Software Evaluation

1. General Description

(1). Name of Software or Web Resource

Imagine Learning English

(2). Description of what the program or resource is and what it is designed to do

Imagine Learning English is a program that is designed for children whose English language proficiency is at the beginning level. It combines interesting content, new technology, music and art in the activities, which can change the situation that children will face when they start to learn a new language. It is designed to “develop the English learners’ vocabulary, listening and speaking, phonemic awareness, emergent literacy and school readiness”. And the goal of the program is to narrow the gap between the higher achieved students and the English learners.

(3). Language proficiency level targeted

Early-intermediate English learners

(4). Age range targeted

Ages 4-7

(5). Description of activities

This program contains several kinds of activities to improve children’s English. It uses words and graphics matching, wordbook, creating personal scene with the words learned before, coloring a black and white picture and reteaching the words with the assistant of the learners’ native languages in the vocabulary development. Then in the listening and speaking part, it uses practicing phrases after hearing and seeing the authentic speech, conversation and scene matching, singing a song, listening to simple stories and answering questions after that. It also uses videos of modeling the pronunciation of the phonemes, putting sounds together to make a word, learning the letters of alphabet through a song, a game to identify the words to practice the listening and speaking.

2. Evaluation

(1). Technological Features

Speed of program operation

According to the demo, the program runs quite well;

Reliability operation

Based on the demo, this program is reliable;

Screen management and user interface

The screen of the program is user-friendly, attractive, and is also easy

to operate;

Exploitation of computer potential:

As the demo shows, the program is quite interactive—with the computer. Almost all the activities are done through computers. And only through computers, it can be attractive for students age from 4-7. Those videos, animations, graphic, songs are all the stuff that made a great help in teaching a language. However, this program is only suitable at the areas where school or families can afford computers.

(2). Activities (Procedure)

This programs contains some different kinds of games, and uses animations and pictures to practice listening and speaking, so it collaborative with language skills. For example, the students will match the graphics of some characters with the shadows of those characters, and the computer will read the words when the click those graphics. Or there’s another example that the students choose different colors to complete a black and white picture, the computer will also read the name of the color when the students click the color. However, there are also tutorials of phoneme; letters of alphabets and pronunciation, and the phrases learning is using videos with authentic conversations, so it is also Instructional with linguistic focus and sociolinguistic focus.

(3). Teacher Fit (approach)

If I will teach students age from 4-7, I want to use this program to assist my teaching. It includes different kinds of activities, which I think is sufficient for kids at those ages. Thegrammaticality is fit the kids’ level, right for beginners. And the demo also shows one activity that is for learning phrases which are used daily, like “do you like it”, “can you help me” or “thank you”. What’s good is that, those phrases are taught through video clips of authentic conversations. That makes children be more aware of when and how those kinds of phrases will be used. Moreover, most activities involve fictional characters, like an ant or a talking microphone, which show no gender bias. And this program is not only easy for teachers to install and maintain, but also make effective and one on one instruction for the students. Imagine a teacher with a big class, how can every student get the personal instruction from the teacher? I’m not saying this program is better than teacher, at least, in that situation, students will know better.

(4). Learner Fit (Design)

To evaluation the Learner fit, I looked into the activities to find if they actually interest the students and they help the students make any progress. For kids age form 4-7,they cannot focus their attention like adults do, learning a language should be like playing for them. At this point, this program does well; it is totally a combination of art, songs, videos and music, but never lost its goal---study. When I was watching the demo, I find that native language support is used to scaffold English acquisition. And those activities are in an appropriate length for students to comprehend. Speech is also modified to fit learner. Except for all those above, this program also has a safe learning environment, which means students learn without fear, embarrassment or failure.Well,although the demo claims that it is adaptive to meets the needs of all students, I couldn’t tell only from the sample activities.

3. summary

This program is good; it doesn’t make any outstanding achievement on designing activities, but doesn’t make big mistakes either. If I will teach English to children at those ages, I will definitely teach in China. At that circumstance, I will not the program to teach grammar. However, the pronunciation and games of learning alphabets, or singing and graphics matching are still will be used. Generally speaking, this program is helpful for learning English. I will probably recommend this program to teachers who are working with a large number of beginning English learner age from 4-7. They can use this program to give their students better instructions which they cannot do for each student before. But the teachers need to bear in mind that even the program is good, they should use it wisely instead of lapping it up.

4. Producer Details

For more information, please visit www.imaginelearningenglish.com

The main idea of my video podcast

Podcast

My glog

Reading Prompt #12

Computer based testing is definitely going to be more and more common in the future, however for now, there are still some factors limit its development. The author mentioned its necessary psychometric assumptions, which I don’t really get the meaning, but I think it’s one of the reasons. In the CAT part, there’s a theory called Item Response Theory (IRT). This theory assumes that all the questions can be graded from easy to hard and the test takers have a particular amount of ability to be assessed on the language trait. Grading questions will take extra time to the testing system and it is not certain that the difficulty of the questions is appropriate. For example, the same question may be difficult for one student but be easy for another student. IRT has a model called unidimensionality which is commonly used. It states that all questions on the test assess the same construct. But it is hard to applied in the real world, questions are hard to be made for only one goal, such as fluency or accuracy assessing only in the speaking test. Usually they were mixed in one question, which may violate the assumption of unidimensionality. Another assumption is local independence. It states that each question is independent, if two questions relate to one same passage, then this assumption is violated. With these two violations, the test takers’ ability cannot accurately be assessed. That may cause unfairness. Then the controversy over an appropriate scoring algorithm and the impractical of large bank of test questions also limit the computer based test. I agree with the author’s points because besides all the reasons above, I think computer based test requires a lot of money to develop the hardware and the software, especially for those developing countries or areas.

For the Cummins&Davesne’s reading, I think it is more interesting for me than CBT. To assess a language learners’ progress, the best way is to compare their current level to former achievement. I still remember that several years ago, school used to post the students’ position of ranking among the whole class in the front wall of the classroom. This was thought to be a good way to show the students how much progress you’ve achieved, and stimulate them. However, it turned out that horizontal comparison only worked for some of the students, most of who keep in the top all the time, vertical comparison is better and the progress were no long be post to the whole class.

Reading Presentation

An article related to CALL

Internet language use is not wrong,so we shouldn't correct it?

A while back, Traci Gardner at the NCTE Inbox blog wrote about "abbreviations and shortcuts" used in IM and elsewhere as not being incorrect grammar. She stated:

The systems that I see Internet writers use don’t indicate laziness or a lack of education. Far from it. They require complex understandings of how language works. When students use Internet language in the wrong place, we shouldn’t mark their work incorrect any more than we would mark students’ use of dialect and home language wrong. What we should do is talk about code-switching and how the uses of Internet language and Standard English contrast.

I responded in two comments over there, but I thought I'd expand a little more on it here. I agree with much of what Gardner wrote. In this particular paragraph, although I agree with the first and last sentences, the middle two sentences, I can't.

Although it might seem that internet language requires a complex understanding of language, most people don't understand the language they use in every day conversation. Linguists do, and people who study a foreign language get some inkling of the mechanics of their native language. But most people don't understand how language works any more than the non-biologist understands how mitochondria synthesize ATP. I remembered taking an English syntax class in my thirties, learning for the first time that the difference between blue bird (a type of bird) and blue bird (a bird that is blue in color) is understood through stress. The former has equal stress on blue and bird, while the latter has stress only on bird. Until that class I didn't even know that I was making that distinction. It was all unconscious (which is how we acquire our languages). So, no, although language itself is complex, most people do not have "complex understandings of how language works," at least consciously.

Yes, dialects and home languages are not wrong. They just are. However, any dialect can be "wrong" in a particular context. Imagine using text-messaging abbreviations in a resume or on a company's business report to shareholders. Imagine pontificating with academic verbiage to your parents. Or using "ain't" and southern double modals in an academic article.

In some ways, it's a natural progression to go from saying that something is not wrong to not evaluating it as wrong. But, again, what is not "wrong" per se can be wrong in a particular context. Most people applying for a construction job are not going to wear a tuxedo or evening gown. There's nothing wrong with tuxedos and evening gowns in and of themselves. At a construction site, however, an employer might question your ability to do the job and might interpret your choice of apparel as indicating a lack of common sense and consequently perhaps a lack of trustworthiness. If your purpose were to obtain a job, then you would have failed an important test.

Similarly, dialect use depends upon audience, purpose, and context. We are not helping our students if the resumes they send out do not have a formal dialect, if the company's reports they write do not have a business dialect, and so on. So, although we need to explain and help our students learn contextual uses of language, we also have to evaluate and give feedback on how well they use a dialect for the audience and purpose for which their text is intended. Generally speaking, internet abbreviations don't cut it in school and business writing.

Another reason that Gardner gives for not correcting dialects is,

The problem is that marking language “wrong” doesn’t work.

Yes, there's research that shows that traditional grammar instruction and correction doesn't work. And there's research that shows certain types of error feedback do work. (For more on error feedback, see my series of posts on error feedback, beginning with Error Feedback in L2 Writing.)

Of course, simply marking something as wrong may not work. Even in sports, if a coach simply says, "Wrong, do it again!" it's unlikely that a player will improve much. But coaches give feedback on what to do, and the players practice hours on end for months to incorporate that feedback. In addition, coaches don't tell players everything that is wrong, only a few crucial points at a time. The problem with most grammar correction is that, although explanation often accompanies the correction, often the amount of correction may be too much to attend to and also students generally do not practice hours on end to change their grammar. So, it's to be expected that much research will show error correction doesn't work. Not because it doesn't work but because it's implemented in ways that will not work. However, many extrapolate from this finding and jump to the conclusion that all types of error correction will not work. That's an unjustified jump.

Having said all of that, it really makes no sense to apply research findings of grammar correction to Internet-speak correction. Teachers may be marking Internet-speak "wrong," but this is not the same "wrong" as in correcting grammar. As Gardner notes,

Wheeler and Swords point to the research of applied linguistics and the work of educators such as past CCCC president Keith Gilyard that indicates the correction of vernacular language, the languages used with family and friends in the home community, just doesn’t work (4).

However, Internet-speak is not a native vernacular language that people grow up with. I'm not sure it should be considered a language as distinct from English. At best, it might be considered some sort of pidgin, as Anil Dash (whom Gardner cites) says, learned around or past the prime time for acquiring a native language. In fact, although we might mark it "wrong," we are not correcting it in the way that we expect students to modify their native language. Instead, we are saying, "Don't use Internet-speak. Use your vernacular language."

Again, the issue is not whether a dialect or abbreviations are "wrong." They're not. The issue is, How can we help our students use the language expected by their audience in a particular context? Of course, as Gardner states, we must orient our students to noticing contrasts between Internet-speak and academic language. Their ability to do so, however, should be evaluated just as we assess other aspects of their writing.