Technology: New Medium in Learning Language Process

5^th Reflective Journal for Technology and Language Learning

            After last week I learned about principles in designing CALL, in these 8^th and 9^th sessions I learned about the ‘real’ example of CALL’s which has functions to teach listening and speaking skill.

 As for technology to teach listening skill I explored some websites which provide listening skill practice program like Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab and British Council-Learn English: Song and Lyric. These two websites I mentioned is the implementation of natural approach which proposed by Krashen and Terrel in 1983. This approach believes at two main things, comprehensible input and optimum affective state. It believes that to produce a good output in language learning process, learner should get an understandable input and free from anxiety, has good self confident and has good intrinsic motivation.  

            Both of the websites I mentioned before designing their website along with the natural approach view. With give a comprehensible input like in British Council-Learn English which gives input for young learner through song and animation and Randall’s website which provide listening skill practice program with contextual topic like conversation in telephone for adult learner. Both of the websites also elicit an optimal stage learning with provide a game and immediate test to examine learner understanding. The best thing is the correction of error is really instant but it won’t make learner feel ashamed if they did wrong.

            Other technology to teach listening skill is based on TPR (Total Physical Response) which proposed by Asher. This technique has strong believes that learner shouldn’t be force to produce output if they are not ready yet. This faith seems obviously in the websites which use this technique like Live Action English Interactive and TPR games. For example in Live Action English Interactive website, it provides a lot of video which tell about a certain activity complete with the illustration.  All teacher need to do are download the video, show the video in front of class and ask student to do pantomiming based on the video. Learner shouldn’t  have to produce any outcome like utterances or writing.

            Meanwhile in the 9^th session I learned about technology to teach speaking, honestly I had high expectation to explore all the CALL’s to teach speaking skill. I was thinking I would find a high tech CALL which could recognize and assess people’s speaking skill in English accurately, fairly and immediately.

            But then my high expectations kind of broken when I figure out that most of websites only provide programs to teach learners about the right pronunciation and repeat it by themselves alone.  Some of websites provide facilitate to record someone’s voice but the there is no assessment or correction from the website. The only human and machine interaction exist is when the website record someone’s voice.  Another bad point is some websites are ‘so heavy’ so it is not easy to open the website completely especially in my place which doesn’t have good internet connection.

            Last I will end my reflection with say that actually I hope soon there is a CALL who can assess someone’s speaking skill accurately  and I also hope internet connection in my place will get better and better.