FanFiction

I would like to talk about the social networking site-- Fan Fiction (http://www.fanfiction.net/) we explored in class this week. Again, like many other websites, it proved to me that the internet could provide more possibilities and opportunities than we could ever imagine. The forums had such a wide coverage of movies, cartoons, books, and TV shows all around the world in this website, and there were so many people discussing, creating, cooperating, sharing, and communicating in it, which had made it look like a whole different world to me. It further amazed me when I found there were people discussing and rewriting popular Chinese TV shows from the 1990s in English. Without the development of technology, this level of exchange and collaboration would have been  unimaginable. Now that we have so much help at our fingertip, we could turn the previously impossible into the possible, but how to get the best out of it remains as our own responsibility.

About CATs

Douglas and Hegelheimer (2008) gave a nice review of the developments in the use of computer technology in language assessment, and there were two particularly interesting points in their discussion I would like to reflect on here. First, as what the authors have concluded, it seems that most argument and debate in this area could be boiled down to "appropriate and inappropriate uses of CATs", which mirrors the result of most of our classroom discussion; and "what was once thought to be the wave of the future in language testing, that is, computer-adaptive tests, has been tempered by the realization of the limits of this particular technology", which reminds us the importance of not getting overwhelmed by the ever-developing technology and throwing away comparatively traditional but effective methods and practice.
 

Second, the article mentions a research conducted by Cohen and Upton (2006)( as cited in Douglas & Hegelheimer, 2008), which has found that "in general, the test takers tended to approach the test tasks as test tasks rather than as genuine reading tasks. In other words, they were mainly interested in getting the correct answer rather than learning anything from the reading". Thinking back, I have had the same problem when I was doing the internet-based test practice to prepare for TOEFL when I constantly needed to resist the temptation to click on the "checking results" button to get instant grading for my answer without really caring about what I could learn from the reading itself. However, on second thought, I would have done the same thing if I could flip the paper and check my answer in pen-and-pencil language tests. Therefore, is this a limitation of CATs only or a limitation for all forms of tests in general. Because, in my opinion, once something is turned into a test, it is human nature for people to focus on finishing the task correctly and pass the test instead of the so-called deep thinking, regardless of whether it is computer-aided or not.

Douglas, D., & Hegelheimer, V. (2007). Chapter 6: Assessing language using computer technology. Annual review of applied linguistics, 27, 115-132.

Reflection on CATs and Fanfiction

Douglas and Hegelheimer (2008) gave a nice review of the developments in the use of computer technology in language assessment, and there were two particularly interesting points in their discussion I would like to reflect on here. First, as what the authors have concluded, it seems that most argument and debate in this area could be boiled down to "appropriate and inappropriate uses of CATs", which mirrors the result of most of our classroom discussion; and "what was once thought to be the wave of the future in language testing, that is, computer-adaptive tests, has been tempered by the realization of the limits of this particular technology", which reminds us the importance of not getting overwhelmed by the ever-developing technology and throwing away comparatively traditional but effective methods and practice.

 

Second, the article mentions a research conducted by Cohen and Upton (2006)( as cited in Douglas & Hegelheimer, 2008), which has found that "in general, the test takers tended to approach the test tasks as test tasks rather than as genuine reading tasks. In other words, they were mainly interested in getting the correct answer rather than learning anything from the reading". Thinking back, I have had the same problem when I was doing the internet-based test practice to prepare for TOEFL when I constantly needed to resist the temptation to click on the "checking results" button to get instant grading for my answer without really caring about what I could learn from the reading itself. However, on second thought, I would have done the same thing if I could flip the paper and check my answer in pen-and-pensile language tests. Therefore, is this a limitation of CATs only or a limitation for all forms of tests in general. Because, in my opinion, once something is turned into a test, it is human nature for people to focus on finishing the task correctly and pass the test instead of the so-called deep thinking, regardless of whether it is computer-aided or not.

 

Lastly, I would like to talk about the social networking site-- Fan Fiction (http://www.fanfiction.net/) we explored in class this week. Again, like many other websites, it proved to me that the internet could provide more possibilities and opportunities than we could ever imagine. The forums have such a wide coverage of movies, cartoons, books, and TV shows all around the world in this website, and there are so many people discussing, creating, cooperating, sharing, and communicating in it, which makes it look like a whole new world to me. It further amazed me when I found people discussing and rewriting popular Chinese TV shows from the 1990s in English. Without the development of technology, this level of exchange and collaboration is unimaginable. Now that we have so much help at our fingertip, how to get the best out of it is our own responsibility.

 

Douglas, D., & Hegelheimer, V. (2007). Chapter 6: Assessing language using computer technology. Annual review of applied linguistics, 27, 115-132.

About Qikpad and UNI-collaboration

In this week's class, we have again done some exciting experiment in lab, including embedding in our blogs an online collaboration tool called Qikpad, which works very much like Google-docs but with a more concise layout. What I also like about it is its easiness in creating a pad with an embedded window allowing instant chatting with partners, and I think it might be able to serve as a nice alternative for intercultural exchanges involving countries like China where Google tools are not that readily accessible. However, I encountered a technological breakdown with Qikpad just the day after the class when I discovered the pad I had embedded was gone, and so was the website (http://qikpad.org). Therefore, I think, like many other technological tools, Qikpad is not 100% reliable, and we had better get prepared for unexpected breakdown like this in future projects.

Besides collaboration tools, we have also explored online platforms for intercultural exchanges like Uni-collaboration (http://www.unicollaboration.eu/), which provide valuable databank to help instructors and coordinators who want to establish cultural exchange projects find partner teachers and classes in other countries, learn about successful projects and evaluation tools, and communicative with other practitioners. However, quite similar as what I have found from another renown model and platform Cultura, most projects are confined to exchanges between institutions in the U.S. and European countries, and the languages involved are usually English, Spanish, French, German, and occasionally Japanese and Korean. Although there are several participating institutions from Taiwan in UNI-collaboration, there is so far none from mainland China. Considering the fact that mainland China has the biggest number of English learners in the world and Chinese language itself is gaining popularity in recent years, there seems to be a huge gap between what should be done and what has been done in terms of exploration of online intercultural exchange in a language learning context.

About "collective intelligence"



Picture from
 http://ldele087.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/collective-intelligence/ 

The report called "Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups" (Woolley, et al., 2010) demonstrated to us statistical evidence of the existence of "collective intelligence", and its exploratory power over a group's performance on a wide variety of tasks. The two studies presented in the report showed that while individual intelligence was a significant predictor of performance on tasks which were completed by individuals, average individual intelligence was not as significantly associated with performance on group tasks as collective intelligence. What was more interesting was that, instead of factors such as group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction which one might have expected to have strong correlation with group performance, average social sensitivity, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group turned out to be some of the best predictors for collective intelligence which could be used to account for a big proportion of variance across group performances. Although the studies reported were not directly related to second language teaching and learning, I think their results could still be beneficial and valuable for language instructors in the process of designing classroom activities, intercultural exchanges, assigning tasks and roles, as well as administering and monitoring any student activities which involve group work. However, as language learning could be a very different cognitive and social process, and the meaning negotiation and construction as well as information processing and internalization in language acquisition might differ immensely across learners of different levels, ages, cultures, and languages, more evidence would be needed to help with a better configuration and implementation of group projects in a language learning context for achieving better results.

Qikpad

Practicing second language without really trying!

Hanna and de Nooy (2003) have made a very important point in their article "A funny thing happened on the way to the forum: electronic discussion and foreign language learning" that it might be advisable to change "practicing French" to "practicing Frenchness" in instructions given to students engaged in online fora for the purpose of second language learning. The authors presented a very interesting study of the online forum exchanges and discussed about the importance of prefacing language learners of what successful participation would mean for a particular forum in order to optimize the expected effect and improve their "cultural knowledge" should forum debates be used for second language learning. In addition, as "neither culture nor genre is seen as firmly entrenched", negotiation of cultural and generic rules would be a great way for language students to improve their language competence, to be more specific, intercultural communicative competence, "through participation in a cultural practice". In this sense, it seems that we could practice second language without really trying, which sounds exciting. However, given the cultural focus of a practice like the forum debate in the article, I believe it is better to be taken as a supplementary part for a second language curriculum. In addition, this type of practice might only be beneficial to language learners who are at least at the intermediate level.