Friday, May 22, 2009
Reflection on Computer Assisted Language Learning
“Computer Assisted Language Learning” is perhaps the course that fascinates me the most this semester because first of all, I have always been the kind of person who is addicted to computer (and Internet of course), so it was such a delight to learn all about CALL. Second, what has been taught in the class is so cool and up to date to me that I develop a lot of interest in them. Third, the learning experience in the class is so different than the others: I have my class in the computer lab; I post my homework to my blog instead of hand in hand-written homework; I learn things such as corpus and My ET that can be very helpful to English learners but have not been taught in any other classes during my entire school years. In the following paragraphs, I would like to mention some of the things we learned in the class: corpus, Google Syntax, and screen capture software.
It was my first time ever to learn about corpus, and I am so glad that I learned it because a course I took at NTNU this semester, semantics, requires a lot of use of corpus. The teacher asked us to use corpus to find the nouns that appear with unit nouns, such as a drop of water or a chunk of money. We were also being asked to find collocations, and again, I was glad that I have learned what is collocation and have introduced to better Collocation Retrieval Systems in CALL class than the one I learned in semantics class.
Moreover, corpus is helpful in self-learning for it shows whether or not certain words can be used in certain ways. For example, when I was writing a journal in English for self-training, I can always go to a corpus database to check if my usage of the words are correct even if there is not an English writing teacher who I can call for help. In other words, corpus serves not only a tool but also a tutor that is able to judge and correct. Since I will enter the workplace after graduation, there will not be any English teacher that I can ask for help like in school years any more. Therefore, I can foresee corpus being my new English teacher in the future, and best of all, I would never feel ashamed to ask him questions that can be deemed too easy or stupid.
Google Syntax is also a nice tool I find useful in CALL class. As a student, I rely on Goole search engine for searching information for homework and presentation a lot. However, though I use it very often, I have never known that with a few words and symbols typed with the key word that I am looking for would lead to more precise search results and therefore, saves both time and effort. Furthermore, other functions that we learned in the class such as “I'm Feeling Lucy(好手氣)” and “Google.com in English” are useful, either. After learning about Google Syntax and other functions, I became more aware about the Google guides and various buttons on the Google page that I did not try to click before because I think there must be many more time-saving functions that I would want to learn about.
In addition, the screen capture software is quite a nice software in which the file is small but provides enough functions for us to do the screen capturing, picture editing, and even recording the movements on the screen. I have always wondered how does the author of computer reference book capture and put the step-by-step screen pictures in his book, now I finally know how he does it. Screen capture software can be applied into many other purposes, such as preparing material for teaching or presentation. The presentation Sophia and I did on the topic of “The OWL at Purdue” uses much screen capture software functions and I found my presentation being more easy for the audiences to understand with the pictures captured from the website instead of just explaining to the audiences with only a few key words on the slides. In some cases, picture speaks louder than words.
In conclusion, I have learned so many useful, interesting and up to date means of computer-related English teaching tool that I would like to use them in my own learning in the future. Last, I would like to thank Dr. Lai for her instruction of telling us to value the work of perfecting our every presentation, the good attitude toward learning, and for that she really cares about our future and shares her experiences with us.
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