Reading Prompt #7

According to Grgurović and Hegelhimer, subtitles and transcript are both very helpful to listening. But they also found that the subtitles are more frequently used than the transcript. That may because when one is doing listening practice, he or she tends to use help options which are more familiar to them in daily life, like subtitles. And higher lever learners are predisposed to subtitles which are written in the target language than those are written in the native language, while the lower level learners are the opposite. However, there are some failures of the participants to make use of the help options. The reasons may be degree of control or time pressure. If a participant cannot skip the help after comprehending the context or is forced to finish the task in a specified time, there’s no way he all she will be go through the subtitles or the transcript thoroughly. The authors point additionally that external factors such as motivation and attitudes towards the task could also be the reasons of the failures. Then turn to the SLA theory, we found that modified input would help to improve comprehension. Thus, the modification available in the form of subtitles and transcripts are important. The research in the paper shows that “All of the other groups that made use of input modifications demonstrated better learning gains overall”.

Among all the aspects the CALL book mentioned about practice, I most interested in pronunciation. Pronunciation is an important part of language learning. Unfortunately, because teach pronunciation require the language teachers have good pronunciation and in country like China, the rate between good language teachers and students is not reasonable, so it is impossible for teachers to give tutorial. That why apply CALL technology on pronunciation will be a great help for improving the students’ pronunciation and alleviate the teachers’ burden. For example, the students can have vivid learning experienced about producing specific sounds either in the shape of graphic annotations or through video and images, just like learning from the teachers. I want to teach Chinese in the future, so I hope the Chinese version of such technology will be widely used in Chinese learning.