Week 7

Part 1 
Díez-Bedmar & Pérez-Paredes (2012)

This study revealed the use of CMC ( wikis, forums) in an intercultural collaborative exchange project involving students in England learning Spanish as their L2 and Spanish students learning English as an L2. Since this project provided ample opportunities for communication via CMC with native speakers, since it allowed both groups of students to collaborate on a final project, which in this case happened to be a tourism brochure. LREs were analyzed since the project was divided up into smaller subtasks, which allowed students to gradually research background information and also familiarize themselves with their dyads.  What made this project even more rewarding for the L2 learners, was that the project targeted the tourist brochure as an applicable project in their professional field of interest.
The study revealed that when analyzing the LREs most of the feedback attended to morphosyntactic and lexical errors, in some cases “the Spanish peers in this experience seemed to only accept it when their perceived it as correct and without further follow-up or discussion” (Díez-Bedmar & Pérez-Paredes 84). In some instances where feedback was incorrect, it also demonstrates that the students were able to focus on form and accurately identify the correct response.

Part 2
Approaches to teaching Vocab/ Grammar in CALL

This week we were introduced to various websites for studying vocabulary and having students self-create their own flashcards. What I found the most useful about this discussion is that we were all given an opportunity to review these websites as available sources for vocabulary and L2 learners. The website we reviewed was studystack.com. This website provided very basic tools that offered little to no multilingual support, which was disappointing to say the least. Also, many of this website’s features fell short of what other tools such as quizlet have to offer. It was a great idea to have us review each website, since it does save instructors time in terms of analyzing what each CALL tool provides, and also since it allows us to consider which tools might be more appealing to particular L2 learners’ needs.