CALL II Course

In order to improve the Learning style of the Course CALL II we made a kind of survey to more or less than 21 students of Languages School of 5^th Semester, and here we have the resumed results in a chart:

Students’ needs from CALL II Course
What to learn in CALL II	# of students	How to learn in CALL II	# of students
General	7	Dynamically	7
Social software	4	Do not say	1
Translators	3	Participating	1
Websites	3	Searching	1
Software (Freewares)	3	Team Work	1
TIC integration	1	Team Work	1
Human Language Technologies	5	Practicing	18

And now, here we have the statistical and graphical form of the chart in a graphic with the percentages of what students want to learn and how they want to learn it:

Searching on the Web, we found some books and articles that support CALL, and explain how CALL is useful in the second language classroom. First we have the book called New Perspectives On CALL For Second Language Classrooms, that in the chapter Perspectives in Classroom CALL talks about the usage of CALL in the classroom and that CALL is design to increase students engagement with the target language, also that with CALL students are responsible for their own learning.

Another book is the CALL Dimensions: Options and Issues in Computer-Assisted Language Learning which has an entire chapter of practice, named with that label Practice here the author emphasize that practice is a very important issue in CALL classrooms and that this word appears very often in CALL books, also it has the discussion Knowing What You Want to Achieve that says “Successfully use of CALL depends heavily on teachers having a clear idea of what they want to achieve in the classroom…” so I believe that with this kind of survey we are accomplishing that point.

And last but not least, we have the book Brave New Digital Classroom: Technology and Foreign Language Learning by Robert J. Blake who is SLA and CALL researcher and also one of the premiers CALL software /courseware developers, and he is certainly an outstanding teacher. Another important thing is the way the book is written which is in a very user-friendly style and succeeds in conveying several very important points: the technology is not a methodology, that underlying principles of second language acquisition (SLA) must form the basis of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) etc. For those points we think this book will be a very good work tool for the teacher but also for the students, in order to have a successful acquisition of learning.

Finally, our proposal is that we need to keep practicing because now that we have read some books telling us that practicing is way too important in the CALL classroom is necessarily to emphasize this part, there will always exist errors on what we purpose to do and perhaps we cannot see them but making this type of analysis makes us realize of them.

We also need to keep updating ourselves, to not lose the track to new software or new websites because according to the chart information, that is what we most want to learn and the fact that we keep searching for new things makes our learning process more dynamic.

Escuela de Lenguas | ELe.