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IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 |
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IATEFL Poland A Journal for Teachers of English ISSN 1642-1027 |
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Reports From Past Events |
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COMPUTER-MEDIATED
LEXICOGRAPHY - A SEMINAR A seminar entitled
"Computer-Mediated Lexicography" was organized by Mari Carmen Campoy
from Universitat Jaume I, Quite a unique aspect of the
seminar was that it joined people representing different viewpoints: academic
researchers, practical language teachers, lexicographers, university lecturers.
Thanks to that, each of the presentations could get a wider perspective to be
included in the monograph on computer-mediated lexicography. The seminar took place in
very well-equipped computer laboratories and auditorium of the Centre for New
Technologies and the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of Universitat
Jaume I of Castello. The presenters could benefit from state-of-the-art
technology, facilitating the delivery of ideas and the comprehension among the
audience. The seminar started with the presentation
by the organizer, Maria Carmen Campoy, representing Universitat Jaume I,
Castello, Spain, who gave a lecture entitled "Computer-mediated
dictionaries: an insight into online dictionary features". She started
with a comparison of electronic dictionaries and paper dictionaries, bringing
to light some of the most crucial differences. She outlined the process of
pedagogical improvements: from glossaries and dictionaries with a few links to
sound files for pronunciation and enhanced hypertextuality; from dictionaries
providing only a definition of words to dictionaries with links to social and
cultural aspects of languages. The presenter addressed also the issue of
dictionary skills instruction and dealt with innovative aspects and design
features, focusing especially on how to use them in the teaching context. The next presentation was
given by Maria Jose Luzon from Universidad de Zaragoza, Ilan Kernerman, from K
Dictionaries, Israel, tried to bring together some aspects of the seminar
topics concerning the growing cross-connection in language, learning,
information, communication and technology. The author touched upon the
dictionary's role in coordination among people and with computers, the
computer's role in the creation of dictionaries and in their use, the
dictionary-making process of deconstructing and reconstructing language(s). One
of the solutions suggested by the presenter was to use bilingual dictionaries
in foreign language learning. The presenter illustrated the speech with
examples from the English learners Passport and multilingual GlobalDix
dictionaries. On the second day of the
seminar, Yukio Tono, from Meikai University, Tokyo, Japan, discussed some major
methodological issues involved in the use of electronic dictionaries for
language learning. One of many problems considered was the one of interface and
the influence it has on the language learner's attitude towards the dictionary.
The presentation was illustrated with a variety of examples of programs and
electronic devices, which was very informative for the audience. Santiago Posteguillo, from
Universitat Jaume I, Castello, Spain, gave a detailed account of an impressive
project of creating an English-Spanish and Spanish-English computer terms
dictionary. Posteguillo outlined the steps of the project, showed the
development of it and envisaged its future. The audience was able to get
first-hand experience of dictionary making. The humble undersigned, Jarek
Krajka, representing "ADELEX: Using
Computer-Mediated Dictionaries Online to Enhance Vocabulary Acquisition"
was the presentation by Carmen Perez Basanta and María del Mar Sanchez Ramos
from Universidad de Granada, Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak, from The final presentation was
delivered by Pilar Safont from Universitat Jaume I, Castello, Spain. She dealt
with the acquisition of English in a
multilingual and multicultural world, with a special emphasis on the use of
multi- and bilingual dictionaries by bilingual learners of English. Illustrated
with examples from English, Spanish and Catalan, the presentation provided
valuable ideas on second and third language dictionary use. At the moment, it should be
stressed that all the participants of the seminar were able to get to know each
other better not only during the presentations, coffee breaks, but also during
more informal evening outings, meals and different forms of entertainment. The
organisers of the conference, and especially its mastermind, Maria Carmen
Campoy, made sure that the participants felt at Castello like at home,
encompassed them with hospitality, let them experience the typically Spanish
culture and take part in local fiestas. Thanks to that, the atmosphere of the
seminar was truly cordial and fully conducive to the successful dissemination
of ideas. All in all, it must be said
that the seminar was a great success due to the devotion and skill of Maria
Carmen Campoy, as well as the facilities and funding provided by Universitat
Jaume I and the Fundacio Caixa-Castello Bancaixa. It is beyond doubt that the
monograph on computer-mediated lexicography that will result from the seminar
should pave the way for future research in dictionary making and effective
dictionary use in foreign language learning and teaching. ICT
IN ELT The conference was organized
by The British Council Poland, IATEFL The conference was attended
by 107 participants, teachers, teacher trainers, CALL researchers, publishers'
representatives, from different parts of Apart from the sessions, the
important part of the conference constituted less formal encounters in a
variety of contexts, which really helped participants get to know each other
and start new projects. This was done at publishers' stands, where everyone
could test-drive the new products, most notably Macmillan English Dictionary
for Advanced Learners and Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English version
4.0. Also, what should be highly appreciated are the organisers' efforts to
provide the conference participants with opportunities for entertainment, such
as a Multimedia Show, a guided tour "Gliwice by
night" and a reception, which helped to strengthen the ties in a less
informal atmosphere. The conference is unique in
one feature: there is some kind of balance between academic and commercial
presentations, which on the one hand enables informing teachers about new
products, but on the other hand the publishers are given the chance to hear the
teacher's views, needs and expectations as for new developments for upcoming
versions of programs. Although it was not
physically possible to attend all the presentations, most of them were given
over on a CD-ROM, which enabled all to explore them in detail after the
conference finished. Thus, what follows is a brief overview of only some
selected presentations. Raf Uzar, representing "Multimedia, the Web and
Formal EFL Exams" was the plenary session delivered by Pawel Topol from Developing ebooks was the
topic of the presentation by Paul East, who discussed a number of issues
arising when producing, promoting, selling ebooks, all supported with a number
of examples of actual materials. Magdalena Derwojedowa and
Magdalena Zawislawska (Warsaw Aleksandra Wojnowska and
Przemyslaw Kaszubski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland) gave a very
interesting demonstration of "TestBuilder", a corpus-based test
authoring application that can be used for making different exercises (open
cloze, hangman, gap-filling, sentence and paragraph reordering). The
participants were really impressed with the quality and user-friendliness of
the program, what is more, available as freeware. An interesting point of view,
from the commercial side, was represented by Michal Tasiemski. In his
presentation entitled "Lexitools - linguistic software. On-line
bilingual phrasal dictionaries and computer aided translation platform" he
showed the process of development and applications of Lexitools, a set
of language tools encompassing a dictionary browser, a translator's assistant
and installable dictionaries. The author's competent and informative
presentation really encouraged all the participants to try the free language
tools on their own. Przemyslaw Stencel, from Wyzsza Szkola Lingwistyczna, Wlodzimierz Sobkowiak,
representing The humble undersigned, All the other presentations
added value to the conference, namely "Language Skills and Technology -
What's Shakespeare Got to Do with It?" by Carol Clark, "Teaching Lazy
Teachers - BC ICT Project" by Grzegorz Juraszek and Grazyna Studzinska,
"Training Teachers to Teach Through Technology" by Ela Gajek and
"English Interactive Quizzes" by Agata Zieba-Warcholak. To sum up, it must be said
that ICT in ELT - 2nd International Conference was a highly
successful event, grouping academic researchers, teacher trainers, teachers and
publishers. Thanks to such a heterogeneous audience, the participants were treated
with an effective blend of theory and practice. It is hoped that if everything
goes well, the readers of Teaching English with Technology will be able
to benefit from some of the ideas presented during the conference in a Journal
issue devoted to the publication of conference proceedings. CILFE 6 CILFE 6 was the sixth conference on
teaching languages for specific purposes, this year held in Vilanova i la
Geltru (Barcelona) and devoted to the importance of Information Technology in
LSP. The conference was attended by more than 100 participants, mainly from
Spain, but also from Gambia, Japan, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan,
Israel, Portugal, Belgium, Hong Kong, the USA, Australia, the UK, Turkey,
Poland, Austria, France, Greece and Finland. There were as many as 58
presentations, all relatively short (of 25 minutes plus 10 for discussion),
with three or four consecutive workshop threads, so it made possible for the
participants to attend quite a substantial number of different lectures and
workshops. The conference started with the
opening address given by the Mayor of Vilanova i la Geltru, the representatives
of the local government of Catalunya, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and
the conference coordinators. Then the participants had the undeniable pleasure
of enjoying the plenary lecture by Deborah Healey, from Oregon State
University, the USA, who described the collaborative project teaming up higher
education institutions in the USA and Tunisia. The speaker gave a detailed
description of the project, in all its stages, illustrated with examples of the
websites used in the project and followed by useful guidelines as lessons
learned from the project. After the plenary presentation, the
participants got the feeling of a more informal and interactive mode of
presentation, attending one presentation in sections. My choice, quite a
fortunate one, was the paper given by Inna Kozlova, from Universidad Autonoma
de Barcelona, Spain, entitled "Expert field environment as a frame for an
LSP course: integration of resources." The author started with the
investigation of the interest of knowledge representation for both LSP students
and translators. Then the analysis of students' needs was conducted in
reference to existing resources, with the conclusion that there is a need for
designing a tool combining different resources and meeting the reference needs
of learners. After that pretaste of the
conference, all the participants were treated with the official reception at
the site of the Museum just opposite the main university hall by the local authorities
(Ayuntamient de Vilanova i la Geltru), when people had the chance to get to
know each other and have an informal (not necessarily CALL-related) chat over
the glass of champagne. The day continued with more
presentations, and, as is usually the case during conferences, it was a hard
task to choose the one to go to. I was happy to attend the paper by David
Lasagabaster Herrarte and Juan Manuel Sierro Plo, from Universidad del Pais
Vasco, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, on learning English with computers at the
university level. The authors presented the results of a study in which
students using various CALL programs were asked to express their opinions about
the learning experience, with the conclusion that students clearly see software
programs as a complementary tool in the foreign language classroom. "Engineering the Net: When
Materials Just Cannot Be Found," the presentation by Alejandro F. Lopez de
Vergara and Jose A. Luis Estevez from Universidad de La Laguna, touched a very
important issue of creating materials tailored to the needs of a specific
class, at the same time exploring the possibilities of the Net and developing
students' learner autonomy. The next speakers, Maria Jose Luzon
Marco and Maria Isable Gonzalez Pueyo from Universidad de Zaragoza, in their
presentation "Using the Internet to Promote Autonomous Learning in
ESP," proved that the Internet supports the paradigm of the
learner-centred syllabus, promotes autonomy and enhances the development of
learning and academic skills. However, as the authors claimed that the new
technology does not guarantee the promotion of autonomy by itself, examples of
tasks that can be used appropriately for ESP are provided, namely the WebQuest
and the Research Module. After a brief coffee break, the whole
day culminated in the plenary lecture delivered by Mike Scott from the
University of Liverpool, UK. He talked about the importance of key words for
teaching and learning languages for specific purposes. Because from the
learner's point of view key words provide a skeleton around which the gist of a
text can be constructed, identifying key words, whether by software or by hand,
is central to the LSP learning experience. To illustrate this issue, examples
were given where key words are identified by a software process. The day full of academic input ended
with a social event, a music recital, which definitely provided some
opportunity to find some fresh perspective for the next day of presentations
and plenary lectures. The second day of the conference started
very early, as the first presenters were scheduled for 8.30. The attendance for
the first presentations was surprisingly high, considering the social programme
that many conference participants had taken part in at night. The humble
undersigned, Jarek Krajka from Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin,
Poland, had the honour to give a presentation entitled "English for
Specific Purposes on the World Wide Web - A Proposal for a Web-based
Coursebook." The paper showed the context of ESP education on the
university level in Poland in comparison with the secondary level, analysed the
availability of ESP materials on the market with the conclusion that there is a
need for teachers to use general English coursebooks but supplement them with a
Web-based coursebook supplement. Then the presenter gave details on how to
create such a supplement and provided sample topics and tasks. The next presentation I had the
pleasure to attend was "English for Information Technology or Information
Technology for English? Designing English for Library and Information Science
Syllabuses," by Piedad Fernandez Toledo from Universidad de Murcia, Spain.
The presenter provided the rationale for a content and genre-based approach. Next,
the procedure for implementing the tasks was described, ending up with the
description of the skills involved and the benefits of the approach outlined. Virginia Hussin, representing
University of South Australia, talked about a teaching and learning framework
adopted at the university that allows students to have more flexible access to
learning and get more control over the learning process, using the information
technologies available. The paper outlined two different applications of ICT in
ESP, giving the examples of the workshops developed. During the brief coffee break that
followed everyone had the chance to exchange views in a one-to-one more
informal atmosphere, but everyone was looking forward to one of the
presentations of the conference, the plenary lecture "IT in LSP: From
Cloze to Kibbitzing," by Tim F. Johns. The author, one of the pioneers of
CALL and the pacesetter in the field, gave a brief but informative overview of
the development of Computer-Assisted Language Learning over the years, with the
special focus on concordancing and data-driven learning. The lecture was very
useful especially for the people like the undersigned who were born in the
Internet era and do not have any experience with previous phases of CALL. Parallel sessions followed, and this
time I became interested in "University E-learning: Teaching Business
English within Electronic Networks," by Manuela Ruiz from Universidad de
Zaragoza, Spain. The presenter talked about the e-learning network implemented
at the university, giving details on how to work within the system with the
special focus on teaching Business English. What followed was the useful
suggestions for practical activities to be included in online BE courses and an
annotated list of website references immensely useful in teaching English for
business. "Integration of E-learning into
a Tertiary Educational Context," the paper by Ruth Trinder and Erika
Ladurner from Vienna University, Austria, described the conceptualization,
implementation and evaluation of web-based materials developed for Business English
students. The authors discussed the pedagogical considerations underlying the
design of the programme, then touched upon the influence issues such as
departmental policy, teaching and testing practices, curriculum. Finally,
students' evaluation of the programme was presented. After the lunch break, the
conference participants were treated with a few more papers. Arna Peretz, from
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Omer, Israel, talked about how to integrate
IT in writing courses for graduate students, giving the information on the
setting, students, prerequisites and framework of such courses. It was really interesting to listen
to a presentation "The Elaboration of a Computer Science Dictionary, or
How to Help Translating the Untranslatable" by Jordi Pique Angordans,
Santiago Posteguillo Gomez and Lourdes Melcion, representing Universitat de
Valencia, Spain, Universitat Jaume I, Castello, Spain and University of Surrey
Roehampton, London, UK, respectively. Starting with theoretical assumptions for
producing the dictionaries in computing and information technology, the need
for specialized dictionaries and the distinction between passive and active
dictionaries, the authors proceeded to outlining the work process on the
elaboration of such an English-Spanish Spanish-English tool. Then, Stephen Bremner from Zayed
University, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, gave the insights into the impact of
computers on the writing process, with the special emphasis on how the computer
as a tool affects the way people write. The paper was supported by the results
of a small-scale study investigating the effects of using computers on the
writing process in a workplace-oriented context. After another coffee break the
participants could listen to and take part in a round table entitled
"Towards the Use of Virtual Learning Environments in LSP Teaching:
Pondering on an Everchanging Scenario." The discussing team comprised Jose
Luis Garcia Perez (Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife, Spain), Pertii Sirvio
(Media Centre Lume, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland) and
Frances Watts (Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain). Discussing the
possible applications in relations to the benefits and pitfalls of OLEs was
really illuminating for many of the audience members, especially that the
session allowed active participation of the audience as well. The long day ended with a cocktail
party and a banquet, when the conference participants continued discussions
started during presentations and in many cases agreed on common projects to
work on in the future. In this respect, the conference can be claimed to be
extremely successful. I could describe many more
presentations that I was able to attend, or the presentations I was unable to
participate in but got access to asking the presenters to send me the
conference materials. However, it is beyond the scope of the present report to
outline every single paper of the ones presented at the conference. Instead, my
aim was to show the character and value of CILFE 6 conference, in order to
encourage our readers to take part in future editions of the conference. High
academic quality of the papers presented, friendly and informative contacts
with presenters and conference participants during breaks, excellent
organisation, ample presenting equipment, supportive conference staff made this
event truly memorable. It is hoped that the conference organisers will continue
that important work in the field of CALL. 10TH INTERNATIONAL CALL CONFERENCE 2002 by Grazyna Studzinska It's hard to overestimate the opportunity given to me by The British Council this summer. Taking part in such a wonderful event as jubilee 10th CALL conference will take its place in my memory for ever. Not only was it the scientific environment but also the atmosphere and people, professionals from all around the world created the event in the shape it appeared. The Organizing Committee and the Editorial Board of the CALL Journal, Michael Levy (Griffith University, Australia), Philip Hubbard (Stanford University, USA), Wilfried Decoo (Brigham Young University, USA) and Jozef Colpaert (University of Antwerp, Belgium) as well as the Local Organizing Committee (Mathea Simons and Saskia Van Bueren) made an immense effort to make participants satisfied in the fields of science, culture and leisure time activities. The conference centre Elzenveld was located in the historical buildings of the St. Elisabeth hospital, convent and presbytery. It was situated in the heart of Antwerp and was a haven of peace in the middle of the busy city bustle. The Elzenveld was perfectly suited for conferences, seminars, receptions, banquets and socio-cultural activities, while its staff made good use of all facilities offering unforgettable meals being also the pretext of informal talks and gathering contacts. The centre offered, next to the large conference facilities, also the possibility to spend the night in an attractive framework, which, unfortunately, was not my accommodation place. In Antwerp, the 'City of Rubens' one obviously can't but take a few moments to admire the artistic world of the master himself in the Rubens' House. Few Belgian cities offer a comparable range of art treasure collections housed in more than 30 wonderful museums and public buildings that we couldn't visit because of the very rich conference programme. The cathedral is without doubt the city's majestic landmark giving a feeling of impressive cultural heritage above my head. With roughly half a million inhabitants, Antwerp is the second-largest city of Belgium after Brussels. It is also the largest town in Flanders, the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium and the biggest centre of diamond industry in Europe but still remains quiet and cosy. The nine previous CALL conferences were held at the University of Exeter thanks to Keith Cameron, the honorary editor of CALL journal. The new organizing committee decided that members of the editorial board would take turns organizing the conferences. Antwerp was the first venue on the "planet tour" and, as it was decided in the evaluation forms written by participants after the event, will be the conference place in 2004 as well. The main concept was to discuss research methodology and directions of CALL as its future is thrilling but also to look back and build on the lessons to be learned from both successes and failures. An opening speech by Carol A. Chapelle (extremely important because of her birthday that day), "Moving Forward with CALL Research," identified important differences in research approaches, charted relationships among research questions, methods, and interpretations of results and argued the need for second language acquisition theory in some types of research. She showed how research questions are tied to particular methods and how questions and methods directly affect the interpretations that can be made from results. She suggested that research attempting to evaluate the effectiveness of CALL are best designed in the view of theory. Philip Hubbard's plenary "A Survey of Unanswered Questions in CALL Research" informed us that CALL research is in principle more diverse than language learning itself. It is influenced by constantly evolving technology but despite this diversity progress has been and continues to be made. He gave an idea of creating a research website where those who are looking for research topics can go for inspiration and direction. The core of this project was a survey sent to over 100 CALL researchers and practitioners around the world, seeking a collective answer to the question: "What do those who devote significant portions of their professional lives to this field aspire to know?" The central item was the request for the respondents to articulate a single CALL research question they would like to have answered. The closing plenary session by Michael Levy "Perspectives on Evaluation in CALL" followed his two earlier presentations on research and design in CALL that used a corpus of CALL publications in 1999 as a basis for description and discussion. The plenary paid particular attention to articulating the links between evaluation goals and method, and any differences that might arise when conducting evaluations in computer-mediated rather than face-to-face learning context. He also mentioned new technologies (e.g., speech recognition), online courses, websites and language learning tasks including those that involve CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication) tools such as email or chat. As it seems to be almost impossible to report from all the presentations I attended, I'll try to concentrate on the most important to my field of interest as a teacher and teacher trainer. "Teaching WELL in a Computerless Classroom" presented by the married couple Christina Gitsaki and Richard P. Taylor from Nagoya University, Japan, was the outline of how they use the Web as a resource for enhancing their English language course in a computerless classroom, how they prepare their students for using English websites outside the classroom, and what the students do with the information they find on the Web. They described sample activities and presented the examples of students' projects. What was especially interesting was the results of the pilot study conducted at the end of their WELL (Web-Enhanced Language Learning) course in order to assess students' attitudes towards the use of the Net as a language learning tool outside the classroom. The conclusion was that the traditional CALL lab is no longer the only place where students can access and utilize online resources for language learning. It was nice to find Polish elements at the conference. Although not living in Poland any more, Sophie Cholewka from AMES, Melbourne, Australia, helped me not to feel lonely and her presentation on "Increased Effectiveness of ESL Programs through the Incorporation of Web-based Technology into the ESL Curriculum" compared my experience with WebCT to the Australian project introduced to the Curriculum of Spoken and Written English. She was talking about the methodology and the learning environment of online resources supporting the curriculum and the ways of improving and facilitating the development and integration process. A crucial point was a "discovery" that WebCT is offered for free in Australia while being so difficult to afford in Poland because of its very high costs. Luba Iskold and John Pearce from Language Learning Center, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA, gave a presentation entitled "Building on Success, Learning from Mistakes". First, they briefly described a three-year project of faculty training in multimedia development. Next, they summarised the success and failures of the project based on evaluation of usefulness conducted by the faculty and students in the department. Finally, the presenters engaged session participants in a discussion exploring the future of FL faculty development in light of "tutorial vs. tool" dichotomy. Abdi Kazeroni from Universite de Technologie de Compiegne, Compiegne, France, turned "Towards Teacher-centred Tool Design," arguing that the difference between teaching a foreign language and teaching any other subject matter arises not from how learners learn but from how teachers teach. He discussed the methodological difficulties encountered in conducting his research into teachers cognition and did a quick demonstration of the appropriate software. "The BYU Electronic Film Review Project" presented by Alan K. Melby from Brigham Young University, USA, showed us the pedagogical context of the EFR project in two assumptions: 1) simply watching foreign language films (this time it was "Chocolate" with Johnny Depp), which he assumed to be not a very effective means of improving listening comprehension since the learner either already understands the audio portion of the film and thus learns little or does not understand and just stays lost or 2) adding subtitles in the learner's language which improves the benefits of watching foreign language films and enabling the student to control the playback of the film. The BYU project is currently preparing two listening comprehension packages for ESL students and the Americans learning French. The presentations were followed by discussion groups conducted by the Keynote Speakers: - "CALL and Authoring" by Steve Cushion, - "CALL and Language Learning Methods" by Wilfried Decoo, - "CALL and the User" by Dominique Hemard, - "Computer, Communication and Sociocultural Context" by David Hoven, - "The Role of Tutorial CALL" by Philip Hubbard. After 3 days of scientific atmosphere the banquet and closing speech by Keith Cameron crowned the efforts with success and left an unforgettable feeling in the participants' memories filling their diaries with lots of contact details for future reference. IV INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE MEDIA AND EDUCATION IN THE TIME OF INTEGRATION (MEDIA A EDUKACJA W DOBIE INTEGRACJI) Poznan, Poland by Jarek Krajka The international conference "Media and Education" was organised under the honorary patronage of the Minister of National Education and Sport by Adam Mickiewicz University, University of Zielona Gora, Centre of Animation of Culture from Warsaw, Poznan International Fair, Polish Society of Technology and Electronic Media and eMPi2 publishing house. The central theme of the conference was the role of media and education in promoting the ideas of integration of Poland with the European Union. It is beyond doubt media have changed the modern education to a great extent, as well as have had enormous impact on the process of creation of a new labour market and social policy. At the same time, it is essential that society be educated in media, by making people more conscious about media and letting them create them. The novelty of this year's conference was its electronic presence: the submitted papers, after having been accepted, were published on the conference website well in advance (see http://main.amu.edu.pl/~techedu/konferencja/ramka/ramka.html, with general information, programme of the conference, conference papers, a discussion forum and a picture gallery), and a discussion forum was set up to enable the exchange of views on the topics raised in them. In this way, the participants of the event could get to know beforehand the details of the papers, could reflect on the materials and formulate some questions or doubts to be clarified by the authors. However, due to a great number of papers, the presentations were given as little as 10 minutes time, which forced the presenters to outline just the main points without going into details. Also, all the conference presentations were published on a CD-ROM, which was given to every participant, while selected papers found their way to the conference proceedings in a traditional book format. Especially the CD-ROM version is worth mentioning here, as it contains all papers in .pdf format, gives easy and quick access as well as enables efficient search. All papers are still up on the conference website at http://www.kmti.uz.zgora.pl/pages/media_index.htm, where they are indexed by author and by title, however, all in Polish. The first day of the conference started with plenary lectures by Waclaw Strykowski ("Media and Media Education in the Creation of Contemporary Society"), Wojciech Cellary ("A Challenge for Education in the Global Information Society"), Tomasz Goban-Klas ("Education in the Face of the SMS Generation"), Zbigniew Kwieciński ("The Future of Education in a World with no Future"), Kazimierz Krzysztofek ("Media and European Integration: the Cultural Aspect"), Rowell Huesmann ("Screen Violence and Real Violence: Understanding the Link") and Robert Muffoletto ("Collaborative Learning, the Individual and the Internet"). The first day was devoted to plenary papers in the main theme of the conference (Media and Education in the Time of Integration), and participants were given a wide view of the matter. The second day of the conference started with a plenary session on the same theme, and after that participants had the chance to attend presentations in three sections: Media in the Society of 21st Century, Media as a Stimulator of Change in Education and Media Education Issues. Debates in sections had a more informal atmosphere and allowed exchange of views between presenters and the audience, however, limited due to severe time constraints. The debates in sections continued on the third day of the conference, when presenters and participants were actively searching for solutions to problems connected with the role of media in the society and the media education. This day of the conference concluded with plenary sessions on the conference main theme, Media and Education in the Time of Integration, with the following papers: European Integration and the Changes in Polish Media Education by Bronislaw Siemieniecki and Academic Teachers' Telework in Informative Society by Kazimierz Wenta. These were followed by papers of section chairpeople, who tried to sum up the conference and provide a coherent view of the media education in Poland. After that, there was a general debate of the participants, which closed the conference. The next day of the conference was devoted to visiting the exhibition of Poznan International Fair "Infosystem, Multimedia, Poligrafia", where the participants could get to know the state of the art of educational technology and develop useful contacts with hardware and sofware manufacturers. On the whole, it must be said that the conference was a successful and interesting event, with a great variety of papers providing a deep view of the problems of media in education, not restricted to the Internet and computers only, but covering also other media and aspects. The undoubted strengths of it were the pre-conference publication of materials and online discussion on them, the publication of all presentations on a CD-ROM and selected papers in a book format, the combination of theoretical presentations and practical exhibition. However, it seems that 10 minutes given to presenters is definitely not enough to present even only the main points, let alone answering questions and clarifying doubts. Thus, it seems that in the future the organisers of the conference could consider devoting more time to each presenter, even if it means reducing the number of presentations. UNTELE 2002 The conference, organised by UTC (Universite de Technologie de Compiegne), was held in Compiegne on March 28-30. This three-day event was attended by over 150 participants from all over the world, with the biggest groups of participants coming from France, Belgium, the USA and the UK, with participants coming also from Italy, Sweden, Greece, Brasil, Germany, the Netherlands, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Israel, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Ireland, Slovenia, Russia, Canada, Spain, Hungary, Egypt and Denmark. The conference was mainly attended by university teachers and researchers, either from the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Second Language Acquisition, or Information and Communication Technology, coming from universities or technology universities, but the educational sector was also represented by some secondary and primary school teachers. Universite de Technologie de Compiegne provided the excellent venue for the conference, with magnificent amphitheatre for plenary sessions and some presentations, as well as three other smaller rooms for sessions held in a less formal atmosphere. After the opening ceremony on Thursday, all conference participants had the chance to attend the plenary lecture by Robert Galisson and Arnaud Galisson on the usage of new technologies in education. The speakers brought into light some interesting issues such as disciplinarite and operationalite, providing interesting introduction and philosophical background to more practical sessions that followed. The conference was held simultaneously in two working languages, English and French, with one third of papers in English and two-thirds of the total number of 40 presentations in French, and my report will focus only on the papers delivered in English, the ones that I could attend. Breffni O'Rourke, from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, in the paper entitled "Metalinguistic Behaviour in a Bilingual MOO Exchange", dealt with the issue of Multiple Object Oriented (or Multiple User Domain) learning environment, explored the theoretical consequences of the fusion of different technologies that takes place in a MOO environment, and presented data from an online exchange demonstrating the metalinguistic behaviour of students to assess the practicalities of using such environments in teaching. In his presentation entitled "Managed Learning Environments for Effective Web Based Learning", Paul Sweeney from The British Council, Milan, reviewed the current state of interactivity in English language learning materials, accessible both on CD-ROM and the Web. The author tried to show how we can build on recent developments in interactive technologies and database technologies in managed learning environments to make Web-based learning more effective. "Native-Speaker/Non Native-Speaker Discourse in the MOO: Participation and Engagement in a Synchronous Text-based Environment", by Klaus Schwienhorst from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, summarised bilingual MOO projects based on tandem learning conducted by the author, looking in detail at such issues as topic negotiation and initiation, in both L1 and L2. Learner data were analysed to assess whether a combination of tandem learning and a synchronous communication technology can support learner participation and engagement in the language classroom. Stephen Munns, from Higher Colleges of Technology, United Arab Emirates, when talking about support strategies for global learners in online written communication, argues that rather than developing the CMC skills of non-native speakers through conventional approaches to face-to-face communication or written academic discourse, an alternative strategy is required: an approach to student support based on social exchange and transfer of information. The humble undersigned, Jarek Krajka from Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland, in his presentation entitled "Language Learning Software and the Coursebook: Do the Tools Bring Expected Solutions", provided the background into commercial ELT software available on the market, characterised main types of programs, then presented the results of a student questionnaire calling for the use of various methods of coursebook supplementation on various levels, also of ELT software use. Finally, he tried to show how the use of computer programs could solve or make less painful such classroom problems as large classes, unequal language level, different pace of work, need for vocabulary reference. "Of Mice and Men. Can Computers in the Language Classroom Really Make a Difference", a presentation by David N. Brown from ESSTIN, Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy, France, touched upon the issue of the effects computer technology may have on integrative and instrumental motivation. Thanks to achieving measurable results due to an attitude/motivation test battery and rewards for scoring well in tasks, the author was able to arrive at a conclusion: the element of choice, fairly common in computer-assisted language learning, does not have to be beneficial for learners, as some of them may find it more comfortable to act with the choices being imposed on them from above. The second day of the conference started with a plenary by Jan Hulstijn from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, entitled "Towards a Unified Account of the Representation and Acquisition of Second-language Knowledge". The author talked about representation of knowledge, high versus low linguistic domains, nativism, special status of lexical units in language learning, different aspects of explicit and implicit learning. David Ma, from the University of Hong Kong, China, dealt with the issue of using the webpage as an instructional tool, and presented the experiments done with university students, who used their knowledge of webpage design to show other students (and language teachers) how to use the Web in teaching. The author's conclusion was that a survey on the needs of the users can greatly increase the impact of webpage as a teaching and learning medium. Finally, the presentation "Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation of Interactive Textbooks", prepared and delivered by Els Heughebaert, Wilfred Decoo and Jozsef Colpaert from Didascalia/University of Antwerp, Belgium, discussed in detail successive steps of producing language learning courseware: design encompassing conceptualisation, specification and prototyping, development with its stages of data structuring and software engineering, implementation divided into information, distribution and follow-up and evaluation consisting of surveys on usage, user satisfaction and didactic efficiency, all based on two interactive textbooks developed by the authors. This report summarises only some of the papers the undersigned had the chance to attend, and there were many more inaccessible to me because of inadequate knowledge of French. In fact, the major drawback of attending the conference was the lack of interpreting service for participants unable to understand French or English. I felt quite bad about being deprived of the chance to listen to two-thirds of papers, and it is a real pity that the conference organisers did not provide any interpreting. Another, and the final, area where some improvement could be made by the organisers, was that of conference proceedings. If there are so many papers running in concurrent sessions, conference participants could make up for not attending the sessions by reading the entire papers, either in book form or electronic CD-ROM format. After the conference, the creation of a volume of proceedings was announced, and it is my sincere wish that it will happen so. However, despite these objections, it must be said that UNTELE 2002 brought together the theoreticians and practitioners from many fields, and the great amount of presentations on varied topics made the conference a truly open forum for dissemination and exchange of ideas on using technology in teaching and learning foreign languages. ELTOC Imagine attending an international ELT conference in your pyjamas, being able to do your exercises when you're feeling a bit stiff and being able to pop the kettle on for a quick cuppa (or open another beer) without losing the plot during the panel discussion. These, and other rather more professional, delights were in store for anyone who "attended" the ELT On-Line Conference (ELTOC) on 10-11 November this year, hosted by NetLearn Solutions. For a fee of 80 USD, anyone with an Internet connection could "attend" the conference from anywhere in the world, though a slight downside of this was that for those in New Zealand, for example, the conference took place in the middle of the night! Before the conference started, the timetable was posted on the conference website, together with speakers' abstracts. Nothing very special about that, but once the conference got under way things got a little more interesting. As each presenter spoke (and their voice was streamed in real time over the Internet), the audience could listen and simultaneously view the speaker's PowerPoint slides in the top half of their screen. Moving from slide to slide was under the control of each conference participant which meant that if the speaker moved on to the next slide too quickly, viewers could delay changing the slide on their own screen until they had finished digesting it (or even go back to it later). In the bottom half of each participant's screen was a chat box. This was where participants congregated and started to chat before each presentation started. However, this chat also continued throughout the presentation - there were comments and questions on what was being said, greetings to friends, amusing asides, etc. And it was via the chat box that delegates posed their questions at the end of the presentation. Unlike a conventional conference, now the conference is over it is possible to access the archives and listen to the presentations again, or catch the ones you missed on the day (there were 2 parallel sessions at any one time). The PowerPoint slides are also available, of course, and even the chat room logs, so that if someone said something really interesting (or really silly!) that you forgot to make a note of at the time, it is possible to go back and find it in the log. For those that missed the conference, anyone can pay 45 USD to view the archives which will be available till 30 June 2002 (or pay 50 USD to buy the conference CD-ROM). The conference website is at http://www.eltoc.com/index.shtmlOf course, not everything went quite as expected. Sound quality and volume levels were a little variable, making some presenters difficult to hear. This was often a local problem requiring delegates to adjust the settings on their own computer, though it meant having one's finger permanently on the sound controls during the panel discussion when some speakers were loud and others very quiet. Some of the PowerPoint slides were too small to read and I, for one, sometimes found the three channels during each talk (audio, slides and chat) quite distracting, though I'm sure I could develop strategies to cope with that. I also found it difficult to "find" people between presentations - I tried looking for them in the so-called "breakout rooms" and "social chat rooms", but often there were few if any people there - they were probably just taking a break and therefore unavailable. On the other hand, the ELTOC had a number of advantages over conventional conferences. Some people may not have found the event cheap but at least there were no international travel, accommodation or subsistence costs. (For some people, like myself, there was the added cost of the telephone connection to the Internet, though this was minimised by the fact that the event took place at the weekend when Internet charges tend to be at their lowest.) The equipment needed to attend the conference was fairly modest - I still use Windows 95, Word 97, Internet Explorer 5,0, have a tiny pair of cheapo speakers and connect to the Internet via a 56K modem. All of these proved perfectly adequate on the day, though if I had wanted to present, I would have needed Windows 98. I had already installed Windows Media Player and Adobe Acrobat Reader on my system, but these are of course freely available anyway on the Net. Being able to view missed presentations in the archives and "revisit" the ones you did catch is an enormous advantage, though time-consuming of course, unless you just want to find a reference or a quote in someone's PowerPoint presentation. Less obviously perhaps, I found that chat enables you to jump in and out of conversation with a wide number of people quite quickly and without being daunted by their physical appearance or self-conscious of your own. Nevertheless, I definitely missed the chance to talk to people face to face. Now, you will notice that I have not yet said anything about the actual content of the conference. The reason for this is that one of the main features of ELTOC was that it was ground-breaking in the way that it actually took place - it was a truly international virtual ELT conference, with around 320 registered delegates from an impressive 68 different countries. However, novelty is not enough to make a successful conference, so what about the content? The conference was entitled "ELT: Evolution of Learning and Teaching and there were 33 presentations, including two keynote addresses and two panel discussions. When compared to big events like the annual IATEFL and TESOL conferences, this was certainly a modest affair. As might have been expected, a majority of the talks did focus on the use of information technology in language teaching and learning, covering such topics as "Emoderation - managing a new language?", "On-line Teacher Training", "Choosing Appropriate Communication Tools for Online Learning", etc. Having said that, a number of talks had nothing to do with computers, which is how it should be at a general ELT conference. For example, there were talks entitled: "Telephone speech data in the English Language Classroom", "Why assign themes and topics to teach writing?", "How fine is the line between ELL and ELT?", etc. To finish, I would like to pose the question: "Was it worth it?" Speaking personally, I found some of the presentations very interesting and did some useful networking. However, I think the conference's main strength lay elsewhere. In his ELTOC presentation, Pete MacKichan quoted Felix (talking about CALL) as saying "The essential justification for any use of technology has to be the improvement of teaching and learning that it allows, and everything needs to be judged against this requirement." In the same way, I feel that ELTOC must be judged not on its novelty value, but on how that novelty is of use to the worldwide ELT community. I think ELTOC demonstrated the fantastic potential of Web technology to enable the ELT community all over the world to communicate and hold significant events on-line, in real time at a far more reasonable cost than the conventional conference. Not that on-line conferences should replace conventional ones, but there's no doubt that they will make it possible for teachers who would never be able to pay for an airfare to attend some international ELT events without ever leaving home. PALC’01 3rd Biennial International Conference on Practical Applications in Language Corpora PALC’01 was held at the Lodz University Conference Centre in Lodz on September 7-10, 2001. The event was organised by the Department of English Language of the University of Lodz, Poland. Organising Committee: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Stanisław Goźdź-Roszkowski, Krzysztof Kredens. Plenaries and papers covered various aspects of creating corpora and using them in linguistics, research, translation and teaching. Although computers have become smaller and data stored on them have become easily accessed to teachers and learners, corpus-based approach to learning a foreign language is still not very popular. On the one hand, it may develop learner autonomy and working on authentic language. ‘Authentic’ texts require both teachers and learners to cope with language which textbooks do not predict. On the other hand, corpus-based approach encourages changing the roles of teachers and learners. Learners, previously taught in a directive rule-based way, may have serious difficulty in studying excerpts from an authentic corpus, while teachers may find this approach time consuming. I have selected some papers which may be of particular interest of English teachers. Guy Aston, University of Bologna, Italy, in his plenary “Learning English with Corpora: the BNC experience” presented plenty of ideas on how to use a corpus for solving language problems, developing reading, oral/written reporting and also contradicting teachers and textbook writers. He recommended BNC as a reference exploration tool which provides deeper processing, more memorable results and more serendipity in learning. However, students may discover that working with it takes more time, needs harder work and gives less definite answers. Prof. John Osborne, University of Savoy, France, in his plenary “Integrating Corpora into a Language-Learning Syllabus” suggested gradual introducing corpus data into language learning in order to enhance language awareness of advanced students. In his opinion, working with corpora "helps learners resolve conflicts in their linguistic knowledge, by noticing discrepancies not only between their own language use and that of native speakers, but also between their representations - beliefs about the language - and their observations of target language usage". Maria Ciesielska-Ciupek, University of Lodz, Poland, presented a paper entitled “Preparation of ELT Materials Using the Internet and Corpus Resources”. Firstly, she dealt with the theoretical aspect of computer-based teaching materials. Then she showed selected examples of teaching materials additional to learners’ textbooks. All the materials come from the Internet and language corpora. Eventually, she analysed students’ test results and discussed data gathered in a learner evaluation sheet. Agnieszka Leńko Szymańska, University of Łódź, Poland, in her presentation “Lexical Problem Areas in Advanced Learner Corpus of Written Data”, showed an example of a learner corpus of 69 essays written by fourth-year students of the Institute of English Studies, University of Łódź. She discussed some aspects of error analysis and recent studies on lexical errors. Also, she presented the quantitative analysis of students’ errors based on the corpus, coming to the conclusion that "collocations should be focused on in the classroom ... to make teaching collocation more effective". A 10-million sample of the PELCRA corpus of Polish was on sale during the conference. The event was also accompanied by a book exhibition by OPTIMUS. IATEFL POLAND COMPUTER SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP MEETING Members of IATEFL PL Computer SIG met on the 24th September 2001 at the Annual IATEFL PL Conference in Warsaw. 20 people attended the meeting. 1. Ela Gajek opened the session and briefly presented the SIG’s main activities: Last year was very successful for Computer SIG.
Last year Computer SIG was sponsored and supported by many companies, publishers and institutions. They helped to promote ICT among language teachers, organise courses and the conference. We are grateful for their help and engagement. Wojciech Drajerczak, a representative of The British Council Poland, and Marek Wozniak, representing Macmillan Polska, who attended the meeting, declared their constant support for the SIG in the following year. 2. Jarek Krajka presented Teaching English with Technology Journal in detail encouraging the SIG members to participate more actively in its creation by writing lesson scenarios, reviews and articles. 3. Ela Gajek suggested plans for the coming year.
4. Zofia Grudzińska presented Teacher Development and Autonomous Learning SIG, their newsletter and web site (http://www.iatefl.org.pl/sig/al/news.html) and encouraged the Computer SIG members to visit the website. Also, she suggested organising a joint event in March or June 2002, which was accepted by SIG members. 5. At the end Ela Gajek encouraged all members to share their experience and expertise with others. Although the meeting was very short, the group managed to present last year’s activities and show perspectives and areas for further development. EXETER
CALL – THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE The Ninth
Biennial International CALL Colloquium was held at the University of Exeter,
the United Kingdom, from 1st to 3rd September, 2001. The
aim of the event was to provide a global view of the latest developments in
Computer-Assisted Language Learning and demonstrate how researchers and
practitioners are responding to the challenge of change in teaching and
learning languages with the use of technological advances. The conference
program comprised over fifty presentations on every aspect of CALL, for
instance the application of the Internet and CD-ROM programs in teaching,
national policies on ICT, computers in ESP/EAP setting, and many more. Also, a
separate workshop on CALL for Arabic was organised as a part of the conference,
where some of the themes raised included developing a website for teaching Arabic,
the use of Java language in solving problems associated with producing CALL
material in Arabic or Web-based learning of Arabic. The
conference was attended by around 100 researchers, teacher trainers and
teachers from all over the world, predominantly from Japan, the USA, the UK,
Canada, Belgium, Germany, as well as from Egypt, Malaysia, Spain, France,
Romania, Austria, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Lebanon, Switzerland, Greece
and Poland. The whole
event was opened with a short address by Keith Cameron of the University of
Exeter, the chief organiser of the conference and the editor of the volume of
proceedings. After that, the participants had the chance to attend two plenary
lectures. The first one, “Using CALL to Address Changes in Student Learning
Styles,” by Randall P. Donaldson and Margaret Haggstrom, provided an exhaustive
introduction into CALL materials effective in fostering cross-cultural
competence. After
that, Geoff Lawrence talked about second language teacher belief systems
towards computer-mediated language learning, trying to define teacher belief
systems by starting with principal belief system constructs and finally coming
up with a teacher belief system model which appeared from the questionnaire
study carried out by the author. On the
next day, presentations ran in two or three parallel sessions, and it was
sometimes a difficult choice which session to attend. Fortunately, upon
arriving conference delegates were presented with a volume of proceedings, with
the full text of all presentations, which made it possible to read all the
papers. Thus, what follows is a brief summary of only a few sessions I have
chosen to attend. In
“Applying HCI Principles to CALL Design,” Paul Allum attempted to incorporate
ideas from Human-Computer Interaction in language learning software design,
with the conclusion that the systematic approach of HCI will ensure a better
product and save time and effort. Sachiko
Tanaka, in her presentation “Multimedia Software for Children in EFL Based on
the Mechanism of Language Acquisition,” introduced some theoretical background
in Second Language Acquisition such as the theories of right and left
hemisphere, the affective filter hypothesis, the Monitor hypothesis,
interaction and feedback in CALL environments. The presenter proceeded to show
the application of these in a program for children. “Language
Learning with Native Speakers in a MOO Community: Real or Virtual,” by Lien
Goedeme, started with familiarising the audience with the characteristics,
benefits and drawbacks of using MOO in language learning. Then, the author
outlined a project that aimed at testing the possibilities of Little Italy MOO
for foreign language learning. Shirley
Holst, in her presentation “Learning Foreign Languages Cooperatively Across the
Internet,” dealt with the issue of Web-based cooperative learning, reviewing existing
solutions and applications and presenting case studies of a cooperative
learning research prototype. “Music,
Language and the Foreign Language Center,” by Charles King, addressed the issue
of creating learning space with CALL software. The author explored the use of
authoring software and music in enhancing language learning. His suggestion was
to make the music into a project rather than a simple activity and use
authoring software to compensate for the problems caused by songs. A joint
project by John Buckett, Naciketa Datta, Derek Lewis, Gary Stringer, Hartmut
Plehn, Peter Ruff, Peter Tscherner and Werner Wegstein, “Conversation Classes
Across Europe: A Challenge for Videoconferencing,” described the experiences of
developing and implementing a telecollaborative Internet project bringing
together students from two universities in the UK and Germany in a virtual
conversation class using freely available videoconferencing software. Electronic
dictionaries were the focus of the presentation by Birgit Winkler, entitled
“The Future Electronic English Learner’s Dictionary.” The presenter described
an empirical study of how two English learner’s CD-ROM dictionaries aid writing
and vocabulary work, support users’ reference and enhance language learning. Vera
Leier, in her presentation “The Integration of CD-ROMs into Language Teaching
at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand,” talked about the
use of computer software in a university language course, starting with the
assessment of the usefulness of computers in four skills, then describing and
evaluating the solutions introduced. “Teaching
Students to Find Internet Resources Related to Culture,” was a presentation
given by Kenji Kitao and Kathleen Kitao, and it provided detailed and practical
tips of advice on searching and evaluating websites, both for teachers and
students. Inas
Barsoum, in her presentation “Integrating IT in English Language Curricula,”
outlined a course successful at providing students with computer skills and knowledge
at the same time developing their language skills. The presenter also pointed
out certain problems and barriers to the widespread application of ELT+IT
courses in Egypt. “The Cloud
around Development and Exploiting CALL Material” by Christine Sabieh attempted
to show that unless the educator develops a bond with technology, he/she will
not be able to use published CALL material or create his/her own CALL
materials, by coming to terms with the power of the computer and its role in
language learning. Jarek
Krajka, in his presentation “Online Students – Using the Internet to Help the
Coursebook,” described the results of the study carried out among secondary
school students, concluding that students are highly critical of their
coursebooks, and at the same time enthusiastic to the idea of using technology
and the Internet to supplement coursebook instruction. Thus, according to the
author, teachers should consider introducing Web-based lessons to their
teaching. There were
many more interesting presentations, lectures and workshops delivered at the
conference, which largely improved participants’ knowledge about different CALL
areas. Also, the conference delegates had ample opportunities for less formal
exchanges of views on the topics raised during the conference. On the
whole, it needs to be said that “Exeter CALL – The Challenge of Change” was a
memorable, successful event, which succeeded in bringing together researchers
and practitioners in the field, and presented the current state-of-the-art in Computer
Assisted-Language Learning. That is definitely a conference to take part in, so
remember not to miss it next time! Acknowledgement I would
like to express my deep gratitude to The British Council Poland, and especially
to Philip Powell-Davies, for supporting my participation in the conference. EASTEUROPEAN IATEFL POLAND COMPUTER SIG CONFERENCE Gliwice, Poland June 23-24, 2001 by Jarek Krajka As a part of the celebrations of the European Year of Languages 2001, IATEFL Poland Computer Special Interest Group ventured into a new field of activities by organising a two-day international conference on using the Internet and multimedia in teaching languages. The event, hosted by Politechnika Śląska (The Technical University of Silesia), was attended by almost one hundred participants from Poland, the United Kindgom, Israel and Slovakia, teachers, CALL researchers, teacher trainers, academic scholars, representatives of educational institutions and publishers. The conference was opened by Grzegorz Śpiewak, Vice-President of IATEFL Poland and Elżbieta Gajek, IATEFL Poland Computer SIG Co-ordinator. After that, two plenary lectures were given. Jan Rusiecki, Honorary President of IATEFL Poland, discussed the problem of inferring meaning from the context and looking up new words using traditional book dictionaries and concordance programs. By showing how these provide insufficient context to successfully understand a word, as a solution he proposed designing a computer program combining a corpus, a concordancer, a bilingual dictionary and a monolingual dictionary. Following that, Clive Newton from the University of Liverpool, in his presentation entitled "E-solution or ELT-solution," presented the state of the art of multimedia CALL and Computer-Mediated Communication, outlining the design, advantages, disadvantages, benefits and drawbacks of both. The author's conclusion was that, in the longer run, CMC may have more potential for language teaching and learning than multimedia. "Developing Language Learning Materials for Online Delivery," a presentation by Peter Simmons, dealt with the questions of What, Who, How, How much and Whether in developing materials, courses and services for online delivery. The author, talking from the position of a coordinator of the process, took into consideration also the pitfalls, problems and hidden costs involved in developing online courses. Speaking as a British Council Poland British Studies Coordinator, Michael Houten in his speech "The Web, British Studies and the Reforma" gave the overview of the BC British Studies Web pages, outlining the design, aims, the content, the process of making and the future of the project. The presenter was aided by Wojciech Korput, a webmaster of the pages, who gave some insights into the technical aspects of creating the resource. Anatol Shevel in a presentation entitled "Computer-assisted conversation practice as a part of Communicative Language Teaching" showed how, in an attempt to combine the possibilities and attractions of multimedia opportunities with the substantial role of human factor in class learning, and rejecting available commercial ELT software, he uses one computer and so-called live/living book computer programs to provoke students to produce language. Addressing the issue of teachers' skills, needs and expectations towards using ICT in class, Elżbieta Gajek presented a survey executed among language teachers in 92 schools all over the country. As the results show, teachers are overally ready and willing to use ICT in class, they are aware of the necessity of introducing changes to their teaching, and they approve of the use of the Internet and computers. However, what they urgently need is proper training in CALL methodology and multimedia. Following this thread and answering the last problem, Wojciech Drajerczak, British Council ICT Project Coordinator, and Jarosław Krajka, British Council ICT trainer, outlined the Information and Communication Technology project for ESL teachers. The presenters discussed the overall strategy, the training content and the course evaluation of the proje ct which aims at providing the ESL teaching community in Poland with the training in the use of ICT and CALL methodology.Lev Abramov, in the presentation entitled "Some practical aspects of delivery mode in Web-based distance education," demonstrated an economic alternative to already existing Web-based online courses. The presenters' solution is using email as delivery mode, achieving a comparable quality of materials with much lower cost by working mainly offline. "Teaching legal English through e-projects," a speech by Agnieszka Gawlik, focused on teaching English for Law by means of electronic projects. Among the issues raised were the stages of working on the EU project, the features of a PowerPoint presentation and the essentiality of the Internet. The author's conclusion was that using e-projects creates conditions for content-based teaching and facilitates acquisition and retention of legal vocabulary. These speeches were intermingled with commercial presentations given by ELT publishers, software developers and computer manufacturers: Cecylia Szymańska from Young Digital Poland, Jarosław Juszczel from Optimus Pascal, Grzegorz Śpiewak from Macmillan Polska, Wojciech Latacz from Oxford University Press, Jarosław Jakubczak from Pearson Education Polska and Grażyna Zarembińska from Apple Computers. These presentations familiarised the conference participants with the latest software developments by providing general overview and highlighting important features of the programs. The conference was accompanied by stands of publishers, bookshops, software developers and computer manufacturers, and the participants had the chance to try out the software presented, seek technical advice, as well as develop new contacts. The event was possible thanks to the effortless organiser, Grażyna Studzińska, and the Wellington Institute of Languages from Gliwice, as well as the support of the following: The British Council Poland Information and Communication Technology Project for Teachers, Apple Computers, The World of English, MM Publications, Oxford University Press, Young Digital Poland, Optimus Pascal, Macmillan Polska, ipnet.pl, Szkoła Komputerowa Impuls, Vobis Computer and Pearson Education Polska. In conclusion, it could be said that EastEuropean IATEFL Poland Computer SIG conference was a highly successful event, enabling the exchange of views and increasing the expertise in the field of ICT and CALL in teaching languages. Let's hope that the second conference, to be organised probably around the same time next year, will further develop these objectives. IATEFL POLAND COMPUTER SIG MEETING Computer Assisted Education and Information Technology Centre (Ośrodek Edukacji Informatycznej i Zastosowań Komputerów), Warsaw 03.03.2001 by Ela Gajek IATEFL Poland Computer SIG coordinator
Eleven SIG members attended the meeting.
The next meeting will be held on 23-24.06.2001 in Gliwice. SECOND NATIONAL YOUNG LEARNERS CONFERENCE Puławy, 23-25 March, 2001 by Kazimierz Szaflarski The British Council, Poland kazimierz.szaflarski@britishcouncil.pl
Over 100 participants from all over Poland together with a strong representation from Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, the UK, Egypt, Spain, the USA, Estonia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic attended the second National Young Learners Conference in Puławy on "Combining Theory and Practice" from March 23 - 25.2001. It is probably true to say that for all those who participated in the conference it was an inspiring experience. You can ask why The British Council organises such a conference - the answer is very simple. The British Council has supported the educational reform and the Young Learners Project since its beginning in October 1998. It has provided training and support for English language teachers in Polish primary schools, and contributed strongly to curriculum development and establishing networks of teacher trainers. The Conference programme offered a great variety of topics for participants: pupil-teacher interaction; planning projects step by step; motivating children to listen and read; teaching children through art; making stories; training early years teachers to be English teachers; children’s literature; the use of the Internet and Information Technology in teaching and learning. During and after workshops participants had an opportunity to ask questions that often raised discussions in the conference rooms. The opening ceremony took place in the beautiful Palace Conference Room, and the Conference was inaugurated by HM Ambassador to Poland, Michael Pakenham. The plenaries were given by Ms Theresa Zanatta on Reach to teach: maximising our children’s learning, and Jelena Mihaljevic on Teaching foreign languages to young learners, looking backwards, looking forwards. After the plenaries the conference delegates had the opportunity to participate in more informal presentations. It is very difficult for me to describe all the sessions, so I would like to focus on those presentations which describe the possibilities that computers offer to learners and teachers. Like it or not, "new technology" is not going to go away - it is going to develop faster and faster, so it is necessary to use technology from the very beginning of the learning process. Information Technology plays a bigger and bigger role in teaching and learning, also in teaching English to younger pupils. Jarek Krajka gave an interesting presentation on Teaching Young Learners with Technology. The author tried to answer the question why teachers should introduce technology into English teaching, and how to create an Internet lesson using Internet resources as a source of materials. While teaching with technology can bring benefits for students and teachers, sometimes limitations and drawbacks could appear. First of all, you need IT equipment - a computer, usually with a fast processor, software - standard office applications, Internet browser, sound cards, headphones etc., then the costs of the Internet connection should be paid. The monthly fee is not too high, but could still be a problem for several Polish schools. Teachers who prepare and hold Internet lessons need to have good computer skills (their role is much bigger in comparison with the role of teachers using ready-made computer programmes). The teacher must choose sites, create texts, adapt the task to the class level, prepare additional off-line activities, provide tasks, motivate and control students' activities. Some drawbacks of Internet lessons: good connection necessary; problems with scheduling a lab for the lesson; the content and language of most sites may be too difficult for YL; some sites may have factual and spelling errors. From teachers’ point of view it could be easier to use ready-made computer programmes in teaching. The materials you need to conduct a lesson are prepared and collected, usually with good graphics and sounds. What is the concern at the moment is that ELT computer programmes are not compatible with coursebooks or syllabuses and allow students to stop doing one activity and move to another one. Join the global village - an e-mail project in a primary school by Irena Kostenbauer is another example of a presentation which referred to teaching YL taking advantage of the Internet. The author focused on the possibilities the Internet offers to YL and their teachers. She presented step by step the e-mail project from the subject preparation, subscription to the International E-mail Classroom Connection, e-mail writing and sending, to collecting, classifying and analysing all materials received. Such e-mail projects broaden children’s general knowledge and their sense of belonging to the global village. Additionally, using computers, communicating with other children all over the world, writing e-mails motivate and encourage these children to work. Teachers, teacher trainers, researchers and materials writers enjoyed spending three days in Puławy where they could not only attend sessions of professional interest but also find an opportunity to exchange ideas and share insights into the teaching of English to Young Learners, meet new colleagues, discuss teaching, and visit publishers’ stands. CHALLENGES FOR COMPUTER-ASSISTED APPLIED LINGUISTICS (CCAAL) Bukowy Dworek, Poland, 27-29 April 2001 by Jarek Krajka
Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics was a one-day workshop organised as a part of a large international conference 33rd Poznań Linguistic Meeting, held in Bukowy Dworek near Poznań from 27-29 April, 2001, and organised by the School of English of Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań. The conference was attended by almost one hundred participants, including guests from Austria, Norway, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as scholars from most Polish universities, both public and private. The three-day conference had almost fifty presentations in three concurrent sessions, divided into such workshops as "Challenges for Natural Linguistics," "Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics," "Socio-historical Studies of Language," "Phonetics-Phonology Interface: Palatalization" and "Language and Global Communication." The venue of the conference, Bukowy Dworek, was a luxurious hotel and a conference centre, situated half way from Poznań to Berlin among beautiful forests and lakes. The hotel provided excellent conference facilities to make the conference a fully successful event. Because of my professional interest, I attended "Challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics" workshop, which took place on the first day, Friday. It consisted of 14 presentations and concluded with a panel discussion of participants on some of the themes recurrent in the presentations. In general, the workshop contents touched upon the following areas: teachers' attitudes to ICT, training teachers in ICT, using computer software (electronic dictionaries, speech analysis programmes), teacher and student models, distance learning, corpus studies. The whole conference started with a plenary by Dafydd Gibbon, who talked about the documentation of endangered languages, explaining in detail how data are gathered and processed with the help of computer software for analysing pronunciation. Then, the conference divided into three sessions, and CCAAL followed with a presentation of Tadeusz Piotrowski on electronic dictionaries. Piotrowski, dissatisfied with e-dictionaries existing on the market, proposed a prototype of an English-Polish and Polish-English dictionary with a morphological analyser, which analyses derivative forms of words and provides a keyword entry, in this way coping with inflections and handling multi-word lexical items. After that, Wiktor Gonet and Radosław Święciński presented a comparative analysis of six typical speech analysis programmes (WinCECIL, WASP, Speech Analyser, PCQuirer, PRAAT, SpeechStation), evaluating them with respect to user-friendliness, screen layout, ease of file management, recording and playback, signal editing, time dimension measurements, spectral analysis and the possibility of annotation. Przemysław Kaszubski, in his presentation on corpus-based research, identified central problems of corpus linguistics (among others representativeness of data and annotation of data). He wanted to investigate Polish learners' idiomatic patterns, and for that reason he extracted examples of lexical fixedness, syntactic fixedness, anomaly and opacity from a few corpora gathered from texts of more and less advanced Polish learners of English. Elżbieta Gajek presented the results of a survey investigating language teachers' computer literacy, their opinions on the use of computers in teaching and their training needs. The optimistic results show that language teachers are enthusiastic and ready to take up a new challenge of computer-assisted teaching, but proper training is needed to make that possible. Next, Anatol Shevel showed how to teach the whole class with a multimedia programme on one computer, using programmes very much different from the ones accessible on the market. His programmes are like a computer game, where there is only the content (dialogues, films, animations, etc.), but there are no language activities and the teacher is free to adapt each page of that multimedia book to present what is going to be taught. When talking about electronic dictionaries and learners of English, Włodzimierz Sobkowiak presented the results of a survey investigating teachers' attitudes to e-dictionaries. The results show that although more than half of subjects know and use at least one computer dictionary, none of the teachers has used it in the classroom, even though most of them have the conditions to do that. The conclusion was that teachers react negatively to computer dictionaries and do not promote them, and that should be amended with proper teacher training. In her presentation, Liliana Anioła-Jędrzejek presented the basic premises of the Multimedia Distance Education Course, a project done jointly by three universities in Poland and one in the United Kingdom, and funded by the European Commission. MDEC is a series of specialised multimedia English courses on the Web, which are going to be used in the classes of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in the three technical universities involved in the project. The next speaker, Krzysztof Jagiełowicz, provided a theoretical background to the other presentations by talking about Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and specifically about its advantages (equality, participation at one's own pace and without seeking permission, reduction of context clues relating to race, gender, handicap or status) and problems (flaming, abuse of power and control, lack of response, lack of purpose). Next, Jarek Krajka discussed the issue of training online teachers of English, giving the necessary qualities such a teacher should posses, as well as reasons why teachers of English should take their instruction online. The author presented the results of surveys conducted among students (pre-service training) and teachers (in-service training), and proposed specific training solutions for both of these environments. After that, Monika Tarantowicz-Gasiewicz, claiming that there are no established pedagogical standards for student model in CALL, wanted to establish some parameters and arrive at some objective standards. By working out a framework for standards, then choosing a pedagogical theory underlying them, deriving standards from it, she came up with a complex student model in a CALL environment. Finally, Miłosz Chmiel, talking about speech processing and speech visualisation, showed CSLU Toolkit, a flexible set of programmes used in teaching pronunciation and acoustic phonology, downloadable for free from the following website: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu. To prove the usefulness of the programme, the presenter showed how the programme works, explained its specific features, gave examples of his own speech recording. The workshop concluded with a panel discussion of most participants, chaired by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak, where the whole workshop was summarised, and most important challenges for Computer-Assisted Applied Linguistics which appeared in presentations were investigated. On the whole, CCAAL workshop was extremely successful and all presentations were equally interesting and thought-provoking. It needs to be stressed that the presenters took great care to support their ideas with visual aids such as computer presentations or transparencies, which greatly facilitated comprehension. The proceedings of the workshop are going to published by LINCOM EUROPA by autumn, and meanwhile everyone interested can read the abstracts of the presentations at this URL: http://elex.amu.edu.pl/~sobkow/ccaalabs.htm. If anyone would like to contact any of the presenters mentioned, please email me at jkrajka@batory.plo.lublin.pl and I will forward your message to a particular author. IATEFL POLAND COMPUTER SIG MEETING 06.01.2001 Computer Assisted Education and Information Technology Centre (Ośrodek Edukacji Informatycznej i Zastosowań Komputerów), Warsaw by Ela Gajek IATEFL Poland Computer SIG coordinator
Eleven SIG members attended the meeting.
THE EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY SHOW AND STUDY TOUR 8 – 13 January 2001, London by Wojciech Drajerczak ICT Project Coordinator British Council Poland Wojciech.Drajerczak@britishcouncil.pl
"There is now a real danger that the information revolution is putting up new walls further barring [the excluded and the ill-educated] from the fruit of progress. We cannot allow this to happen. And school is where we can really make the difference. And that imperative drives forward everything we do in this area." These words quoted from Minister Michael Wills’ speech at the BETT 2001 opening ceremony best summarise the efforts of the British Government to adopt the UK educational system to the requirements of the new technology rev | |||||||||
