Digital Technology for L2 Learning and Teaching

The technology article that I read was "Situated Learning through Social Networking Communities: The Development of Joint Enterprise, Mutual Engagement, and a Shared Repertoire" by Nicole Mills. This article described a study in which students in an intermediate French college course agreed to use Facebook as part of their course; the students were required to create fake Facebook profiles, assuming the identity of a character that they had created. All these characters "lived" in the same apartment building in Paris and interacted with each other through Facebook updates, notes, chats, etc. Personally, I would not like it if a Facebook assignment like this one was used in one of my foreign language courses but I see how it helped the students a great deal in this study. The students were able to interact with each other in a less stressful setting, focusing on using the grammar skills they had learned in class online while interacting with their peers. They also learned a great deal about the French culture, which was a great benefit of using Facebook; since the characters the students created all lived in Paris, it was necessary for the students to recognize film, music, artwork, etc. that was important to the French culture in order to interact and carry on conversations with each other. The students all learned to communicate in a rapid manner with each other, and assumed the roles of their characters in a way that both enhanced their skills in writing conversational French and writing descriptive French (i.e., the "notes" or "memoirs" the students would have their characters post on Facebook).

With what Mills calls the iGeneration becoming more and more involved with technology, it is important for education to incorporate this into the classroom in order to better engage students. Using Facebook as a part of the course curriculum also proved to be beneficial; 12 out of the 17 students who took part in this class said that the Facebook profiles made them pay more attention to grammar as they were posting in a public place that all the other students could see. This project also seemed to be beneficial in that it caused the students to engage with each other in the target language in different scenarios; some of the characters were a bit meaner than the others, some were apathetic, some were cheery, some were artistic and it was the role of the students to write on their Facebook profiles incorporating the "voice" of their character as best that they could. After reading this article, I think that Facebook is a good tool to use in learning a foreign language. Blogs and Wiki are also great tools because it allows students to collaborate and post information together, and then share ideas as a class. Skype could be a beneficial tool if a professor must travel and can't be in class so that the student can practice their speaking skills in a face to face setting with their professor or classmates. In my opinion, Twitter would not be a good way to supplement or support foreign language teaching simply because it does not allow its users to post an unlimited number of characters. It could be a good way to quickly remind students when an assignment is due, but I do not see the benefit of using it to supplement foreign language teaching.

I think that Second Life for Language Learning is a good tool for people trying to learn their L2 because it allows people from all over the world to interact with each other. It's great how teachers from the U.S., England and Australia can interact with students whom they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to instruct and they can give immediate feedback to the people who are participating in their activities. The only hinderance I can see to using this tool for L2 learners is that they can only see the cartoon characters on the screen - I think it is helpful to see the actual teacher and how they pronounce their words so that the student can imitate them in order to successfully pronounce words in the language that they are learning. Other than that, I think Second Life for Language Learning is a great method for learning a language on your own time and at your own pace and I think it is really beneficial because it places students in conversational settings with other students.