"Using Technology in Second Language Research: What Can It Offer?" |
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8:00 -11:50 am Saturday September 9 Organizer: Sally
Sieloff Magnan, University of Wisconsin-Madison Presentations:
The line between research on second language acquisition (SLA)
and research on pedagogically oriented foreign language learning
(FL Ed) is a blurry one. Unfortunately, discussions of the role
of technology in both of these areas typically focus on research
on the "efficacy" of pedagogical uses of the technology
for language teaching, which is an entirely different matter from
using technology to explore how learning occurs. I will try to
make this distinction clear and to argue that theoretically sophisticated
uses of technology are crucial to research on adult classroom
second language acquisition, whether or not the research findings
have immediate pedagogical implication.
With the introduction of Computer-Assisted Interaction (CAI) in the second/foreign language classroom, research has begun to pay attention to its effect on language learners' performance and classroom dynamics (Chun 1994; Warschauer 1996; Kern 1995; Sullivan & Pratt 1996). Still, there is a need for research from a process-oriented perspective that describes the nature of the discourse generated through CAI, and that ascertains which features of this discourse are relevant to the processes involved in second language acquisition. In a series of studies we found the use of negotiation routines (Varonis & Gass, 1985) in computer-mediated interaction, thus documenting some of the processes conducive to second language acquisition in the synchronous written medium. We will provide an overview of these studies and discuss the effects of the sociolinguistic background of the dyad members, the nature of the medium (oral versus synchronous written interaction), and the type of task (open versus close) on learners' generated discourse.
This experimental study was designed with three different web-based experimental tasks to test the competence of bilingual (L2, English/French) and trilingual (L3, English/Spanish/French) learners of French in their acquisition of the syntactic properties subsumed under the verb movement parameter and the null subject parameter. The background information questionnaire and three experimental tasks (a scaled grammaticality judgment task, a preference/grammaticality task and a production task) were created with a web-based software, Claris Homepage, while a fourth experimental task (a magnitude estimation acceptability judgment task) was designed with a multimedia software, Director. This study was based on the premise that a wider variety of web-based elicitation tasks would yield a rich set of data with greater internal and external validity. It addressed two research questions: 1) will there be a relationship between the learners' performance on various syntactic properties and task types?; 2) will there be a relationship between L2 learners' performance and the L3 learners' performance? The results indicate that the performance of both groups of learners was influenced by the type of elicitation task they were administered, as well as by the syntactic properties. In addition, it was found that the L2 learners outperformed the L3 learners. Both findings are examined within the context of underlying psycholinguistic processes in second language acquisition.
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Last updated May 19, 2000.
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