The 2012 EUROCALL Proceedings are out and freely available at http://research-publishing.net/publications/2012-eurocall-proceedings. The 2012 annual conference of the European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) took place in Gothenburg, Sweden, 22-25 August 2012; 59 papers are included in these proceedings.

The book as well as all individual papers can be downloaded from the publisher’s website. The Proceedings are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported Licence, which means that the contents are freely available online for anybody to read, download, copy, distribute, and transmit provided that the authors, editors and publisher are properly cited.

Reference

Bradley, L., & Thouësny, S. (Eds.). (2012). CALL: Using, Learning, Knowing, EUROCALL Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 22-25 August 2012, Proceedings. Dublin: Research-publishing.net.

Abstract

Language teachers, as one might expect, are often confronted to the task of assessing and grading students’ assignments, which should ideally be addressed with respect to not only reliability and validity, but also functionality. Based on Knoch’s (2011) taxonomy features with regards to design and development of writing assessments, an analytic approach was devised to assign scores to a certain amount of independent aspects of language learners’ performance through the means of specific rubrics. Rubrics are defined as “systematic scoring guidelines to evaluate students’ performance [...] through the use of a detailed description of performance standards” (Zimmaro, 2007, p.1). Assessor as well as student oriented, these rubrics were elaborated to describe the rating of the various tasks intermediate learners of French had to do; tasks such as the presentation of their projects in front of their peers or the transcription of interviews they conducted with native speakers. Following a brief description of the learners’ assignments, this presentation will highlight the significance of following the scoring grids to maintain a relatively constant grading style across all students and teachers alike, thus lessening the variations due to, for instance, subjectivity or tiredness. Additionally, this presentation will focus on the advantages of providing students with scores and feedback in a timely manner. Furthermore, it will illustrate how Google Docs, used in conjunction with simple and undemanding scripts, assisted in the process of correcting and providing students easily with fast corrective feedback.

References

Knoch, U. (2011). Rating scales for diagnostic assessment of writing: what should they look like and where should the criteria come from? Assessing Writing, 16(2), 81-96. doi:10.1016/j.asw.2011.02.003

Zimmaro, D. M. (2007). Using rubrics to grade student performance. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Centre for teaching and learning. Retrieved from http://ctl.utexas.edu/assets/Evaluation–Assessment/Using-Rubrics-to-Grade-Student-Performance-10-15-07.pdf

Presentation

Thouësny, S. (2012). “Scoring rubrics and Google Scripts: a means to smoothly provide language learners with fast corrective feedback and grades“. Symposium presentation. EUROCALL 2012 Conference, CALL: using, learning, knowing, 22-AUG-12 – 25-AUG-12, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Publication

Thouësny, S. (2012). Scoring rubrics and Google Scripts: a means to smoothly provide language learners with fast corrective feedback and grades. In L. Bradley, & S. Thouësny (Eds.), CALL: Using, Learning, Knowing, EUROCALL Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 22-25 August 2012, Proceedings (pp. 286-292). Dublin: Research-publishing.net.

Further information on scripts to report grades can be found in one of my previous posts.

Abstract

Learners’ responses to correction are commonly referred to as learner uptake. Closely related to the notion of uptake, the concepts of “repair” and “needs-repair” describe a pushed modification a learner would suggest after being prompted to self-edit an erroneous linguistic feature (Lyster & Ranta, 1997, p. 49). While an uptake/repair points to a learner’s correct reformulation of an incorrect aspect of the language, an uptake/needs-repair indicates that the alternative form provided was not appropriate and still needs to be rectified. A learner’s repair may be deemed an indicator of both feedback success and learner noticing, but cannot be considered as evidence of language acquisition (Ellis & Sheen, 2006). Indeed, providing a correct alternative form to an incorrect linguistic feature does not establish that learners knew how to correct themselves; it only demonstrates that they were able to suggest a correct replacement to an incorrect form at a specific point in time; this replacement may have been the outcome of a guess. While researchers on learner uptake generally intend to investigate the effectiveness of feedback types such as clarification request or metalinguistic feedback on learners’ responses, little is known about learner uptake/repair and lucky guesses.

References

Ellis, R., & Sheen, Y. (2006). Reexamining the role of recasts in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(4), 575-600.

Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37-66.

But, …

Proceedings are often bad in their form. Is it just me, or are they formatted with less and less elegance? I know I have a background in design which makes me biased in this matter, but I cannot stand anymore headers at the bottom of a page without text below, or widowed lines, i.e., the last line of a paragraph, all alone on the other page.

Conference organisers ask for camera-ready papers more and more, which means that the documents provided by the authors are the final versions of the manuscripts that will be printed or published. Editors, be careful, it is, in addition to bad styles, more than frequent to find inconsistencies in references as well, such as

• no reference list at the end of a document;
• references in text not matching reference list or vice-versa;
• inconsistencies in reference style throughout not only one paper but also the whole publication.

All of these issues in form give a pretty bad look to proceedings and decrease their value, which should not be the case as their contents are invaluable. Editors and publishers should keep in mind that the look is one, not to say the essential feature that gives the first impression to a potential reader.

It is hoped that the book will assist doctoral students in discovering and selecting relevant hypotheses, frameworks, and models when elaborating their own research design. The entries listed in the book are briefly and objectively described in order to give a swift idea of what they encompass.

More information on the publisher’s website.

This work implies a lot of research and verifications with regard to references, and the only way to double-check a reference is to read the original paper itself. Unfortunately, I don’t have free access to everything, which is kind of annoying. The table below lists the references of publications I cannot find for free. Would you have them, and would you be willing to share them with me, please contact me per email (sylvie.thouesny@icall-research.net).

This table is constantly updated!

Interactive Whiteboards by PolyVision

Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence includes

(a) attitudes: curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own, (b) knowledge of social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in one’s interlocutor’s country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction, (c) skills of interpreting and relating: ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one’s own, (d) skills of discovery and interaction: ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction, and (e) critical cultural awareness/political education: an ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries (pp. 50-53).

The study is a six-week telecollaborative email exchange, with as focal point the intercultural competence between American and German students. Schenker found that almost all Byram’s learning objectives, apart from those, for instance, referring to synchronous communication, could be observed in the students’ exchanges. She further points out that “the telecollaborative project showed an increase in the students’ self-perceived knowledge about the target culture” (Schenker, 2012, p. 460). All in all, the author suggests email exchanges as an appropriate means to foster language learners’ intercultural competence.

References

Byram, M. 1997. Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Schenker, T. 2012. Intercultural competence and cultural learning through telecollaboration. CALICO Journal. 29 (3), pp449-470.

Abstract

Assessing language learners’ written language not only provides insight into learners’ linguistic strengths and weaknesses, it equally assists in the prediction of learners’ future performance. Future achievements are generally predicted by looking at past performance and potential development, past-to-present and present-to-future models, respectively (Valsiner, 2001). Within a past-to-present model, the future is acknowledged as being the continuance of learners’ past and present performances. On the other hand, a present-to-future model intends to predict learners’ future attainments from their collaboration with other more knowledgeable persons. While both approaches intend to unveil the learners’ future accomplishments, neither model infers what learners currently know. Predicting learners’ present knowledge is a challenging topic, as it implies distinguishing between competence-dependent errors and performance-related mistakes (Corder, 1981). Grounded in sociocultural theory, this paper presents an expanded theoretical approach based on Valsiner’s (2001) present-to-future model to predict language learners’ current knowledge as opposed to knowledge to come.

Presentation

Thouësny, S. (2012). “Predicting language learners’ present knowledge from their written performance: an expanded theoretical model”. Paper presentation. The 15th International CALL Research Conference, The Medium Matters, 25-MAY-12 – 27-MAY-12, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan.

Publication

Thouësny, S. (2012). Predicting language learners’ present knowledge from their written performance: an expanded theoretical model. In J. Colpaert, A. Aerts, W.-C. V. Wu, & Y.-C. J. Chao (Eds.), Fifteenth International CALL Conference, The Medium Matters, Proceedings, 24-27 May 2012. Taichung, Taiwan: Providence University.

To be able to reuse copyright material from a published work in my own work, I need to ask for permission. I don’t think that the adage “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” would work here. Let’s be prudent!

Finding the permission information page on the website was easy enough. The “Request permissions” link is listed at the bottom of the article. Some publishers grant their permissions through a centralised Copyright Clearance Center. For instance, “Taylor & Francis has partnered with Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service to offer a variety of options for reusing Taylor & Francis content”.

They offer, they say, a variety of options for reusing their content, so far so good.

After completing their online form, I discovered that the price to reuse one single figure in my new publication would cost me 110.26 EURO. COME ON! I intended to use about 500 different ones. Even the authors of this graph must ask permission to reuse their own work; it is not their’s anymore.

My final thought is that, we writers have the power to select our publisher. Let’s make a good choice and publish our work under Creative Commons.

Reference

Levy, M., & Hubbard, P. (2005). Why call CALL ‘‘CALL’’? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(3), 143–149.

Early language aptitude

Identifying those with major difficulties and those with natural abilities at easily learning a foreign language motivated the first attempts of language aptitude testing. The so-called prognosis tests, occurring in the late 1920s, were developed in the U.S. schools to screen learners’ aptitude so as to reduce the high percentage of unsuccessfullness with regard to language learning (Dörnyei, 2005). The results, judged “too unreliable for use as a basis for denying any child the right to undertake foreign language work”, promoted at the time the creation of orientation classes to distinguish in between different learner’s levels (Kaulfers, 1939, p. 82). Years later, in the 1950s and 1960s, the goal had not changed and research on language aptitude became more active than before (Dörnyei, 2005).

The MLAT

The Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) designed by Carroll and Sapon (1959) aimed at predicting each candidate’s level of success in terms of rate of learning in second language acquisition, where candidates with more aptitude were likely to learn faster. In other words, it anticipated learners’ potential at rapidly speaking and understanding a foreign language. Carroll (1973) refined the concept of foreign language aptitude to the “rate at which persons at the secondary school, university and adult level successfully master a foreign language” (Carroll, 1973, p. 5 cited in Johnson, 2008, p. 118).

Language aptitude reconsidered

On the one hand, Dörnyei and Skehan (2003) claim that post-Carroll research on language aptitude has been poorly investigated, mostly because “aptitude is perceived as anti-egalitarian, in that if a fixed, immutable interpretation of aptitude is taken, it is seen as potentially disadvantaging many learners, with no hope offered of overcoming the handicap of low aptitude” (p. 593). One the other hand, Stansfield and Reed (2004) point out that the “MLAT has been used for selection, placement and guidance by schools and U.S. government agencies for more than 40 years” (p. 43). Because MLAT was developed when language teaching was mostly audiolingual, a now outdated technique, some researchers on foreign language instruction, in 1990, came to the conclusion that “…the time has come to rethink the whole notion of what constitutes ‘aptitude’ to learn FL’s” (reported by Parry & Stansfield, 1990, p. 2), to which Carroll (1990) retorted:

… it has been my assumption, for some years, that the degree of success has been acceptable or more than acceptable. In view of this, I return my query: What’s wrong with present methods? Do they require just ‘fine tuning’, or is some more radical change called for? (p. 12).

Regardless, Carroll (1990) still suggested a new approach of language aptitude prediction by investigating memory performances and cognitive factors, which were emerging, at the time, as highly active domains of research. He also proposed to take language learning tasks into consideration for further research in foreign language aptitude.

New contributors to language aptitude

New cognitive factors started influencing how researchers could measure language aptitude. Sawyer and Ranta (2001) believe that working memory capacity, which is the new label for short-term memory system, may be the answer to enhance the concept of language aptitude. The outdated term portrayed the short-term memory space as a limited space for information that will be remembered for just a few moments (Skehan, 1998). Working memory, however, is defined as “a system for temporarily holding and manipulating information as part of a wide range of essential cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehending“ (Baddeley, 1997, p. 49). Ellis (2001) further points out that in opposition to short-term memory, working memory has an active storage function for managing information.

The working memory, proposed by Baddeley (1997), is a controlling attentional system or central executive that supervises two subsystems specialised in short-term memory and information processing, respectively named the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad. While the central executive, limited in capacity, is responsible for the allocation of attention, the phonological loop deals with verbal information, and the visuo-spatial sketch pad is concerned with image representation and spatial information. According to Ellis (2001), individual differences in the phonological loop account for individual differences in language learning aptitude. He adds that the ability to repeat uttered phonological sequences predicts the learner’s facility at learning vocabulary and syntax.

Conclusion

The perception of what language aptitude is has considerably evolved during the last decades. It seems to be now acknowledged as being several different individual cognitive aptitudes that differ from person to person, rather than one individual difference per se. The aptitude at learning a language will be balanced between learners’ more or less developed cognitive aptitudes, which may be, for instance, classified into basic cognitive abilities, such as processing speed, pattern recognition, phonological working memory capacity, phonological working memory speed, semantic priming, lexical inferencing, text working memory capacity, text working memory speed, grammatical sensitivity, and rote memory (Robinson, 2005).

References

Baddeley, A. (1997). Human memory: theory and practice (Revised ed.). Sussex: Psychology Press Ltd Publishers.

Carroll, J. B. (1990). Cognitive abilities in foreign language aptitude: then and now. In T. Parry & C. Stansfield (Eds.), Language aptitude reconsidered. NJ: Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs.

Carroll, J. B. (1973). Implications of aptitude test research and psycholinguistic theory for foreign language teaching. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 2(1), 5-14.

Carroll, J. B., & Sapon, S. M. (1959). Modern language aptitude test: MLAT; manual. New York: Psychological Corporation.

Dörnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dörnyei, Z., & Skehan, P. (2003). Individual differences in second language learning. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 589-630). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Ellis, C. N. (2001). Memory for language. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, K. (2008). An introduction to foreign language learning and teaching (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited.

Kaulfers, W. V. (1939). Prognosis and its alternatives in relation to the guidance of students. The German Quarterly, 12(2), 81-84. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/400453

Parry, T., & Stansfield, C. (Eds.). (1990). Language aptitude reconsidered. NJ: Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs.

Robinson, P. (2005). Aptitude and second language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25(1), 46-73. doi:10.1017/S0267190505000036

Sawyer, M., & Ranta, L. (2001). Aptitude, individual differences, and instructional design. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford Univiersity Press.

Stansfield, C. W., & Reed, D. J. (2004). The story behind the modern language aptitude test: an interview with John B. Carroll (1916-2003). Language Assessment Quarterly, 1(1), 43-56. doi:10.1207/s15434311laq0101_4