TECHNOLOGY AND THE FOUR SKILLS
Robert Blake, University of California, Davis

Abstract

• review article
• computer-assisted language learning (CALL)
• second language (L2)
• 4 skills: speaking, listening, reading, writing
• task-based language teaching (TBLT)

Introduction

• Gass(1997) defined L2 learning: interactions, communication breakdowns to prime the language acquisition pump
• Instructors attend to more traditional measures, care more about the four skills have been adequately addressed, and are interested in the practical applications of any given technological tool or textbook

Introduction

• CALL programs and activities were praised for supporting reading (Chun 2006), cultural knowledge (Blake 2013), and writing (Oskoz & Elola 2014a) but NOT speaking and listening.
• examine the advantages afforded by CALL with respect to the four skills and pay particular attention to speech production and listening comprehension

Language Tasks

• González-Lloret (2015): represents Dewey's "learning by doing".
• Willis (1996): a goal-oriented activity in which learners use language to achieve a real outcome
• involves authentic meaning-oriented communication

Long (2014): TBLT framework

• conduct a needs analysis to identity target tasks that are important to their students
• classify the target tasks into task-types
• develop pedagogic tasks
• sequence the tasks to form a syllabus

Appropriate level of complexity

• Robinson (2011)
• the number of task elements
• the task length
• the allotted planning time
• the extent of the learners’ prior knowledge about the topic

Skehan (2003): Best tasks

• carefully structured with both a pre-planning and a post-task phase
• organized around familiar information
• equire analysis or justification
• interactive or dialogic in nature by virtue of asking the participants to work together

Technology-mediated TBLT

• González-Lloret (2015)
• Doughty and Long (2003)
• Affordances: special features and functions that a particular digital tool allows L2 learners to engage in
• students must be trained how to use technology

L2 SPEAKING

• tutorial CALL
• memory storage of L2 phonemic and morphological contrasts
• lexical phrase retrieval
• Teixeira (2015): electronic flash cards can help when learners subvocalize new words
• lack of any feedback

L2 SPEAKING - tutorial CALL

• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• work best in clearly circumscribed linguistic sub-domains or micro-worlds
• Ehsani & Knodt 1998: specific tasks, such as individual sound practice, word recognition, or short sentence repetition
• commercially available programs: Dragon software (Nuance); TeLL Me More (Rosetta Stone)

L2 SPEAKING - tutorial CALL

• Dictation exercises: transcribe into the L2 what the learner said
• Dragon software, Online Dictation, Evernote, TalkTyper, VoiceAssistant, Speechlogger, PaperPort
• errors indicate the pronunciation has deviated from the statistical norms
• Swain (2000), Swain and Lapkin (1998): a feedback loop enhancing L2 speaking

L2 SPEAKING - tutorial CALL

• PRAAT: doing phonetics by computer
• a free computer software package for the scientific analysis of speech in phonetics
• Chun (2002); O’Brien (2006); and Gorjian, Hayati, and Pourkhoni (2013)
• pronunciation training on L2 intonation patterns

L2 SPEAKING - CMC tools

• VoiceThread: create collaborative online stories with sound, images, and text
• add comments, answer questions
• Asynchronous CMC (ACMC) with audio at a distance

L2 SPEAKING - ACMC tools

• learning manage systems (LMSs) add a Flash plugin
• post video recording
• Guillén & Blake(in press): increase planning time and improve accuracy; increase linguistic complexity and promote fluency

L2 SPEAKING - ACMC tools

• use digital video tools and upload recordings to YouTube
• Blake and Sh’iri (2012): first-year Arabic class at UC Berkeley
• great satisfaction to both students and instructors; feedback from entire class

L2 SPEAKING - SCMC tools

• Synchronous CMC (SCMC) tools
• Videoconferencing: exchange video, images, and text in real time
• Adobe Connect, Big Blue Button, Blackboard Collaborate, Skype, Google Hangout, Zoom
• telecollaboration projects; tandem learning experiments; social media exchanges; online language curriculum (O’Dowd, 2007; Guillén, 2014; Lin, Warschauer, & Blake, 2016; Blake, 2011)

Speaking proficiency

• Hulstijn (2011,2015): basic linguistic proficiency, extended or academic linguistic proficiency
• L2 student could have a good sense of extended proficiency WITHOUT mastered basic linguistic proficiency
• such as correct pronunciation or appropriate intonation or the pragmatics of sarcasm

L2 SPEAKING

• CMC training help to avoid intercultural miscommunications that might occur as a by-product of using the computer medium
• well-designed tasks improve student outcomes by promoting successful and satisfying online exchanges

L2 LISTENING

• native-speaker authored content (Hubbard, in press)
• L1 speakers routinely author materials for members of the same speech community (Blake, 2013)
• Instructor needs to frame these materials linguistically and culturally in ways that will be meaningful for L2 learners.

L2 LISTENING

• pre-listening activities; cultural background; follow-up activities
• annotations for videos with questions, comments, and comprehension checks (Zaption, Thinglink, Adobe Captivate)
• Gass(1997): reiterative processing stages of comprehended (not just comprehensible) input, intake, uptake, and output

L2 LISTENING - Caption

• blurred division between listening and reading skills
• Borrás and Lafayette (1994): better listening comprehension and speaking performance
• Plass and Jones (2005): dual processing
• Winke, Gass, and Sydorenko (2010): positive vocabulary and comprehension effect

L2 LISTENING - Caption

• the use of captions, transcripts, input enhancement, electronic glossaries, links to dictionaries, or speed control (Cárdenas-Claros and Gruba, 2012; Chapelle, 2003)
• mixed results depend on individual factors
• package authentic materials & create effective listening activities for learners

L2 LISTENING - future

• allow to stop captioned videos at will by simply clicking on the captioned words so as to link directly to dictionary glosses
• only 21.3% of students used the L2 glosses for listening vs 73.9% for reading (Jin and Deifell, 2013)

L2 LISTENING - future

• content curation: the collection of enriched media for the learner organized by topic, language level, and other features (Hubbard, in press)
• Brigham Young University’s Arclite Project; Berkeley Language Center’s Library of Foreign Language Film Clips; ELEclips for Spanish, CLILstore by the European Union

L2 LISTENING - future

• how to put together sound pedagogical tasks to accompany the videos
• In a TBLT approach, the linguistic level of the videos can be higher than what the learner can produce, but the task can be fitted to correspond to their learner’s present abilities.
• need to receive training for learner autonomy

L2 READING

• exclusively or primarily text-based on the web (Godwin-Jones, 2015)
• textual persistence: the text preserved on the computer screen permits L2 learners more time to process unfamiliar linguistic structures (Payne, 2004)

L2 READING - glossing

• Lingua.ly: online glossing program, provides definitions with audio for languages
• L2 students preferred to access simple definitions in their L1 (Knight 1994, Karp 2002)
• combined glosses: picture or video in addition to the translations (Chun 2006; Yanguas 2009)

L2 READING - comprehension

• vocabulary recognition ╪ reading comprehension
• explicit multimedia CALL instruction benefits L2 lexical growth (Arispe 2012)
• But fluent reading skills are impacted by complicated factors (L1 reading levels, L2 language proficiency, and background knowledge...)
• pre-reading activities (Chun, 2006)

L2 READING

• lines between reading and writing are being further blurred by Web 2.0
• wreading (Allen 2003)
• digital social reading (Blyth 2014)
• reading online can also entail collaborative digital writing

L2 WRITING

• electronic discussion forums, blogs, wikis, shared documents (Google docs)
• writing tools available within LMS platforms
• using social digital tools as part of a multimodal and staged approach to collaborative writing (Oskoz and Elola, 2014a; Kessler, Bikowski, and Boggs, 2012)

L2 WRITING - CMC

• social CALL and CMC writing are similar to oral speech (Payne & Whitney, 2002)
• L2 learners wrote more turns than those talking face-to-face (Kern, 1995)
• engage in telecollaborations with native speakers at a distance, with the multicultural misunderstandings that might arise

L2 WRITING - Academic

• CMC tools foster collaborate work and feedback at stages of the writing process (Oskoz and Elola, 2014a)
• revisions, re-writings, and re-editing produce improvements; reactions from other readers and audience stimulate more effort (Yoon, 2008; Oskoz & Elola, 2014b)

L2 WRITING - Corpus

• Vocabulary size takes considerable time to grow (Cobb, 2007)
• Corpus tools and concordances can fine-tune word usage at any stage of L2 development (Gaskell & Cobb, 2004)
• Linguee
• must be trained to search for correct lexical phrasing & frequent collocations

L2 WRITING - Storytelling

• Oskoz and Elola (2014b): using digital tools (iMovie or FinalCut) to produce digital stories published on YouTube
• learning by doing
• a multimedia and literary (scripted) artifact
• feedback from the class

L2 WRITING - Fanfiction

• online networks of fans of books, movies, or musical bands
• resemble what students are actually doing in real life, give more meaning and personal investment (Sauro 2014)
• fandom reading sparks writing and sharing, stimulating more reading, writing, and sharing in an ongoing cycle.

L2 WRITING - Community

• transnational CMC communities can facilitate L2 writing in English
• multicultural identities; personal textual voice; social roles; sense of belonging
• it’s a way of finding your THIRD PLACE (neither an L1 nor an L2 identity, but rather a bilingual identity) in a multicultural world (Kramsch, 2009)

CONCLUSIONS

• Competence is no longer just grammatical but also communicative, symbolic, and relational, ruled by pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and cultural considerations. (Hymes 1974; Kramsch 2009; Kern 2014)
• 4 skills are not self-contained proficiency modules that can be adequately evaluated in isolation (Hulstijn 2011, 2015)

CONCLUSIONS

• all of them connect to multicultural competence and the construction of a bilingual identity (Kramsch's Third Place)
• teachers construct sound TBLT activities by a more integrated implementation of L2 learning with an impressive array of CALL tools standing at ready to help