CALL for grammar and structure practice
On the two sessions by David Barr (G1, 12-12.30) and Petter Karlström et al (G5, 15.30-16) on Tuesday, similar topics were discussed: What will spicing up grammar by using computers lead to when it comes to language learning? Barr pointed out the benefits of using eg Hot potatoes for producing web exercises. His French students were asking for more grammar exercises! Offering exercises online caters for an increased database of exercises required. Technology helps students retain an interest in grammar. (Which is also my experience from software development of a net based grammar tool, EngOnline, that we use where I teach).
Karlström pointed to the issue of student interaction, when describing the development of their grammar checking program; Grim. How students use the tool is reflected by how they are asked by the program to use it: The outcome of the activities will be formative if that’s what the program is designed for. But how can you get grammar and structure practice to be more interactive?
Karlström pointed to the issue of student interaction, when describing the development of their grammar checking program; Grim. How students use the tool is reflected by how they are asked by the program to use it: The outcome of the activities will be formative if that’s what the program is designed for. But how can you get grammar and structure practice to be more interactive?
posted by Linda Bradley at 8:44 am
8 Comments:
When I first got interested in CALL in 1976 (which may be before some of you attending this conference were born!) most of the materials available focused on grammar. It’s interesting to me as a partner in a software publishing business that grammar packages such as GramEx (developed by Paul Hickman for the TELL Consortium in the mid-1990s) and CLEF (produced by a consortium of Canadian universities) continue to sell.
What I miss most in modern CALL packages focusing on grammar is the lack of (1) discrete error analysis, (2) useful feedback to the learner, and (3) help which the learner can turn to in order to revise a specific point. All three of these features were (and still are) an integral part of the CLEF package, which dates back to the late 1970s! The tendency these days is for authors to produce what I call point-and-click-let’s-move-on-quick grammar packages, consisting solely of multiple-choice and gap-filling exercises with little or no feedback – especially on the Web. I am, however, aware of work being done by Aliy Fowler (University of Kent, UK), Trude Heift (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and Mathias Schulze (University of Waterloo, Canada) on grammar package that incorporate a more “intelligent” approach (ICALL) to interactive grammar exercises. Dana Paramskas (University of Guelph, Canada, and one of the authors of CLEF) has been working on “intelligent” grammar packages for many years.
See here for a description of CLEF:
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/dddware/
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/clef.htm
Some of the podcasts produced by the Partners in Excellence team in Scotland focus on grammar for students in secondary education:
http://www.pie.org.uk/
Linda, I think this is a very important topic! Good software can both make grammar practice more fun and more efficient by individualized exercises. I am also attracted by the possibilities to save valuable teacher - student interaction time by working with these types of activities outside the classroom.
We are more and more moving towards autonomous, student-directed contexts in higher education where I think the points made by Graham become essential. In my fact-to-face teaching i have increasingly included assessable tasks which involve eliciting from students meta-linguistic analysis of grammar structures. Clearly, from a form perspective repetitive grammar drill type activities work for (some) learners but I have found a lot of success when getting students to articulate what a structure, verb tense, preposition, etc. does rather than just how you form it...so, I would like to see that type of metalinguistic information integrated into CALL grammar materials...is it a pipe dream????
I was pleasantly surprised to see our presentation being discussed here! However, the discussion is beginning to drift away into things that may form misconceptions about what Grim and my study is about.
First of all, Grim is not a fill-in-the-blanks, quick point-and-click application. It is a communicative tool for exploring grammar. Students write (or read) texts, and then have a multitude of tools to explore forms in the text. The feature being used depends on the task at hand. For example, highlighting grammatical forms might be useful when revising and one wants to check e.g. verb tense. By highlighting a word class such as verbs, the students get a global perspective on their text structures, which may help in reflecting on when and why there are tense changes in the text (This is just one example, there are many tools in Grim).
Now, my study suggests that students prefer being taught by program. They tend to use it more like a grammar checker that tells them what is correct than as a global text-revision tool. Still, they do do write free-form texts and they do focus on form. Perhaps the task of freely revising is too demanding even for advanced students. It may be that other tasks are needed to encourage students to use more implicit tools and to reflect more on their text structure.
In other words, our tool and our study is actually quite different from fill-in exercises! The CALL tools we advocate attempt to encourage students to reflect on their own language. The question is how to build such tools and the tasks that go with them.
I just had a quick look at the Grim page. It appears to have a lot in common with Paul Hickman's GramDef, a CD-ROM program produced as part of the TELL Consortium series of CD-ROMs in the mid-1990s, complemented by Paul Hickman's GramEx, which is one of the better types of interactive grammar packages - and which still sells quite well.
Petter, I’ll definitely have a closer look at your program which seems really interesting! What I was referring to was the discussion that came up on your session about how students put grammar tools into use.
I'm reminded too of these two useful tools for learners:
Ultralingua: As well as offering online and offline dictionaries, Ultralingua offers a useful facility that can convert a Web page into a "dictionary-enabled" page, so that the words on the page are clickable and can be looked up in a defining dictionary (English) or a bilingual dictionary. You type or paste the URL of the Web page into the address box and choose the source and target language. The original Web page is then made available as a dictionary-enabled, clickable page. Some Web pages can't be dictionary-enabled, but it works most of the time. Includes verb conjugation tables too: http://www.ultralingua.net & http://www.ultralingua.com
VoyCabulary: VoyCabulary makes the words on any webpage into links so you can look them up in a dictionary or other word-reference-site of your choice, by simply clicking on the words. Anytime you find yourself reading a Web page with words you wish to look-up, try running the page through VoyCabulary and just click on the words: http://www.voycabulary.com
It is always good to have reminders from previous development in the field, thanks for that. However, I think there are some novel features in Grim. To start with, the integration of the different tools in one environment is not very frequent in CALL-programs. There also exist some novel approaches to the analyses of the learners’ texts. We have developed a statistical grammar checker which is now integrated in Grim. I believe that statistical methods are very important in general, and in particular for the processing of learners' language. Their language is really unpredictable. If you want to read more about this I recommend a paper written by Johnny Bigert, Viggo Kann, Ola Knutsson and Jonas Sjöbergh (2004). Grammar checking for Swedish second language learners. Chapter in CALL for the Nordic Languages, Copenhagen Studies in Language, Samfundslitteratur, Copenhagen, Denmark.
If you are interested in the design and development of Grim read the article by Ola Knutsson, Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Kerstin Severinson Eklundh and Stefan Westlund (2006). Designing and developing a language environment for second language writers. Computers and Education. An International Journal. Elsevier. You will find this paper through Science direct.
In addition, Grim works under most operating systems and is freely available How to install Grim.
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