Digital natives vs. digital immigrants

Who are we? Digital natives or immigrants?

When I see my nephew, who is just 6 years old and can use a computer, iPad or iPhone very well and does all kinds of fun stuff such as downloading files, uploading videos and pictures on his Facebook, I often question the pace of technology in our lives. It is funny that I had no idea of technology until I attended the university. I believed that there was a magic IT room that we could get connected to the world, and when we were out of that room, we were not connected virtually to search on Altavista or Yahoo. I didn't get the idea that the existence of the internet as our new space or persona was simply there outside the IT room. By the time I was good at using the computer and some software, I was nearly graduating from the college. Now you can tell that this might happen and it is called as the generation gap. It might be but more than this, it is a singularity as Prensky (2001) says: "A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century".

According to Prensky (2001) how might this singularity affect our teaching then?

The profile of students as digital natives is as follows: 

1. Today's students think and process information differently from their predecessors.
2. Today's students speak of a language different than their predecessors. That is, the language of the digital immigrants refers to going faster, less step-by-step and more random access.

The basic thoughts for teachers:

1. Teachers need to reconsider teaching methods for the learners who cannot tolerate the slow pace and step by step processes.
2. Teachers should take the content into consideration. Whatever they teach, they need to think if they can make the teaching more efficient by using technology, thus getting the attention of the students of 21st century.

Reference: 

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. Retrieved on http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf

Teaching content-specific vocabulary by using corpus tools

What is a content-specific vocabulary?

It is conceptually related to specific content and crucial to the instruction of the content. It is highly noticeable and defined in the context. For example, you can read the following sentence in an anthropology textbook: "This way of responding to cultural different behavior is known as ethnocentrism- the belief that one's own culture is most desirable and superior to all others". (Ferraro, 1995, p. 23)

What is a academic word?

It is not salient as content-specific word because it is not directly related to the topic of certain content. It is often used in a variety of contexts and in addition to this, it is extremely difficult to explain. In terms of teachability,  although content-specific words are of importance for students to master the content of a particular content, we need to consider that academic vocabulary might be more important for the success in the long run.

Using corpus to search academic vocabulary:

First of all, a concordancer is needed to check the occurrence of the words. When a concordance creates a frequency list, teachers can compare it with the existing list of academic vocabulary (Nation, 2001). This enables teachers become aware of a set of academic words that occur in academic context. Students  can work on the frequency list, concordance lines and extended concordance displays for further context with the help of teacher. Teachers can also create their own corpus, uploading the files on the concordance program and make the database for the distribution of the academic words used in the context. Additionally they can encourage students to compare their own definitions or knowledge of the language patterns with the context in the concordance. All these might help raise the awareness of words and inferencing skills.

Reference:

Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: CUP.

Twitter and student engagement

                                               Image retrieved from http://teacherstraining.com.au/twitter-for-education/

Social media has attracted the interest in most of the sectors ranging from business to education. According to Hughes (2009), it motivates students to be more active learners. It is no doubt that it makes people more social and current; yet I am a bit suspicious about believing that it makes people active learner. Integrating various social tools into teaching and learning has become trendy after the social networking sites have sold the idea of getting connected with the others wherever they are.  Most of the college students use social networking to keep updated or present themselves virtually. Twitter is one of the primary microblogging platforms that people follow what is going on in 140 characters. It provides constant engagement in what is going on in the world. I have a twitter account and every time I log in, I lose the sense of rigid structure of information receiving. Every minute there appears more tweets to replace the others. I have read the article The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades by Junco, Heibergert and Loken (2011). When reading the literature review, I am convinced that twitter provides 1) student/faculty contact, 2) student cooperation 3) prompt feedback. Other principles listed under the good practice of twitter are active learning, and emphasizing time on task are flawed for me. As a language teacher, I would like to see a concrete example to believe in claims that it increases active learning. What is there for us to regard the twitter engagement as learning outcome by active participation? How can it emphasize time on task when the flows are constant and when you miss being updated and you feel behind the flow of time? The study mainly aims to examine what effects encouraging the use of Twitter for educational purposes have on students' engagement and semester grades. Honestly speaking, I am still not sure what it means by student engagement. Student engagement in what? Student engagement in construction of learning, or learning processes or social being? They are all relative and might directly or indirectly affect Twitter users (students). Designing a semester-course and working with experimental and control groups to keep updated for class discussion, reminders, assistance and study groups, the authors have concluded that the experimental group has a significant increase in engagement in learning process than the control group. The main limitation is that the scope is too narrow and is not operationalized. The other limitation is to measure the engagement. The study measured the engagement through self-report, not through student active engagement. The real life observations are left out. Last but not least, there might be other variations to cause an increase in student engagement.

References:

Hughes, A. (2009) Higher education in a Web 2.0 world. JISC Report. Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/ documents/publications/heweb20rptv1.pdf 

Junco, R., Heiberger, G., & Loken, E. (2011). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(2), 119-132

Learning communities on Facebook

I have a question: Can we turn a fun social networking site into learning environment? Personally, I think  we cannot or we shouldn't. We have a separate space in life: social space is for fun and connection to others. I might confront some of the scholars by stating my personal opinions. An article Using the Facebook group as a learning management system: An exploratory study by Wang et al. (2001) claimed that students were contended with Facebook functioning as LMS. The procedure of the study was basically setting up the Facebook group for students to put up announcements, resources for sharing, weekly tutorials and online discussions at a teacher education institute in Singapore. Although we know that Facebook has been a hit in social media, I think its use for the educational purposes are limited. Students might be engaged in discussions and receive the announcements. These are basically how one can plan. For receiving resources, it is rather limited. One can post videos or weblinks but not pdf files or Word documents that you might also need to share. Privacy is another consideration to taken into account. How autonomous and public can a teacher be in organizing the structure of the learning environment? More importantly, it does not make students learn by doing. Imagine that a language instructor puts up a weblink and asks students to check the information on the site and join the discussion. Do you think students learn the information for the sake of the common social platform they share? I am quite suspicious to claim that fun private social networking can be also utilized as learning environment. Yes, it can be regarded as learning environment for not specific content matters but social matters. As a Facebook user, I get informed about the news, funny video clips, youtube videos, an extract from a magazine or a column or review from a newspaper. If you count all these as construction of learning, I do agree I am learning socially and Facebook can contribute to my learning to be updated. The bottom line is this argument here: if users are obliged to use the social platform for a specific educational reason, where have the key elements of learning such motivation, learner autonomy and preferences gone?

Reference:

Wang, Q., Woo, H. L., Quek, C. L., Yang, Y. & Liu, M. (2011). Using the Facebook group as a learning management system: An exploratory study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(3), 428–438.

Multimedia ESP

Do you think it is important for pilots to know aviation English? Yes? No?

Watch this video:

I have read an article "Utilising multimedia ESP programme in enhancing flight attendants’ safety knowledge and problem solving skills" by Bani-Salameh, Kabilan & Bani-Salameh (2011). The article remarkably presents the importance of the simulation-based environment with the multimedia tools to teach ESP for aviation personal especially flight attendants. It draws our attention to the limitations of the existing methods of teaching ESP for flight attendants and suggests that authentic real life context should be developed by utilizing technology and multimedia tools and students’ cognitive skills should be enhanced. The authors designed a program based on Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction to teach safety knowledge and problem-solving tasks through listening and reading comprehension and worked with 36 flight attendants. The result indicates that the designed ESP program has an observable effect on the flight attendants’ recall of safety knowledge and problem solving skills. Although the study is one of the recent publication that highlights the importance of the integration of multimedia tools in teaching ESP, it has some flaws. For example, the language skills is very limited (only listening and reading are measured) and an operational definition of problem-solving task related to aviation does not exist. Additionally, the relation between Gagne’s theory and the structure of the content is not clear. I think that instead of taking aside for every kind of technological innovations and regarding it better than the traditional method of teaching, it is safer to consider potentials for improvement as well as the integration of classroom-based and multimedia ESP.

Reference:

Bani-Salameh, Z. A., Kabilan, M. K. & Bani-Salalmeh, L. (2011). Utilising multimedia ESP programme in enhancing flight attendants' safety. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(6), 1003–1015.

What have corpora got to with language teachers? A brief note on my experience!

Not until I came to Atlanta and started my program here did I know how a teacher can use corpus in the class. I never felt interested in it as the discussion of the ownership of English was reasoned. Then I got to know how to use the concordance lextutor for our graduate writing class. In the following week, Dr. Friginal talked about it in our Technology and Language Teaching class. He mentioned his study in which he investigated the impact of the use of corpora and corpus-based instruction on the development of report writing skills of college-level students enrolled in a professional forestry program. He concluded that corpus instruction contributed to students' learning the patterns of the frequencies, and distributional data of linking words, reporting verbs and verb tenses in the students' reports in a positive way. As an assignment of the course, I prepared a 45-minute-lesson with an aim of teaching adverbial hedgers such as likely, perhaps, and probably. The assignment gave me an opportunity to design my writing class for the College of Business students and to realize that the corpus based activities were not too complicated at all. Indeed, by using corpora, a language teacher can create activities that students can raise their awareness in terms of the frequency of patterns and words, and variation across registers. In her article "Corpora and teaching academic writing: Exploring the pedagogical potential of MICUSP", Römer (in press) mentions direct and indirect pedagogical applications of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). She stated that students learning Academic English can directly browse papers related to their fields and carry out simple word or phrase searches.  When students are engaged in finding certain patterns and a frequency of a certain word, they can figure out the use of certain structures like this and might notice common phraseological items and their textual positions in the sample papers in the corpus. Based on my personal experiences and knowledge I got out of readings, I believe corpus-based activities created for language teaching (mainly reading and writing) are valuable for students who are in need of seeing the certain patterns and words in context as well as the collocations of the words.

For the tutorial, visit the website: http://micusp.elicorpora.info/micusp-simple-tutorials

Reference:
Römer, U. (in press). Corpora and teaching academic writing: Exploring the pedagogical potential of MICUSP.
To be published in Thomas, J and A. Boulton (eds.). Input, Process and Product: Development in Teaching and Language Corpora. Bruo: MUP.

Podcasting

Podcasting is a term that refers to downloadable audio or video over the internet. The word "podcast" is derived from combination of "pod" from iPod and "cast" from the word broadcast and was first used by Ben Hammersley, a British internet technologist, at his columm in the Guardian newspaper in 2004. It has become so popular in the USA that the podcast audiences have increased in numbers for the past few years (According to the assumption by emarketers, there will be 3.7 people downloading podcasting in 2013 and it was around 17,4 million according to the 2008 figure).

What benefits does podcasting provide for in education, especially in language learning?

1) It provides accessible practice for language learning. Students can listen to the material outside the class or at their leisure times and they continue to learn out of the classroom environement through podcasting.

2) It is authentic. That is, it provides real input to practise language learning.

3) It helps students to develop oral and comprehension skills (Ducate & Lomicka, 2009) and facilitates self-paced learning.

4) It builds a sense of community sharing and learning from others.

5) It offers richer learning environment for students with different learning styles.

There is a tutorial showing how you can create podcasting using the software Audacity, which is a digital audio editor program. There are a lot of free software to enable people (teachers and students) to create podcasting. Some of them are propaganda, evoca and podcastpeople. 

Before getting started, here are some tips for you:

• Write the script first, and provide students with the script,
• State your goals clearly at the beginning and review these goals at the end of the podcast,
• Normalize and balance the sound quality,
• Insert dialogs, images and videos to add variety of input and avoid the monotone sound.

Some useful links for language teachers:

http://www.podcastsinenglish.com

http://www.businessenglishpod.com

http://www.manythings.org/e/podcasts.html

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/english-as-second-language/id75908431

http://a4esl.org/podcasts/