Teaching with Technology

Blog 9 Prosody is an important aspect of language production, it encompasses:  word stress, intonation, and pausing.  According to Tanner et al, (2009) in The effects of computer-assisted pronunciation readings on ESL learners’ use of pausing, stress, intonation, and overall comprehensibility, “Empirical research has begun to confirm the importance of prosodic features in learners’ overall […]

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Blog 8  To promote language use, a great deal of attention is placed, by teachers and language learning researchers, on ways to foster in and out of classroom writing and speaking. But do certain exercise formats elicit particular types of speech? This was the focus of Colletine’s (June 2009) study of intermediate and advanced students […]

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Blog 7 They are everywhere and their numbers are growing. They are changing nations by changing the lives of their people. They provide access to economic opportunity even in some of the most remote places on the globe. And they are being mined for their educational possibilities as well. Mobile phones have dramatically expanded their […]

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Blog 5 Distance learning as a means of language teaching is not a concept that has been widely embraced by language teachers. However, as reported in Blake et al’s article, Measuring oral proficiency in distance, face-to-face, and blended classrooms, there are situations where distance learning or a hybrid course that blends both distance and face-to-face […]

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Blog  4  What happens when 40 “pre-service Non-Native (NNS) English teachers” (p. 79) studying at a “large Mexican university” are given a semester long assignment to collaboratively create and develop a wiki on the meaning of culture and are not given any other guidance or teacher instruction other than four reminders to contribute to the […]

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It’s the great debate in the language teaching world fluency versus accuracy or as it’s more commonly known: form. Fluency is typified by learners expressing language oral and/or written in a steady stream that is unencumbered by detours to correctly apply grammar rules. Form focus in language learning is the attention to the linguistic rules […]

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A good place to build technology enriched learning activities is upon technologies that many higher education students are already familiar. For example: many students have experience posting to Facebook, other networking sites and Blackboard. Wiki sites like Wikipedia are another technology with which students have familiarity.  Because of this familiarity, learning activities that build upon […]

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Captioning is a technology most of us are aware of as viewers of foreign language films. Their use brings other worlds to a theater near you. Similarly, closed captioning brings educational, entertainment and other types films to the hearing impaired.  For decades captioning has also been a tool in foreign language teaching.  Winke, Gass and […]

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Teaching Assignment Ideas:   Voice blog Video captioning Phonetic pronunciation videos  Class Wiki   Voice blog: A class blog that is similar to the blog we are posting our assignments to for this class, except all the posts would be of students speaking.  Downloads could be made from computers or cell phones.  This assignment would […]

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