, um, you know what to expect the next time around without the subtitles, you can pay attention to certain things the next time.” (Second-year Chinese learner who saw captions first.) Example 8. “When I didn't have them, I paid more attention to the video and, um. You know, when I had the subtitles, when the second time, with the second video I was thinking ‘ok, so, pay attention to words,’ so that when I listen to it the second time, I, I can, I just hear it, I can pay more attention to what's going on and try to figure out what they mean. But it wasn't that easy either. It was harder to pay, for me I'm mostly going back between the subtitles and the images so, it was sort of hard to pay attention but ...” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions both times.)


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Example 9. “I think they were helpful, um, they at times can be distracting I guess, if you were listening to something again, but seeing it each time would be helpful.” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions first.) The fourth theme that emerged from the interview data had to do with the decomposition and/or analysis of language. This is seen in Examples 10 and 11. Example 10. “Um, well, with, Russian, it's just hard to, to sometimes tell where they start one word and where they end another, and this, it's just nice to be able to see it, laid out for me.” (Second-year Russian learner who saw captions second.) Example 11. “So if I watch it first without it, then I can kind of take in the whole message of it, hear a little bit, and then when I get stumped I can really break it up.” (Second-year Spanish learner who saw captions first.) Finally, the interview data revealed that captions are sometimes viewed by the learners as crutches. Comments related to this are presented in Examples 12 and 13. Example 12. “Yeah. I think that, you know, if you, I mean, for me the subtitles are kind of a crutch so, you know, you try to watch it the first time with the crutch, and understand it the best you can, and after you understood it a little bit, then you can watch it without.” (Second-year Russian learner who saw captions first.) Example 13. “Um. Yeah. It is helpful, just to double-check to make sure that what you are hearing is correct. But sometimes you use it like a crutch, you know, like only read and not listen.” (Fourth-year Spanish learner who saw captions second.) DISCUSSION This study set out to investigate foreign language learners’ use of captions while watching videos in a foreign language. By presenting captioned and noncaptioned video to groups of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish learners, we found that, in response to the first research question, captioned rather than noncaptioned videos aid novel vocabulary recognition. This occurred regardless of whether the vocabulary test words were presented to the learners in written or aural mode. Captioned videos also aid overall comprehension of the videos. In other words, the use of different modalities appears to facilitate vocabulary recognition and overall comprehension. The benefit of multiple input modalities is supported by previous research, such as Bird and Williams (2002), who found that a bimodal presentation (in their case, text and sound) resulted in better recognition memory. Essentially, it appears that more input is better, leading to increased depth of processing since learners utilize different input modes differently, and these input modes reinforce one another. Similarly, when considering the vast literature on learning styles in educational research (see Dörnyei, 2005), we recognize that individual learners may be able to process one mode of input better than another. As Dörnyei noted, learners interact differently with the environment and approach learning tasks differently. Thus, as noted by our participants, captioned video allows this to happen. The second research question relates to the ordering effect of captions. We found that when a video is shown two times, once with captioning and once without, the order of viewing has an effect on the subsequent recognition of vocabulary presented in the aural mode: learners presented with captions in the first viewing are better able to aurally recognize novel vocabulary than learners presented with captions in the second viewing. We suggest that this is due to the important role of attention in learning a second language. This is supported by comments from our participants. Many of their comments indicated that the captions served the function of drawing learners’ attention to the language in the video. The captions seemed to help isolate what the learners perceived to be important and helped them determine what to pay attention to in subsequent viewings. Language Learning & Technology

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With regard to attention, it is well documented that language learners are often faced with a string of sometimes incomprehensible input and need to focus attention on particular parts of language as aspects of the learning process. In fact, Schmidt (2001) claims that attending to particular parts of language “appears necessary for understanding nearly every aspect of second and foreign language learning” (p. 6). This claim is integral to Schmidt’s (1990, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2001) noticing hypothesis: awareness (through attention) is necessary for noticing, which in turn is essential for learning. Schmidt and Frota (1986) suggested that “a second language learner will begin to acquire the target like form if and only if it is present in comprehended input and ‘noticed’ in the normal sense of the word, that is, consciously” (p. 311). The idea presented here is that learning requires a learner to be actively involved or attending to L2 forms in order for learning to take place. However, at times, the language input (in this case the video) may be so complex that it is necessary for learners to have some sort of aid (in this case captioning), as was found by Markham (1993). In a similar vein, Gass (1997) argued that interaction often serves as a priming device, setting the stage for learning rather than being a forum for actual learning. The same may be the case for captioning. When captioning occurs first, it may draw learners’ attention to something they do not know. This allows for further information-gathering during the second listening. This is easier for those who can easily read the script (Spanish, Russian). When captioning occurs second, the unknown word/phrase that a learner hears is salient precisely because it is unknown (see Gass, 1988). The second listening allows for confirmation. Reading an unknown script requires more prior knowledge, which in this case comes from hearing the unknown word. In other words, with scripts that are similar to the native language script, it is easier to be alerted to something unknown through seeing it in writing; with scripts that are different from the native language script, it is easier to be alerted to something unknown through hearing it spoken. The second video provides additional confirmatory/nonconfirmatory evidence of what was comprehended. Acquisition is not necessarily instantaneous; it takes time and often requires repeated input, especially when the input comes through multiple modalities. The third research question concerned orthographic differences between participants’ native and the target language. It may be that language input, presented simultaneously through multiple modalities (aurally and in writing), is taken in differently depending on the orthography of the language. There was a trend for learners of Russian and Spanish to do better on comprehension and vocabulary tests when the captioning was first, and for learners of Arabic and Chinese to do better with captioning second. However, Arabic and Chinese learners did not appear to obtain consistently better test scores depending on a single ordering of captions. We suggest that learners of a language whose orthography is closer to that of the target language are better able to use the written modality as an initial source of information. Thus, Russian and Spanish learners benefitted when the first exposure to the language included the written mode. On the other hand, when there is a great distance between the native and target language orthographies, the aural modality is preferable, that is, it is more difficult to avail oneself of the written modality and there is a reliance on listening because the written symbols are not well learned. Finally, this study did not find that proficiency differences affect any benefits derived from captions ordering. For Spanish and Russian learners who were either in their second year or fourth year of study, seeing a video with captions the first rather than the second time was equally beneficial regardless of year of study. This may suggest that captioning, as a language learning tool to aid processing, may function similarly for all proficiency levels. Concerns about whether lower-level students can benefit from captions in the same way as upper-level learners (Guillory, 1998; Markham, 1993; Taylor, 2005) may be more about the appropriateness of the video’s complexity level for the lower-level learners rather than the appropriateness of the captioning for lower-level learners. As in Taylor’s (2005) study, we found that when captions are used, upper-level learners performed better than lower-level learners on comprehension, as one would expect, since both groups watched the same videos. In light of our study, we suggest that the lower-level learners in Taylor’s study who reported that it was more difficult to attend to captions than Language Learning & Technology

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upper-level students were perhaps having a harder time with the content of the video as it may not have been as appropriately matched to the lower-level students’ abilities. Thus, it appears that captions are beneficial for a range of proficiency levels,12 as long as the videos are matched appropriately in terms of content and complexity (not too hard and not too easy) to the proficiency level of the language learners. As mentioned earlier, we looked for patterns in our interview data. Three patterns related to our research questions, but two additional findings emerged from the comments of our participants. First, as seen in Examples 10 and 11, captions aided in the process of language analysis or decomposition. Word boundaries cannot always be determined in fast running speech. But in writing words can be made more discrete, allowing the learners to unpack the speech in a more meaningful way. Ellis (2003, p. 77) stressed that “learning to understand a language involves parsing the speech stream into chunks which reliably mark meaning.” We believe that our data show that captions help learners see and be able to then parse structural patterns or chunks in the videos, which may assist them in remembering and learning from the patterns presented. The role of chunks has a long history in the SLA literature (see Conklin & Schmitt, 2008; Hakuta, 1974). A full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, but in general, processing information in chunks reduces the burden on the learner to process individual bits and link form and meaning. Research on the processing of formulaic sequences (Conklin & Schmitt, 2008) suggests a processing advantage of formulaic sequences over matched nonformulaic sequences. The present study may help explain why captioning may lead to a greater depth of processing, as suggested in the literature (Bird & Williams, 2002; Borras & Lafayette, 1994; Danan, 2004; Garza, 1991). As noted before, captions may aid in chunking. For instance, Vanderplank (1993) suggested that captions not only indicate word boundaries for learners, but they also are unaffected by variations in accent and/or audio quality that can adversely affect aural comprehension, thus further facilitating aural comprehension. Note that the present study found that captions resulted in better vocabulary test scores in the aural mode, especially when videos were shown twice, once with captions and once without. The second additional finding that emerged from interview comments is that captions can be a crutch. We take the “crutch” notion to be a positive one in that when learners do not have to focus on extracting meaning from the sounds they hear, they can focus on the form and link that form to meaning. Learning requires learners to actively attend to L2 forms in order for learning to take place. But, at times, the language input (in this case the video) may be so complex that it is necessary for learners to have additional help, in this case captioning, as was found by Markham (1993). In this sense, captions can be a sort of scaffold or tool to aid L2 learning, as described in Example 12, even though, as Example 13 suggests, captions may be overused at times, as mentioned by Pujola (2002). CONCLUSION This study has yielded a number of observations about the use of captions, confirming previous research that indicates that captions are beneficial because they result in greater depth of processing by focusing attention, reinforce the acquisition of vocabulary through multiple modalities, and allow learners to determine meaning through the unpacking of language chunks. We found that listening twice to a video, first with captions and then without, may reduce listener anxiety, activate selective and global listening strategies, and promote automaticity in processing. We encourage replications of this study to create a broader database that includes learners of related and unrelated languages with Latin and non-Latin writing systems and learners with a greater range of proficiency levels. Future research should address a number of additional questions pertaining to the use of captions, for example: •

What precisely are learners focusing on when they look at captions?

•

Do upper-level learners ignore captions more often than lower-level ones?


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•

What are the individual differences that contribute to learners’ utilization of captions, such as use of learning strategies, modality preferences, and memory?

•

Do additional viewings of a video with captions result in greater vocabulary and comprehension gains, or is there a ceiling effect?

•

Can learners be trained in effective use of captions? (Taylor, 2005)

•

What is the need for captions as perceived by the learners themselves? Allowing learners to toggle captions on and off can provide information about when captions might and might not be useful to them13 (Grgurović & Hegelheimer, 2007).

With a greater emphasis on technology in language classrooms, the use of captioning will undoubtedly increase in importance and frequency. If this is to happen, appropriate research will need to increase in future years lest we introduce a pedagogical tool without fully understanding its implications.

NOTES 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented in Essen, Germany at the AILA World Congress, August, 2008. We hope that we have addressed all of the comments received from various sources. All errors that remain are our own. We are grateful to the Center for Language Education and Research (CLEAR) at Michigan State University for support through a Department of Education grant P229A060011. We are also grateful to Dennie Hoopingarner and Michael Kramizeh for assistance with the development of the videos used in this study. 2. We distinguish between captions and subtitles according to the definition provided by Markham and Peter (2003). “Subtitles refer to on-screen text in the native language of the viewers that accompany the second language soundtrack of the video material. Captions refer to on-screen text in a given language combined with a soundtrack in the same language” (p. 332) (see also Danan, 2004, pp. 67-68). During the interview, interviewers and learners often used the word subtitle to refer to what we refer to as captions. 3. Form-meaning mapping refers to the psycholinguistic process of connecting the meanings of new vocabulary or grammar to their spoken and written representations. 4. We have used a variety of terms to refer to proficiency levels (e.g., lower-level, upper-level, beginninglevel). When referring to the work of others, we have used their original terminology. 5. Garza (1991) showed captioned videos to American students of Russian (captions in Cyrillic script) and ESL students (captions in Latin script). Students of Russian had higher gains on comprehension than ESL students when captions were provided, but this difference is attributed to experience in watching movies rather than to the different scripts. 6. Age and gender were not variables in this study. All students were undergraduates and therefore represented a homogenous population. We are not aware of suggesting that either age or gender would be relevant to the current discussion. 7. We were not able to obtain comparable proficiency information across the language groups. We used seat time as the only available measure of proficiency despite its obvious weaknesses (see also NOTE 12). 8. We selected professional quality videos (one was a National Geographic video and the others were professional videos made for children) that represented common interests. Each video had a storyline that could hold the viewer’s interest. All videos contained unfamiliar vocabulary.


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9. A native speaker of the target language did the original translation from English. It was then checked by another native speaker of the target language. All translators were fluent in English. 10. When working across languages, especially with vocabulary, it is not possible to have exactly comparable difficulty levels for the same vocabulary items (Ard & Homburg, 1983). 11. The background questionnaire consisted of questions relating to demographics (age, gender, L1, etc.), length of study/exposure to the target language, and study of other languages. 12. Very early learners were not included in this study, so the results may not be applicable to this group. 13. We are grateful to the anonymous LLT reviewer for suggesting we mention this area of future research.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Paula Winke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University, where she teaches language testing and language teaching methods in the MA TESOL and Second Language Studies Programs. Her research interests concern the assessment of L2 learners, individual differences, and teaching methods. Email: [email protected] Susan Gass is University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at Michigan State University. She has published widely in the field of second language acquisition and has served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and of the International Association of Applied Linguistics. Email: [email protected] Tetyana Sydorenko is a Ph.D. candidate in the Second Language Studies Program at Michigan State University. Her research interests include computer-assisted language instruction and testing, second language curriculum and materials development, and second language acquisition. She has published book chapters on computer-assisted language learning and testing. Email: [email protected]

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Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/vol14num1/call.pdf

February 2010, Volume 14, Number 1 p. 87

Call for Papers for Special Issue of LLT

Theme: Learner Autonomy and New Learning Environments Guest Editors: Hayo Reinders and Cynthia White This special issue of Language Learning & Technology will focus on the relationship between technology and learner autonomy. The affordances and constraints offered by new learning environments, whether in mobile, immersive, distance, or other forms of learning, often place greater, and in many cases different, demands on learners’ ability to manage their own learning. At the same time, they can also offer greater potential to support learners in the learning process. We are inviting submission for papers that explore these affordances and constraints and the development of autonomy. Papers should be grounded in a theoretical framework that formulates research hypotheses and then seeks to confirm or disconfirm them by following an appropriate research methodology (http://llt.msu.edu/resguide.html). Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: •

Metacognitive demands of new learning environments

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New ways of using technology to foster autonomy

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Technology and social aspects of autonomy, e.g., social networking

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Effects and outcomes of technology use in relation to learner autonomy

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Sociocultural inquiry into autonomy-related aspects of learning through technology

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Technology and the measurement of autonomy

Please send an email of intent with a 500-word abstract by March 20, 2010 to [email protected]. Publication timeline: •

March 20, 2010: Submission deadline for abstracts

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April 15, 2010: Invitation to authors to submit a manuscript

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September 3, 2010: Submission deadline for manuscripts

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October 3, 2011: Publication of special issue


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