“We see a move from computer assisted language learning (CALL)  to technology enhanced language learning (TELL) [,,,]. One of the main differences between CALL and TELL is that we see technology not as assisting language learning, but as part of the environment in which language exists and is used” (Walker A, & G. White (2013:9))…

How do you (or don’t you) identify yourself with the level of confidence and behaviour discussed in Kessler & Plakans’ article? This week our focus is on CALL or Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Following an analysis of the history and current situation of CALL, as can be found in my previous post, I read an interesting…

Which of the approaches identified by Bax would you say most closely approximates your own CALL practice? I work at a English language training centre, and the adoption of CALL is fairly new, literally coming in during the 4 years I have been working there. We started by adding single computers in classrooms, using textbooks with…

  Do you think Bax’s criticisms of Warschauer are valid? If so, in what way(s) does his approach deepen our understanding of the history of CALL? I agree that the inconsistencies in naming of Warscheur’s CALL phases and chronology of those phases are distracting. Calling the second phase “Communicative” and attaching it to the period of 1980’s-1990’s (Bax 2003:16) is…

Structuring lesson plans to appeal to Digital Natives Understanding learner styles The infographic above is very revealing. It seems to support the main idea Prensky put forward in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, “Digital Immigrant teachers assume that learners are the same as they have always been and that the same methods that worked for…

The distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants is inaccurate as it is too simplistic and misleading. My Reflections In his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Prensky (2001) makes unfavourable assumptions about teachers and their abilities to react in a sensible manner to changes in their environment. Describing Digital Immigrant teachers as those who, “……

‘We can track within the ‘digital native’ literature and discourse an alignment with this vision of higher education as market driven and determined by a culture of enterprise. The need for institutions and individual academics to change (to become more ‘digital’) is regularly justified by referral to student ‘needs’ which come to stand as proxy…

In his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Prensky (2001) claims that our students think and learn differently from their teachers because, while the former are digital language native speakers, the latter have, at best, learnt their digital language as a foreign language. Thus, while our students have native speaker intuition, teachers do not. My reaction to…