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Friday, March 27, 2009

Posting 4: Can I CALL You?


I finally get to my fourth posting. What we were assigned to do this time is go to UKM Tun Sri Lanang Library and get information from the databases subscribed there. To be honest, it was a little bit tricky because I'm not used to searching in the databases and look for the things that I'm not familiar with. Anyway, I managed to complete the task and here I am, starting the fourth posting.

First of all, I'm going to share a tiny bit of information about EBSCOHost, one of the database that we were told to look for. From what I understand, EBSCOHost is one of the database that were used by many of education institution around the world for educational resources such as journals, academic materials and many more. It is very convenient for research purposes and for information regarding various subjects.

Library and Information Science Abstracts or better known as LISA Net is a database full of references in Information Sciences. LISA Net provide a lot of abstracts from articles, journals and many other materials for various academic uses. This database have many collections from countries around the world.

After searching for a while, I managed to get the articles on one of the topic we have to choose which is Computer Assisted Language Learning or CALL. I found both of these articles in EBSCOHost.

The first article is a review by Pius ten Hacken from the Swansea University on a book entitled "Errors and Intelligence in Computer-Assisted language Learning: Parsers and Pedagogues" written by Trude Heift and Mathias Schulze. the author of the article summarized that the documentations on CALL include a lot of articles that people would categorize as having no relation to any areas about COmputational Linguistics. The author gives a full overview on the book and explains the contents of each chapter and also the errors that he found made by the creators of the book. The author of this article states that despite the obvious errors that the book has, the book is very helpful for those who is in the CALL field.

The second article that I found is about "The Multiple Roles of the Teacher in CALL" by Jia Yi-Dong. This article is mainly an overview and suggestions about teachers' roles in CALL. At the beginning, the author mentioned about the traditional role of teachers before CALL was introduced. In short, the author said that teachers are the heart of the classroom when it comes to learning especially in language. The author states that people misunderstood that when CALL is used as a medium to obtain better knowledge in language. teachers roles are no longer compulsory. However, this is not true since teachers responsibility multiplied when using CALL. For example, the teacher need to to supervise students, decide how much control the computer may have in the classroom and also to help students on how to initiate CALL. As a conclusion, the author thinks that the teachers' roles are crucial in CALL on the contrary of the belief that their positions are threatened.

From my point of view, I think both of the articles opened my eyes in CALL. From my understanding alone, I was easily mislead by the concept of CALL. At first, I thought CALL in basically using computer to do my assignments but after a lot of observation, now I finally understand that CALL is actually a kind of bridge that help me in improving my language learning through computer-based components. As for the teachers' roles in CALL, I agreed with the author of the articles that teachers play an important role in CALL. Without the guidance and instructions from teachers, students would be astray and would not be able to understand the significant of CALL. I could say I experienced first hand in this matter. Regardless of how advanced the technology is, we still need someone to assist us in doing things and who better to help us than a qualified teacher ^^

So in a nutshell, my assignment this time is not just another material to put up in my blog. Though I have to admit that I did not have any fun in completing this task >.<, I still gained a lot from it the fact that I understood better about the course syllabus and my do we have to do the tasks we wer given. Oh, and one more thing, I get the chance to practice my writing skills as well ^_^

1 comments:

norizan said...

Teh the activity is problem solving type. when you go to the library search for the online database and read about the topic it is discovery learning. You learn better that way.