Rich and innovative as it is, CALL is not a program meant to substitute
face to face speaking activities. This program is designed to address - among
other issues - to problems related to anxiety and psychological
inconveniences which may occur to ‘some’ students during real classroom confrontation.
To me, it’s therefore another instructive and constructive tool that needs to be implemented to improve
the quality and the way speaking is integrated in the curriculum.
I can’t deny that such applications as SLIM and ‘Conversation’ whose
designers have apparently paid careful attention to minute details, do open up learning horizons which definitely
outnumber those created by teachers in classrooms. Nevertheless, people speak
to people not to machines in real life
and this leads us to believe that CALL can solve teaching problems but it can
be the biggest problem in case we rely solely on it.
Hi Omar,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point that the advent of CALL is beneficial for those language learners who confront social anxiety. It does give them the silver lining for they may feel more comfortable and easy to talk to computers instead of face to face interaction. However, as you said, it can cause another problem if we only rely on it. After all, it provides virtual world not the real one.
Omar and Yu-Zhen,
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree with you that computer programs or web 2.0 tools cannot replace real communication. ‘People speak to people not to machines,’ that’s so true. However, sometimes we do need web tools and equipment to make students practice or just get together across cultures! One of the applications that can be very useful to achieve certain teaching goals and combines virtual machinery world with real communication is Google Talk:
• It can be used for real time communication;
• It is a valuable tool for organizing group discussions and international online projects;
• It provides students with considerable communicative practice and improves their listening and speaking skills;
• It provides both Text Chat (Instant messages, Status updates, File transfer) and Voice Chat (Free long distance, Audio conferencing and Google Mail integration).
I believe there are more tools like this one and it can be hard not to get lost in all of them. Perhaps it would be good to concentrate on just some of them and learn to operate them perfectly? Don’t you agree?