Transcript bruno-Background

Historical Background
LAMY, M.N.; HAMPEL, R. Online communication
in language learning and teaching. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Bruno Oliveira Maciel
Marco Antônio Pereira Couto
1.1 The Emergency of Computer-mediated
Communications for Language Learning and Teaching
 CMC has been interest of teachers, learners and researchers: (1989) –
(Mason and Kayne)
 Mindweave: Mason and Kayne’s classic book => Disscuss the Idea of
CMC.
 The book is about online communication through language learning.
–
 Lots
of Acronyms were created but CALL was integrated to CMC forming
CMCL (mid-1990) ;
 What has happened to CMCL along the way and influenced the shape it
has today?
Lots of different forms of computer-mediated communication were
created and they were similar to CMCL at times and other times
different from it.
The three strongest shapes are CMC, CALL and socio-personal CMC
The generic education CMC and CMCL had common interests in the
idea of learning communities and other computer relations associated to
this one.
CMCL was more resolutely divergent. (Warschauer and Healy - 1998)
 A view of the History of CALL
• Behaviouristic: the computer supplies drills to a learner.
• There is a move through the 80’s generating the communicative CALL.
The computer is regarded to have the right answer. CALL used
technology to have the learning process more interactive and for
opening.
• From the 90’s up to 2000 CALL begin to be integrated. Many skills can
be developed and then the computer-based communication is being
improved.
 CALL was responsible to have created CMCL as a successor. It’s said to have been
at least its extension.
Thorne and Payne conclude that socio-personal CMC started to develop with all the
interaction caused by the development of the communication.
1.2 The road travelled: a broad view
 Warschauer (1995) outlined the CMCL with his practitioner book.

–
–
–
Learners could:
communicate with native speakers;
have one-to-one conversation;
One-to-many or even many-to-many group conversation.
 Warschauer and Kern’s questioned if the use of network-based language
teaching lead to better language learning.
CMCL needs to get specific practices of use (task types, process description
discourse and others).
1.3 What the meta-literature reveals about practice
and research:
 CMCL must be considered a category.
 Authors neglected seen it as a category then it caused the insufficient
problematisation of CMCL in this area of teaching.
 Jung: “…we are using the internet as an empty transport medium like the
telephone…”.
1.4 Practitioner studies as a reflection of practices of
use
 Some authors made a deep study analyzing the learners actions. Liu et al.’s
corpus and Hassan et al.’s corpus show us the way some learners used the
CMCL. See table 1.3 and 1.4 below
 Kern’s view of US based CMCL for ten years has shown that the result of
CMCL – based learning is dependent on lots of social, logistical and mainly
pedagogical factors.
1.5 A new content area
Kern (2006) comes out with a development of another area: interculturalism
=> theory – building activity such as:
• connectivity non necessarily makes intercultural communication;
• there are cultural differences in the interaction styles;
• students must see the impact of cultural differences;
• research should be carried out to check communicative genre;
• success depends on interpersonal response;
• cultural misunderstandings from pen-pals can cause failure and low
interaction.
1.6 The quality of CMCL research
 CMCL research is called to have a more quantitative form.
 Levy (2000) wrote a long article defending the descriptivism;
 Hubbard (2005) presents critics about the researchers using small
numbers of untrained learners to make some conclusions;
 Hassan et al. says that studies must analyze the result of language
learning intervention associated with another intervention;
 Liu et al. stated that “ the use of well established measures with clear
reliability and validity is the least point of start.
 Levy added that “ descriptive work is necessary in all CALL research,
otherwise it becomes empty.
• Summary
 CMCL research has focused on questions on conversation and discourse,
learner participation and collaboration.
 Oral skills is still of great interest.
 Older research is being carried out to see the facilitation of oral ability.
 Newer research is also happening to check how real speech happens in
synchronous voice-over-Internet environments.