CALL and autonomy

A couple of years ago, I started crafting an online PLN; and in following edtech bloggers, I began to get an inkling of the myriad tech tools that were available online. Last year, I began to incorporate tech tools into my classes in earnest, and I started to more fully appreciate the ways these tools could promote autonomy by offering a wide range of choices and removing learning from the confines of the classroom. 

In light of all of this, this week’s reading was particularly interesting to me, as it took these nascent ideas and suggested new directions, links, and perspectives that I hadn’t previously considered. The focus of the reading was computer programs providing language instruction, but many of its points can also apply to tech tools that act as a medium/excuse for using language, as well.

Our reading this week:

Healey, D. (2007). Theory and research: Autonomy and language learning. In Hanson-Smith, E. & Egbert, J. (Eds.), CALL environments, 2nd edition (pp. 377-388). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

In Healey’s piece, there were a few ideas that I was particularly taken with.

1. A community of practice for language learners

Autonomy doesn’t mean students have to study alone! In fact, Healey suggests that autonomous learning “is enriched by the connectivity provided by the internet” (p. 379) and recommends collaborative “tandem learning projects” that “encourage learners to teach each other” (p. 379). Though she doesn’t elaborate on what kinds of projects might be useful, she does point out that the difficulty learners might face in finding online collaborators is more than made up for by the “real-time, synchronous interaction” and “delayed interaction” (p. 382) that technology permits.

I love this idea! True, the idea of using technology for collaborative learning isn’t new; but I had never thought of it as a community of practice. It really is, though, isn’t it? Even without collaborative projects, communities created by sites such as Voxopop provide learners with a network offering support and encouragement—as well as an authentic audience that can give learners purpose.

2. Technology can help change the locus of power.

I had a vague notion of this, since using technology encourages learners to express themselves and tap into their personal preferences, beliefs, and funds of knowledge, privileging these experiences and recognizing them as worthy of inclusion in a classroom.

Besides this, though, I like the way Healey laid out a teacher’s purpose in the CALL classroom: “The role of the teacher is to help learners see that they have options and to help them achieve their goals” (p. 379). Indeed, the teacher/facilitator, throughout the online learning process, “has a substantial role to play in encouraging learners to use a variety of material and methods and explaining how to go about doing so” (p. 382 & 383). This ties in nicely with the idea of promoting autonomy through offering choice, but takes it a step further: giving learners choice...with the ultimate goal of their being able to find, evaluate, and utilize online resources on their own.

3. Providing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

As with the points above, this is not exactly a new idea, but I appreciated having it laid out so clearly. Learners, Healey says, can derive “an internal sense of satisfaction” (p. 383) from shiny, impressive products of technology (Healey cites “a good-looking printout” [p. 383], but I’d suggest that the multimodal production options available online today are even more rewarding). A more extrinsic pleasure, meanwhile, can be derived from charting one’s progress through the explicit assessments and “mileposts” (p. 383) built into many CALL programs.

Healey also touches briefly on the possibility of (facilitator-initiated) self-assessment, and I think this is an area that has expanded since the publication of this chapter. I’d suggest that an online portfolio resource such as LinguaFolio would meet Healey’s approval and, indeed, might overcome the weakness of CALL programs’ “snapshot of learner performance” that fails to “give students a sense of where they stand in meeting their overall language learning goals” (p. 383). LinguaFolio or other self-assessment tools can, I think, help learners track (and set) personal milestones not determined (or fulfilled) by language-learning computer programs.

Caveats

Of the weaknesses and caveats related to CALL that Healey cites, there were two that really resonated with me.

1. Beware “inauthentic labor”

Healey suggests “inauthentic labor” is found in the “struggle just to operate a program” (p. 383); and indeed, this has been one of the most frustrating aspects of finding appropriate tools to use in my classroom. So many sites are completely unintuitive, overly complex, or riddled with advertisements, or they require software downloads! This is a key barrier to access that teachers need to keep in mind, and I'm glad Healey addresses it.

2. A call for critical pedagogy in CALL

Honestly, this is one aspect of CALL that I hadn’t considered: the need to situate it in “a larger political and social context” (p. 387). Healey briefly explores the ways in which “[technology] can encourage certain ways of thinking and acting and discourage others”; for example, CALL materials might “require learners to work one-on-one with a machine, to use workbook-style exercises that give instant feedback but require no deeper thought, to see one right answer in exercises, to memorize and repeat after the computer, and to trust what they find online” (p. 387).

Healey urges teachers to use critical pedagogy to question and make visible “the assumptions behind these approaches—that language learning is divorced from thinking, that language can be memorized, and that the knowledge of those who post online is greater than the learner’s” (p. 387). I’d be very interested in reading more about critical pedagogy in CALL; how teachers can help learners discover “how to query, find, and question what they find on the internet, in software, and in print” (p. 388).

Website review: English Central

For the past couple of years, I've been hearing about English Central. The words movie English always made my ears perk up; but as soon as I heard mention of money and paid subscriptions, I lost interest. Well, this week, I finally got around to visiting the site and playing around with its various tools and capabilities. It turns out the site offers a free basic package, and it's actually got a lot of potential! It has a lot of problems, too, but I think the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. It's something I intend to recommend to my students in the future.

For this week's website/software review, I took an in-depth look at English Central. My paper wound up being too long for a blog entry, but here are the highlights.

Software/Website Title: English Central

Website URL: http://www.englishcentral.com/

Grade/Age Level: young learners through adults



Overview

English Central is designed to help students learn English through videos. Most of the videos offer a four-step process:

1) Watch. Learners select a video and watch it with subtitles. If they don’t know a word, they can pause the video and click on the word; the word appears in a pop-up box along with the definition, a sample sentence, and IPA and audio pronunciation. If the user interface is set to the student’s L1, a translation into that L1 is occasionally also provided.

2) Learn. Learners focus on vocabulary words pre-selected by the site. They watch the video again, this time with gaps in the subtitle text, and they type the missing words they hear. If the word is correct, the definition box appears, and the video moves on when the learner is ready. If it’s wrong, the definition box appears, and the learner tries again.

3) Speak. Learners watch selections from the video, and repeat the dialog line-by-line, with the website recording their audio and offering feedback in the form of a point score and highlighted areas of difficulty.

4) Quiz. The learners review their new vocabulary through quiz questions.

The "Speak" part is pretty cool. I kept getting low scores, though....

The website keeps track of the student’s progress, noting the videos watched as well as the words learned, and the learner can take quizzes whenever they wish to review vocabulary words. Learners can move words from their “known” to their “unknown” list, or vice-versa, depending on what they’d like to review.

Teachers have the option of setting up a class site for their students. If they choose to do this, they can select specific videos they’d like their students to watch, select a pre-set “course” of videos put together by the website, or let the students choose which videos to watch. Teachers can also choose whether or not to set goals for their students (e.g., “Watch 5 videos and study 25 words per week”), and can monitor students’ progress through a detailed tracking system. If the teacher pays to upgrade to a Premium membership, the site will also give the teacher in-depth pronunciation feedback for each student and even let the teacher “listen in” to the students’ recordings.

Individual users can access a variety of videos for free (registration is required, though sample lessons are available). For about $15/month, users can get full access to the 9,000 videos in the English Central library and will be able to “speak” all of the videos, instead of only a limited selection.


External documents provided

Video tutorials are available for teachers. These are effective but probably unnecessary for most tech-savvy teachers.

Clicking on “video details” on a video’s page opens a pop-up window that includes the video transcript, a list of featured words, and a few comprehension and discussion questions. If the learner has selected their L1 for the user interface, the video transcript will appear with a line-by-line translation (at least, it did on the videos I sampled). It’s nice to have the supplemental material for discussion and comprehension, but some of the questions are better than others. 

One of the less-than-stellar comprehension questions

Practice/Assessment/Feedback opportunities

Feedback on a vocab quiz. And I love the definition.
It makes giving birth sound like a magic trick.

This website is entirely based around practice, assessment, and feedback! First, in the “Learn” part of the process, students listen and type the missing words. The website marks the words as right or wrong (spelling counts) and reveals the right answer in the dictionary box; if the student has made a mistake, they have an opportunity to write the word again. Next, in the “Speak” portion, the learner listens to the lines and tries saying each one, themselves. The website records their speaking and gives them a score, highlighting areas the student had difficulty with or encouraging them to speak more fluently, and also offering a chance for students to compare their recording with the original audio. The “Quiz” portion allows learners to test themselves on vocabulary words from the video, keeping track of correct and incorrect answers and showing the right answer before moving on to the next word. The “My Words” section of the user’s profile, meanwhile, tracks the words for which users sought definitions (during the “Watch” portion) and lets users review the words either as a list or through quizzes. The site also uses formative assessment to decide which words users have mastered and which need more work, using a visual indicator bar to alert learners to their progress on each word.


Strengths of the website

1. The use of L1. I love that the user interface is available in multiple languages; this can help alleviate a lot of the stress learners might feel when encountering a new online tool or language software program. The use of L1 translations/definitions in the quizzes also make it easy for learners to demonstrate their knowledge without being stymied by complicated English definitions  (see “Areas for improvement,” below).

L1 definitions are usually available for the video-based vocabulary reviews.

2. It’s easy to re-watch videos—or parts thereof. If learners select the icon for “listen to the last line again,” the previous line is played again, this time more slowly. This is very handy! The time bar under the video is also divided into segments that represent each line in the video, letting learners quickly locate different lines.

3. The bonus materials. The extra materials (script, discussion questions, etc.) provided make it easy for a teacher to use these videos with an entire class.

4. The personalized feedback. The tracking and feedback—on the vocabulary quizzes, pronunciation, etc.—is highly individualized and personal, allowing learners to pinpoint their weak spots and improve on them. It would be very difficult for a teacher to give this kind of individual feedback with any regularity to the average class during a semester!

5. Encourages autonomy and mastery. The wide selection of videos means that learners can pursue their own individual interests; this kind of autonomy can help increase learner motivation. The use of feedback, particularly in the “Speech” section, also encourages mastery goals, as does the self-paced watching (and re-watching) of videos and the ability to click on unknown words without any penalty.

6. Various formats for word encounters. The quizzes use different formats for their questions: sometimes the words are given, and the user must select the definition (which can be in their L1); sometimes the definitions are given, and the user must select the appropriate word; sometimes the user must type the missing word from a line in the dialog.


Areas for improvement 

1. Quizzes that actually check comprehension and encourage transfer. Although I like that the video-based quizzes use different formats for the questions, I’m not convinced the questions actually indicate any comprehension or mastery of the word. First, the distracter answers are often obviously unrelated to the dialog, so the user can easily guess the correct response; second, the questions use only lines from the dialog. I’d rather see questions that check real comprehension of the word; for example, gap-fills in new sentences, concept checking questions (e.g., “The ball is enormous. Is it a little big or very big?”), or using the target word in a new sentence and asking the learner to select the appropriate picture (e.g., “I have a large dog”—> the learner chooses the photo of the child with a big dog, not the small one, the hairy one, the dead one, etc.).

2. Better example sentences. In contrast to the video-based quizzes, the review quizzes (in “My Words”) do use new sentences; however, these sentences are unrelated to the level of the initial video, and thus tend to include more complicated or difficult words than a beginning learner would know, even if they know the target word. For example, when I registered as a student and worked my way through a video called A Big Family, the video introduced the expression “gave birth”; the review quiz, however, used the sentence, “You can patent anything in the world that’s alive, except a full-birthed human being”—quite a step up from the beginner-level video I had studied!

Seriously??

3. Better definitions. Related to the idea of better example sentences is another concern: The definitions, themselves. They seem fine when they’re translated into the student’s L1; however, in English, they’re excessively complicated or confusing. For example, the definition of “large” in my student-self’s word list is “having the broadest power, range, and scope.” I have to wonder, what learner doesn’t know “large” but does know “broadest,” “range,” and “scope”? Occasionally, definitions are even missing, as was the case when I clicked “million” in The Devil Wears Prada.

Bonus points for a difficult definition AND a sample sentence that stereotypes its target audience!

4. Keep better track of word forms and meanings that the student has encountered; quiz students only on these. Sometimes the word lists store (and then quiz students on) the incorrect word form or definition. In the video A Big Family, for example, “now” was defined as “at the current moment or time”; but the word list stored it as an adverb, giving the definition “used for giving emphasis to a request, order, or comment,” and the quiz’s example sentence was “Now, tactful is a little bit of a difficult word.” As another example, when my student-self encountered “make” in the video, it was defined as “to cause to be or to become”; my word list, however, stored the noun form: “a group of products that are all made by a particular company.” A similar thing happened with “lonely,” which somehow changed into “lone” in my word list—closer to having the correct meaning, at least, but still likely to be confusing for students!

5. Better/more comprehension questions. As it is, each video offers three comprehension questions. They tend to be detail-oriented and seem to require reference to the script (or an excellent memory!). It would be nice to have more open-ended comprehension-check questions, including questions for both gist and detail; also, perhaps answers should be provided so students can self-check.

6. More genuine videos and movie clips. A lot of the videos I found on English Central are actually just still photos with a voiceover—basically a listening exercise with pictures added. Even the dialogs based on movies (e.g., Monster House, The Devil Wears Prada) were like this, though I found a handful that were actual movies (mostly trailers and clips older animated features, such as a couple of Peanuts clips). If I were a user who had paid a lot of money to learn English through movies, I’d be very disappointed. I’m sure there are rights issues that explain this; but the subscription fees charged by the site should be sufficient for the website to secure the rights to more video clips.

The site's video for The Devil Wears Prada feels as if you're flipping idly through the book.
Check out the distracter answers, too.

7. Use more natural speech on the videos created by the site. The conversations on the created videos are often a bit stilted and rarely include connected speech or weak/reduced forms. Some of the dialogs also contain phrases that sound a bit awkward or unnatural.

Sounds like something Jesse Pinkman would be selling.

8. A better speech evaluation system. I can’t figure out how the system evaluates spoken input during the “Speech” stage. I suspect it’s mostly stress-based, with less emphasis on discrete phonemes. When I tried it, myself, I got a “Very nice!” and a high score when I spoke with natural stress but very poor phoneme pronunciation; and I got a “You can do better” and a low score when I spoke a little slowly but with my natural pronunciation.

Even with these problems, though, I’d recommend this site for EFL teachers. Overall, it’s a nice site for individual studying, personalized feedback, and integrated skills. Even with the limited number of genuine videos available, it’s still a promising (and motivating) departure from more traditional listening exercises for students.

On authenticity

If someone had asked me last week what “authenticity” means, or what defines “authentic” language in an EFL classroom, my answer would have included the words real-world, culturally appropriate, natural, and used for communication.

This week’s readings made me think more deeply about the definition of authenticity and its relationship to CALL. I don't think my working definition has changed much, but it certainly has expanded to include more aspects, and I no longer conceive of authenticity as an all-or-nothing category! 

We read

Chapelle, C. A., & Liu, H. (2007). Theory and research: Investigating authenticity. In Egbert, J., & Hanson-Smith, E. (Eds.).CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues, 2nd edition (pp. 111-130). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Publications.

and

Johnston, B. (2007). Theory and research: Audience, language use, and language learning. In Egbert, J., & Hanson-Smith, E. (Eds.). CALL environments: Research, practice, and critical issues, 2nd edition (pp. 61-69). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Publications.

Johnston focuses on the notion of audience and its role in authenticity. He defines an authentic audience as “an audience that is concerned exclusively with the meaning of the speaker’s message” (p. 67); thus, he suggests a teacher, in paying attention to form in addition to meaning, is unlikely to be an authentic audience. The potential size of authentic audiences has grown exponentially with the proliferation of computers, as electronic communication (email, blogs, etc.) has opened the gates to a vast sea of new audiences. ELLs might be “disadvantaged both in their understanding of audience-related issues and in their productive capacity for audience design in target language contexts” (p. 69), since online communication tends to be very strongly language based; however, they also have an unprecedented ability to become an authentic audience, themselves.

Chapelle & Liu, meanwhile, take a slightly different, but complementary, approach. First, they follow Widdowson (1979) in terming real-life texts genuine instead of authentic. To Chapelle and Liu, authenticity refers to what learners do with the text; authenticity is derived from “learners’ engagement of strategies for making sense of language in context” (p. 112). They measure authenticity of performance based on “the authenticity of the language elicited” (p. 113), while task authenticity is measured by “estimating correspondences between a pedagogical task and tasks in the domain of interest” (p. 114). 

I like these definitions of authenticity; they’re a great way to think about the activities learners are doing and why they’re doing them. Johnston’s definition of authentic audiences is a great reminder that students need to create for a purpose—indeed, purpose is one of the keys to motivation (e.g., Pink, 2009). CALL makes it easy to garner an authentic audience, even if it’s only one’s classmates: blogs, class web pages, social media, etc., facilitate the “publication” of one’s work. Best of all, most platforms today allow creators to decide how public their creation is. They can share it with the whole world, with a particular class, or with just a select few. In some cases (e.g., YouTube), they can also decide how much interaction they welcome; comments can be disabled or screened.

The Chapelle & Liu paper, meanwhile, was a useful reminder that CALL activities aren’t automatically “authentic,” but instead become authentic when they provide a context and motivation for communication—when learners “simulate talk that works toward objectives used in the real world” (Chapelle & Liu, 2007, p. 112). Tech-based group projects, for example, would evoke the kind of discussion a project team would use in real life, even if the resultant project, itself, involves forced/artificial language production (e.g., writing a story using a particular verb tense). 

Ironically, the CALL example Chapelle & Liu discuss, which involves conversations between two different participants and a computer, completely fails Johnston’s “authentic audience” test, and it has some notable departures from real-life application and language use; however, I appreciated their conclusion that this simulated conversation had "some characteristics at both ends of the authenticity continuum” (p. 124). It was an effective reminder, I think, that we shouldn’t be overly glib with our pronouncements on authenticity or overly confident that all CALL is automatically authentic. In fact, a new spin on this computerized conversation has emerged in recent years with the creation of interactive (“genuine”) videos such as The Subservient Chicken and NSFW: A Hunter Shoots a Bear. Both of these defy polarizing definitions of “authentic” and remind us that the degree of authenticity of CALL depends on a variety of factors, including the ways learners interact with it—and with each other.

Follow up on "How can tech tools increase interaction?": PBL and CALL

Howdy, all! I mentioned an earlier post that I'd had great success using tech tools with project-based learning (PBL), and I alluded to a project in which my students made advertisements with Animoto. If you'd like to learn more about how I incorporated Animoto into my (traditionally pen- and marker-based) travel and tourism lesson, I wrote an article about it that just appeared on ProfsAbroad.com. Enjoy!

MALL follow-up

Yes! This article describes exactly what we need more of: programs in which students can introduce teachers to useful apps. This not only recognizes students as autonomous learners and authorities, themselves, but also begins to address the problem of teachers having to instruct students in how to use apps, if they choose to use MALL in the classroom. If the students are already using the technology, minimal instruction in it is needed--and the student-introducers can provide any necessary training, themselves!

MALL: Current guidelines and future directions

Last year while I was traveling in Thailand, I came across an editorial in an English-language Thai newspaper that left me quite agitated. In it, a journalist-cum-mother protested the Thai government's plan to distribute tablet computers to school children. In her experience as a mother, she said, tablets only have two purposes: for reading (and why would she want her children reading on a tablet, when they have perfectly good books at home?) and for games. Taxpayer money shouldn't be used to enable children to play Angry Birds, she complained.

I was so appalled by her position that if it hadn't been my last day in Thailand, I would have written a scathing response. She was incredibly misinformed and clearly lacked the vision and creativity of a good teacher! Not only did the government's plan show great foresight in preparing the next generation for participation in an increasingly technological world, but distributing tablets in schools nationwide would help even the playing field between economic classes. Tablets also have a wide range of educational applications that this myopic journalist was clearly overlooking. Bravo, Thai government!

This week's readings on mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) gave me further support for my retort. This week, we read the New Media Consortium's (NMC) Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition 

and

Stockwell, G. (2012). Mobile-assisted language learning. In H. Reinders & M. Thomas (Eds.),  Contemporary Computer-Assisted Language Learning (pp. 201-216). Huntingdon, GBR: Bloomsbury Publishing. 

Now, my students use smartphones and tablets a lot in my classes, so Stockwell's discussion of their multiple functionalities came as no surprise. My students use their smartphones constantly, so using them for learning is a natural next step. They are what Stockwell calls "a familiar part of the everyday routine of the user, and this in itself increases the chance for learning to take place" (p. 205). As Stockwell points out, mobile devices can take on the role previously occupied by heavy language textbooks, making "learning something that can happen in a spontaneous way depending on circumstances" (p. 204). Got a few extra minutes on the bus? Pull out your "textbook" and review! We just need to "provide the skills and the impetus for learners to do it" (Stockwell, 2012, p. 205). 

Stockwell provided a few interesting insights into how, precisely, to integrate mobile technology. Though a few of the studies he cited seemed a little outdated, I found several quite applicable. First, he notes that in one study, students preferred to access language-learning podcasts on a desktop computer rather than an mp3 player. The downloading process seemed to be the primary barrier to listening on an mp3 player (or, now, smartphones): the students lacked time and know-how. This seems easy to work around. Teachers could just take the time to show students how to download the podcasts; could upload the podcasts so students can listen to them online, without downloading them; and/or show students how to get podcasts to automatically update, with no extra time needed.  Point taken.

A second guideline for teachers considering integrating MALL in their classes comes from another study Stockwell cited, in which ELLs listened to or read an English audio guide while visiting a zoo. Students "felt that the events at the zoo were distracting from the learning that they were undertaking," and found it difficult to read the screen (p. 208). Lesson learned: encourage students to use smartphones for language study when they can devote full cognitive attention to it--for example, while on the treadmill at the gym, while riding a bus, or any other time when they want their brain distracted from the external environment.

The third MALL guideline I found interesting relates to occasions when it might be better to use a desktop computer instead of a mobile device. For example, Stockwell cites the "size of the screen and the inconvenient keypad" (p. 209) as considerations, and points out that the length of the text should also be a factor in decisions about whether something should be read on a smartphone or on a desktop computer. (I suspect the increasing popularity of tablets will obviate this last concern, though.) Indeed, I discovered some of this first hand when I tried to do a poster project on Smore.com using smartphones; my students complained about the difficulty in entering text and in viewing the complete project, suggesting I should use desktop computers for this particular project in the future.

The most interesting thing Stockwell discussed, I think, was the future of MALL. He suggested that mobile devices might increasingly shift to more "push"-style learning, in which "information is made available to learners without effort on their part," and there will be an increasing "interconnectedness" in which "learners can constantly be interacting with the things and people around them" (p. 212). A student of Japanese who walks past a Japanese restaurant, he suggests, thus might automatically find information about Japanese food and useful food-related vocabulary. Learners will increasingly be able to interact with their environment "in a way that can facilitate language learning through relating it to potential opportunities that arise as part of their daily lives rather than just what occurs in the classroom" (p. 213). I keep telling my students they need to make English a part of their daily lives; I love the idea that mobile technology is evolving to the point where they can do this without any extraordinary (or even conscious) effort.

The reduction of barriers and increase in everyday integration is echoed in the NMC Horizon Report. This interesting document takes stock of where mobile learning stands today and what technological advancements are on the horizon. It discusses, for example, new apps that make it "very easy for anyone to create and publish media-rich interactive pieces" (p. 11) or that permit "users to add, edit, and delete text annotations displayed alongside […] video footage" (p. 12). These kind of multimodal options for students tie in nicely with new conceptions of multiple literacies and Universal Design for Learning, decreasing barriers to learning and putting an increased value on students' autonomy and individuality. The report also cites studies that have found that "integrating tablets into the curriculum has led to increased student engagement and has enhanced learning experiences" (p. 15), and explores the potential of online games to promote "teamwork, leadership, and discovery" in addition to prompting gamers to "expand their learning outside of the game" (p. 20). 

So yes, my dear Thai journalist/mother, giving tablets to your nation's students is actually a fantastic idea--as long as teachers take into consideration some of the guidelines that researchers such as Stockwell proffer. The future is technology, and it's to your advantage to start integrating it now.

On using YouTube and Facebook in class: two articles

This week in class, we read two articles:

Terantino, J. M. (2011). YouTube for foreign languages: You have to see this video. Language Learning & Technology, 15(1), 10-16. http://llt.msu.edu/issues/february2011/emerging.pdf

Prichard, C. (2013). Using social networking sites as a platform for second language instruction. TESOL Journal 4(4), 752-758, DOI: 10.1002/tesj.113

Terantino gives a brief overview of YouTube before turning to its advantages in a language class. He touches on the “picture superiority effect” (Berk, 2009; cited on p. 11), the idea that “concepts or ideas are more likely to be remembered if they are presented as pictures rather than words” (11), for example, and then describes YouTube’s potential for providing “linguistic and cultural content and information in and related to the target language” (12). Videos, he writes, can introduce students to the culture of the target language, provide linguistic input, or just grab students’ attention; and YouTube, in particular, is a venue in which students (or teachers) can share their own video creations.

Prichard, meanwhile, discusses the ways a social networking site (SNS) such as Facebook can be used by learners “in a variety of ways, from communication skill practice to language acquisition,” while teachers can use an SNS to “organize, monitor, and evaluate student work” (756). Specifically, he suggests Facebook is good for facilitating discussions outside of class, while L2 learners can also use it to practice listening, reading, and writing, and expand their vocabulary while simultaneously acquiring grammar structures. At the same time, as they interact with native L2 speakers, students will build “pragmatic awareness” (756) as they’re exposed to nuances of authentic language such as register.

I appreciated both of these articles. The authors raised solid points, all supported by my personal experience. I love using YouTube videos in class, and my students and I have shared self-created videos with each other via YouTube. I’ve also found Facebook a great avenue for out-of-class discussions; my students post completed projects on our class page and then comment on each other’s work. I also use it to communicate with students; if I need to make an announcement about an upcoming class, I post it on the class page. (The class captain usually re-distributes the most important announcements via Kakao Talk, the messaging app of choice in Korea.) Facebook’s potential to provide access to authentic language and culture, meanwhile, is something I’ve written about elsewhere.

But I feel as if both articles are missing part of the picture. For example, I read an article a while ago (can’t find it now, unfortunately—it was in a Korea-based professional journal) suggesting that requiring students to use SNSs can actually backfire; though the students in this study initially were very excited and motivated to use Facebook and Twitter for class assignments, the novelty soon wore thin, and postings soon became just another piece of homework. This isn’t an argument against using SNSs in the language classroom, but it is something teachers should keep in mind as they consider how best to integrate them.

Terantino’s YouTube article, too, missed some of my favorite uses for videos in the language classroom: setting context, eliciting the target language, and providing students with a reason to talk. There doesn’t even have to be any language; in fact, silent videos allow students to focus on what’s happening and avoid cognitive overload, then they can follow up videos by producing language of their own. For example, Teeth (2008) has no dialog—which makes it the perfect video for information-gap watching. Student A watches the first half while Student B puts his/her head down; then Student A explains to Student B what happened. The partners switch roles for the second half of the film.

Or as another example, I use the first 1:12 of the 2004 Dawn of the Dead trailer to set the scene for a 2-hour zombie apocalypse lesson that elicits modals (“What’s the problem? What could she do? What should she do? What would you do?”). We then use the first thirty seconds of this Zombieland (2009) trailer to introduce a new twist: the zombie plague has reached Korea, and groups can choose five things from Home Plus (a store similar to Target) to take with them to survive. The lesson culminates with this awesome interactive zombie movie (which is very challenging, linguistically, but the choose-your-own adventure style is great for inspiring quick debates between partners. It’s also a lot of fun.).

In short, there are a few more topics I wish these authors had touched on—and many more things one can do with videos than Terantino considers! (Ironic, given how close his name is to a certain innovative director’s, eh? You can read more about how I use these videos—and see my favorite five—here.)