mylife

I have just read two chapters from Pennington and Stevens booked on Computers in Applied Linguistics and have found some of the points with in the articles by Bernard Mohan interesting. As previously I had not considered the talk associated by the learning tasks assigned to students as being included in the language acquisition of our students. By this I am referring to any speech that takes place while the students are engaged on the task of language learning.

Associated with the web quest I had thought of some incidental learning as being linked to the way the group would be expected to work through the task, discuss the topic and work together to solve any problems that arise, however the incidental learning that could take place would be severely reduce if students are able due to similar backgrounds rely too much on their native languages. The discussion aspect that Mohan discusses seems to rely on students having to use English as a means of communicating with each other as differing first languages won’t allow for easy problem solving. This means that even the simplest and most basic of CALL lessons may have far greater impacts than first thought.

I think that it is important to use CALL lessons for more than just the online grammar exercises and typing tutor that might sometimes be forced upon us by the powers that be as lessons that engage the students and interest them are more likely to raise the incidental discussion that was discussed in this one part of Pennington and Stevens book. So far the most engaging CALL lesson that my students have had may not have raised a lot of English but made the students interested in something that involved English for more than twenty involved them typing a variety of words in a typing tutor style format, except that they had to type these words before they were eaten by a bunch of sharks. There was a lot of first language discussion however at least 4 out of the 12 students asked me what some of the words means and for me that was a small victory that while not the incidental discussion based learning that Mohan was discussing was I feel a form of learning none the less.