Classroom Assessment of CALL Because few things are more meta-fabulous than the assessment of assessments

CALL Research typically has 3 questions

1. Does it work?2. Do students like it?3. Can a set of tutorials be better than a

teacher?

*But it’s better to just not assume, since doing so makes an “ass” out of “u” and “me”

BAD ASSUMPTION: to think that media affects learning on its own

BETTER ASSUMPTION*: “...some particular qualities of media affect particular cognitions...when learning certain tasks

Traditional, oversimplified CALL research

Experiment:

● Two groups of classrooms: One gets CALL, the other doesn’t.

● Study doesn’t take into account other possible factors influencing outcomes.

Modern CALL research

● Acknowledge other factors that can influence language acquisition beyond CALL.

● Researchers are asking more cognitive oriented questions and relating them to specific CALL attributes.

Specific cognitive questions such as:

1. Learners aptitudes as they interact with CALL

2. Mental processes activated/cultivated as a result of CALL instruction

3. Specific aspects of L2 competence in relation to call lesson type (my fave)

4. social effects of CALL on the quality and quantity of language production

In practice this means looking at:

● Lesson types (my fave)● Student characteristics● The effect of “formal variables” on learning

(i.e. screen design, user experience, input formatting, etc.)

● Educational outcomes

Case Study

● 25 students received listening and cultural training through through music-based multimedia software.

● The students listening skills and reading comprehension and their responses within this CALL approach were measured.

Some supportive research findings

● musical aptitudes -- pitch, loudness, rhythm, time, timbre, and tonal memory -- might be important in language acquisition (contrast with an earlier discussion we had on multiple intelligences where there was almost no correlation between musical intelligence and L2 gains)

● music can aid learners in acquiring the rhythm, tone and stress patterns of the target language

● the simultaneous presentation of aural/visual through multimedia can improve student language achievement

● hypermedia language environments are effective when text is accompanied by sound

● learners are more likely to notice language structures when they are presented as aural input, or when text and sound are presented together

● also captioning, colorization

The study’s objective

H1: The simultaneous presentation of spoken songs and written language through CALL has a positive effect on the listening and reading comprehension skills of students

What the students do:

Students listen to, type, and see the song through the feedback feature in the hopes of improving their listening and reading comprehension skills.

Research method:

25 college level students in an introduction Latin American literature course.

Students spent approximately four weeks of the semester working on selected musical and literary works related to salsa and nueva cancion genres. CALL instruction was used and assessed.

Research Method pt. 2

Differences between the pre and post observations were used to assess the effect of the treatment.

One group received traditional instruction. One group received multimedia instruction.

Group 1 was exposed to songs/given chance to analyze song texts and express reaction to songs.

Group 2 wass given interactive software offering cultural context of songs plus exercises that help with reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing skills.

At the end of each period students listening and reading comprehension skills were tested using a cloze exercise of the transcribed songs, 3 short answer

questions.

Results: Listening

Results: Reading Comprehension

My questions about the article 1. Did the research fail to compare “apples with apples”? It seems that

group 2 was simply given more learning resources, regardless of the medium. Group 1 could have received more instruction and learning activities through a non-digital medium, although it's just not clear what group 1 did beyond “exposure to songs” and “discussion”.

2. Could CALL also help with reading comprehension, but the study was unable to uncover the impact because song texts are short and require less assistance to comprehend. Could we have seen more significant results had the texts been longer?

3. While this study does increase my belief that multimedia is powerful, it is unclear exactly what aspect of the software helped the students. Was it the interactive exercises? The screen design? The additional content that contextualized the music culturally? The study’s design seems to fail the caveats placed by the author at the beginning (slide 7)