Teaching with Technology

The focus of the previous two articles I posted on our class blog was on the feasibility of computer-assisted L2 vocabulary learning for adult learners, specifically, those who learn English for academic purposes.   Up to now, what I have found is that vocabulary learning can be enhanced by computer programs that allow learners to interact with them.  However, we don’t have enough evidence of the effectiveness of these programs to conclude that they should be adopted as pedagogical tools in L2 classrooms.  It is not clear that these programs could replace the traditional way of learning vocabulary.  My interest in this posting is on vocabulary learning software for native speaker children, as opposed to L2 learners.   There are a number of vocabulary learning software programs on the market that claim to foster the literacy of children.  I wonder whether the logic behind these programs for L1 children is similar to that of programs for L2 adult learners.  I also want to know how effective these programs are in improving vocabulary knowledge and developing the literacy of children.  In “Can Software Support Children’s Vocabulary Development?” written by Julie Wood, I found some answers to the questions that I had regarding these software programs.

In this paper, Julie Wood presents her findings from a content analysis of 16 software applications.  The primary users of these programs are native English speaking students in grades three through five.  The main areas to be investigated in the study were the explicit and implicit strategies employed by these products in the teaching of vocabulary, and the efficacy of these media-based teaching strategies in vocabulary instruction.  Each product was evaluated using the following guidelines recommended by literacy experts:

Guideline 1: Does it relate the new to the known?

Guideline 2: Does it promote active, in-depth processing?

Guideline 3: Does it provide multiple exposures of new words?

Guideline 4: Does it teach students to be strategic readers?

Guideline 5: Does it promote additional readings?

The following are some of the major findings from the analysis of the products:  (1) Strategies that require deep cognitive demands for new words are rare in most of the products.  (2) The products rely heavily on a limited range of teaching strategies, such as matching words with definitions, answering multiple choice questions, and filling in blanks. (3) The products offer few opportunities for deep processing of new words.

The products studied in this paper turned out not to be as efficient in children’s vocabulary development as the developers had claimed, but I believe that with further advances in technology, more powerful and effective software applications for developing students lexical knowledge will become available.