CALL Review 3

Time flies! It's already half past November, and there are not many weeks left until winter vacation. And this will be my last CALL review for this semester! :-( I think I was fortunate enough to take this course and was able to learn (and will learn for next few weeks) a lot of ICT second language teaching materials and resources. I would never have known these much about CALL and MALL which is very crucial and play central roles in teaching L2 in recent years.

I have learned many tools for teaching speaking and writing (+ a few teaching reading tools) ever since I have written my second CALL review. Speaking and writing, as reproductive skills that are often neglected in classroom instruction in Korean educational context, can be implemented through CALL tools and materials. On this CALL review, I would like to elaborate more on "Wikispace." (http://www.wikispaces.com/)

I can explain Wikispace with 4 keywords borrowed from applied linguistics terminology; Collaborative writing, Classroom management, Social writing, and Formative Assessment. Let's look into one by one.

First, as you can guess from the word 'wiki' that it contains, Wikispace is a great tool for collaborative writing. If you ever have googled something, you must have heard of (or presumably used) Wikipedia before. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which anybody who has a connection to the Internet can create and edit articles. Basically, someone who play a role in creating and processing can become a co-author. Wikispace adapts the similar system, which certain participants can collaborate in writing and adds educational features to be used in classrooms. You can have every member of your classroom in one of your 'wikis' you create on Wikispace and participate in writing project. Process Approach is the key approach here,

Secondly, Wiki participants can have a social communication as well. They can comment each other freely on their writing projects or talk in general just like you do in Social Networking System. The different thing is that it is for more closed groups. You won't be able to participate in any sort of communication unless you are a member.

Thirdly, Classroom management is also an important educational feature of Wikispace. Since all participants are in the wiki and a teacher is able to look at each's contribution to the project, managing is not a big issue on Wikispace. It is rather easy! You can send out every one the message though Social communicating feature and be able to see their log-in time and so.

Last but not least, formative assessment will be easily completed. As I have mentioned earlier, Wiki is a big help for process approach of teaching L2 writing. In process approach, formative assessment is crucial, not summative assessment. A teacher will be able to evaluate student's in-process participation with a graphic aid. Formative assessment can enhance collaborative writing.

I have look through the features of Wikispace. I think wikispace is a very educational website and depending on a teacher's intention, it can be very useful in both in-class and out of class activity and writing task for students.

CALL Skill Practive 5

http://hyeonq.wikispaces.com/Being+Tardy
A wiki story created by Hyeon Gyu Ko and Taewhan Kim

CALL Skill Practive 4: Creating animation dialogue by using Go animate

Funny by Taewhan Kim on GoAnimate


I made a funny video clip using GO Animate.
I think this website is very useful in a sense that you can create your own video on your preference.
This is highly applicable to classroom speaking class but it is quite time-consuming becuase you have to create from scratch.

CALL Review 2

Ever since I have wrote a CALL review 1, which was a few weeks ago, I have learned tremendous amount of CALL resources and tools within classes in terms of teaching vocabulary, listening and speaking. Since I have already discussed about the use of concordances and corpus data in my first review, I would like to elaborate on podcasting resource for teaching listening and speaking, which are for the practical use of language.

Podcasting is quite a useful online resource that can be used when teaching both speaking and listening in and out of classroom settings. So what is a podcast? Even though it has been spreading out as a popular listening material, It is definitely not something popular in Korea. It is a online subscription of broadcasting through a blog or other related platform. Because the word 'podcast' itself is a combination of 'iPod' and 'broadcasting' and iTunes is the most popular podcasting provider in the world, Koreans are not quite familiar with downloading and listening to podcasting. And I think I was one of them. I knew what a podcast is but never thought it could be used for language learning and teaching. I am glad to learn many resources that I could further utilize when I become an English teacher.

The podcast providing resource that I liked the most was "Elllo" (http://www.elllo.org/). Ello offers 6 different categories (Views, Videos, Mixers, Games, Scenes, and News Room) to find the one for your teaching materials and sub-categorized topics. What is good about this website is it provides a detailed script also, so you can explore the further activities or task. Within classroom setting, when connected to internet, the site itself provides a few activities you can do with students such as fill-in-the-blank questions or comprehension quiz. Just like any other podcast providing website, you will find a link to download mp3 files. If you try to seek more an integrative learning experience, You can use Elllo podcast (especially Mixer ones) for teaching speaking. Use the discourse as a fixed script for dialogues for group or pair works. Or use podcast listening materials as a pre-speaking activities and make students speak on their own. The broad spectrum of podcasting materials available online will enable teachers to come up with instruction that follows with their own principles of teaching

Another benefit of using podcast is that there are tremendous amounts of resources on the Internet. Depending on the level of your students' proficiency, You will be able to find the right one even with the consideration of Krashen's i+1 hypothesis. Especially for advanced learners, I highly recommend you utilize iTunes U, which enables you to access to complete courses from leading universities and other schools such as Berkeley, Harvard and etc. The podcasts that iTunes U offers are the listening files of the classes from those prestigious universities. Not only the authentic and meaningful input these can be, iTunes U can give the positive intrinsic motivation to L2 learners.

The best thing about podcasting that other tools cannot even compete with is that with the understanding of Web 2.0 and mobile application, both teachers and students can utilize podcasting everywhere with a help of today's advanced technology. The applications like Good Morning Pops or iListen, students can listen to authentic English wherever they go.

Just because now I know so much about how podcasting works and the true benefits of podcasting, I will, as a continuous L2 learner, use podcasts autonomously for improving my English proficiency of speaking and listening.

CALL Skill Practice 3; Fill-in-the-blank (Task 1)

Please Listen to the following audio file and do the fill-in-the-blank exercise ^^

Record and upload audio >>

CALL Skill practice 3: Halloween (Task 2)

[Pre-Listening]
Do a quick brainstorming with students by asking students' background knowledge about Halloween day. Draw a mind map with the words and terms that students come up with.


[While-Listening]
Provide students a fill-in-the-blank exercise of the song lyric. The blanks are mainly the words that are related to Halloween day and its culture, so students will find a correlation between the words that they need to fill in and the words that they brainstormed.


[Post-Listening]
Do a group discussion about other yearly celebrations only exist in the United States or other English speaking country such as Halloween. Make them compare ones in South Korea with those.

The Wishy Washy Washer Woman with Vocaroo

Record and upload voice >>

I used "Vocaroo(http://vocaroo.com/)" to only extract the audio that I want

The Wishy Washy Washer Woman with Google Drive

CALL Skill Practice 2

 I made my own concordancer using the free software provided from this website (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/)

I have made this using three full scripts of different movies. It is very easy and quick process that you can utilize for vocabulary teaching. L2 learners tend to not pay attention to collocations, but teachers can teach them using concordance in classroom. For example, with this skill practice, I myself have learned that the word 'another' is not used with definite artice such as a/an.

Sample Student Writing improvement using concordancer

[Sample Student Writing]

Actually, many people think that bartender is just a person who simply makes cocktails. And they also think that foreign language skills are not needed to be a good bartender. But it's not true. Even in korea, many foreigners went a bar for cocktails. For them, bartender has to recommend or introduce cocktail's name and its taste. Of course, most people knew what they want to drink, but in case of cocktail beginner, they don't have any infomation about cocktail. I think it is the basic virtue of bartender. So I have to study a brewery English and hotel English. I have a textbook about those two area. It is little bit difficult, because of the idiom expression. So I'm studying hotel English expression. I memorized the word overbooking. I didn't know about what it means. Delux room is also new word. But I am studying with fun. It fits me!!

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[Improved Writing using Concordancer]

Actually, many people think that a bartender is just a person who simply makes cocktails. And they also think that foreign language skills are not needed to be a good bartender. But it's not true. Even in Korea, many foreigners go to a bar for drinking cocktails. For them, bartenders have to recommend or introduce a cocktail's name and its taste. Of course, most people know what they want to drink, but in case of a cocktail beginner, they don't have any information about cocktails. I think it is the basic virtue of bartender. So I have to study English words about brewery and hospitality. I have a textbook about those two fields. It is a little bit difficult, because of the idiom expressions. So I'm studying English expression for hotel business. I memorized the word 'overbooking'. I didn't know what it means. 'Deluxe room' is also a new word. I am studying while having fun. It fits me!!


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I have used Google, a easy-to-use concordancer, to improve the sample writing.
For example, in order to find out whether 'a basic virtue' is right or 'the basic virtue' is right, I simply typed both word on google with quotation marks and it gives the number of search results found. More natural and native-like expression will have a higher number of search results.

I didn't use concordancer to correct student's typing or spelling errors and misuse of singular and plural nouns. (I need a suggestion for this)

For the odd expressions like 'hotel english' and 'brewery english', I typed in both words on google and could not find any relative search results, so I corrected on my own as I assume it is not a really authentic language use.

I could improve the sample writing expressions/sentence use too (Not only incorrect single word uses) For some expressions like 'studying with fun', Even though I could find some search results, I could definitely tell that "have fun while studying" or "studying while having fun" is more widely used expression with the number of search results, so I changed it.

With this exercise, I will definitely use concordancer programs like google for my own writing, because I now know it is a very useful and straightforward tool for language learning.

Taewhan's CALL Review 1

So far, I have taken 4 classes in ‘Use of Multimedia in ELT’ course. I think I have learned a lot within a very short period of time. And I think it is very good that I get to write a review like this because it will help me to remember things I learned much longer.

During the first week of the course, I learned what is ‘CALL’; Computer Assisted Language Learning. It is a very important terminology that generally includes all kinds of language learning that involves computing and associated devices such as mobile phones. Since I am in the generation which I grow up with the developing technology, I am very much familiar with the use of those devices but not with using those as a learning tool. In Korean educational context, they call it ‘Smart Learning’ in order to describe an interactive learning experience with Information Technology and they highlights expands and utilization of smart learning for this decade. Since I want to be an English teacher in South Korea, I feel the necessity to learn how to incorporate CALL into learning instruction. Knowing about this new cutting-edge language teaching method definitely evokes my interests to discover about CALL more.

As a beginning of the semester-long CALL introduction, we created a blog which itself is a great tool for CALL and autonomy in learning. I have already created one 4 years ago when I took an ‘ICT and autonomy in learning’ course and decided to use it again, instead of creating a new one. For the first step to decorate my blog, the professor introduced ‘Microsoft Powerpoint’ as a powerful tool to make an illustrative work without such professional tool like ‘Adobe Photoshop’. You can do lots of simple task with this program and I will absolutely use it for my future photo works. Also, I learned how to do a survey interaction using the website “http://www.polleverywhere.com“ This website is partially free for all and is very useful to interact with a small number of people. It works simultaneously just if you are connected to the Internet. It seemed like it is a pretty applicable voting tool.

During the second week of the course, we finally started to go into more details in terms of teaching language through CALL. The first topic is about teaching Vocabulary. As we learned the new theories, terminologies and even some methodologies about vocabulary teaching, some effective vocabulary teaching resources are introduced. In accordance with the Lexical Approach that Michael Lewis introduced in 1993, the professor and I looked through the websites that offers a variety of activities that involves learning collocations and others. One of the best websites was British National Corpus “http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/” Through this website, I could easily check up the natural and native-like collocations because it lists the search result by the frequency of usage. Visuwords Online “http://www.visuwords.com” was another interesting website that offers online graphical dictionary. It gives you a straightforward visual mind-map of the word that you type in. I think younger kids will be a good target for this because they tend to learn visually. Lastly, I also very liked the Wordsmyth. “http://www.wordsmyth.net/” This site offers you a free glossary maker. I think I will use this website with the top priority when I teach kids. Within a few clicks, you can print out a glossary list that is essential tool to teach kids vocabulary in classrooms.

I didn’t review the all the websites that I looked through in class because they are too many. I picked few that I like. For the future reference of vocabulary resources, please visit my professor’s blog “http://proactiveteacher.blogspot.kr/2012/02/corpus-concordance-and-data-driven.html” I think because of the less complexity, teaching vocabulary is the field that you can utilize a variety of CALL and multimedia resources. I think I have learned a lot only during the past 2 weeks and I am highly looking forwards to going to class more times.

CALL Skill Practice 1

It is my first CALL skill practice 1 using EclipseCrossword program.
This is a very useful and easy tool to create a simple crossword puzzle exercise.
I highly recommend all of you to utilize this program.

The website address for the future reference is http://www.eclipsecrossword.com/
Go download the program and start using ^^