Twitterbean Rationale

c.f. Aja's Blog:

Twitter provides English language learners a means of connecting with native speakers, encountering authentic input while restricting usage to 140 characters or less. The strict limits force students to critically use vocabulary and abbreviations that mirror native speakers' usage. This project will just be one means of using twitter in the classroom as students will have experience using twitter to follow a celebrity or cause, communicating with classmates and posting reactions to readings and discussions. Using twitter as a form of data collection and reporting will: focus students on collecting specific pieces of data in accordance with the character limit, allow for numerous entries, while saving the data and making it open for public view. Below are instructions for using twitter in the context of students' politeness measuring project.

2nd Life

I signed up to second life as Jamon Delicioso. I was able to customize most of my appearance and basically, made a doppelganger of my true self. I realize that the fun thing about 2nd Life would be to make myself different from my true self but hey, I'm as entertaining as watching paint dry. I have yet to actually walk around the joint but when I do, I will seek out some language academies.

I can see the benefit to using the world as a language CALL tool. I've heard there are enclaves where one can go to learn just about any language one would want to learn. That is kinda cool. Although, the downfall would be that you don't get to practice listening and speaking as much as reading and writing.

e-journaling

Cohen and Ishihara cite e-journaling as a great way to reflect on their own learning experience. A way of self assessment that can be easily viewed by not only the learner, but the instructor and his/her peers in the classroom.

Something I would emphasize to the student would be to have them pick certain areas where they are deficient and write about that. By writing on it, the student is actively acknowledging his/her weaknesses and will be able to attack those problems with gusto!

I would say that the use of e-journaling would be limited to high-intermediate to advanced students who may have a much better grasp of writing in the L2. Allowing the collaborative effect of multiple viewpoints and suggestions, the learner could really benefit from this type of activity.