Will you offer friendly CALL advice?

Dear CALLers,

next Tue night we will have a visitor – Emily C. who is a graduate student in our program.

She is interested in exploring how innovative and emerging technologies (esp. Second Life) contribute to affect and motivational strategies that can facilitate and even enhance effective second language learning.

Now that you have all designed your Second Life Tasks (btw do email me an electronic copy if you haven’t yet), I am sure you will be happy to share your opinions and suggestions with Emily!

Feeling critical? pessimistic? hopeful?

Bowers (2000) argues that CMC should be viewed as a degraded form of symbolic interaction and pretty much calls computer-based education a delusion. What is your take on this perspective? Based on the CALL studies that we have seen so far and the many problems we identified with the current state of the field, are you as pessimistic as Bowers???

ACTFL Podcasts

Have a look (and a listen) at the 2007 ACTFL convention podcasts on CALL-related topics:

http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4805

Enjoy,

Viktoria.

workshop on funding your research

I thought that this might be of interest to you:

Finding Funding: A workshop for grant seekers (for faculty and graduate students)
The presenter: Grace Thornton, Grant Development Specialist
Dates: April 14th OR April 25th 2008
Time 2:30-4:30
Location: Aderhold 227/228
You have to contact Grace to reserve a seat: gthorn@uga.edu

Learner Corpus Analysis

Hello CALLers,

Satomi will be posting her questions for us shortly. In the meanwhile, here is a question from me as well.

Some critics of learner corpus analysis maintain that it focuses too much on learner ERRORS, and, therefore, is in essence a disempowering approach.  Based on our readings for this week (+ Belz & Vyatkina, Belz & Kinginger & , as well as articles on the Grim and iWrite tools) , would you agree with this evaluation? What else is learner corpus analysis good for beyond error analysis?