Volume 17 Number 1, February 2013 Special Issue on Less Commonly Taught Languages - Language Learning & Technology
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
1 - 5 of 15
-
Item2012 Reviewer Acknowledgements( 2013-02-01)
-
ItemCall for papers—Teacher training and CALL(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2013-02-01)
-
ItemOjibwe language revitalization, multimedia technology, and family language learning(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2013-02-01)Although Indigenous language loss and revitalization are not new topics of academic work nor new areas of community activism (e.g., King, 2001; Grenoble & Whaley, 2006), increased attention has been paid in recent years to the ways that new technology can support efforts to teach and renew endangered languages such as Ojibwe. However, much of the work with Indigenous languages and technology thus far has been aimed at adults rather than children or families (e.g., Coronel-Molina, 2005). Addressing this gap, the current project examined how urban Ojibwe participants utilized computer-based language learning technology with their families at home. Specifically, we investigated how a particular multimedia tool might jumpstart communication in the Ojibwe language at home. During the two-month study, families were regularly video-taped using the software and participated in weekly audio-video recorded interviews regarding their language use and learning. Presented here is a fine-grained, qualitative analysis of two families’ language and technology use. Findings suggest that technology-based language learning was incorporated into existing family dynamics and was helpful in providing a starting point for learning and language use within established extended networks.
-
ItemDigital texts for learning Finnish: Shared resources and emerging practices(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2013-02-01)Recent studies in the field of new literacies have indicated that a remarkable change in the way we access, consume, and produce information has taken place. The boundaries between concepts such as authorship and ownership have become blurred. This paper will deal with using digital texts in teaching reading comprehension on a university-level course with a special focus on Finnish as a second language. Furthermore, the benefits and challenges of teaching L2 reading comprehension in a multimodal learning environment will be discussed. The three main perspectives utilized are meaningfulness, sharing, and adaptivity. The students attending the course described in the paper were advanced university students from various European countries, who studied Finnish as a second language. The study examines the literacy practices that take place when learners of Finnish as a second language engage in reading and writing blogs in a reading comprehension course. The results of this study indicate that sharing, meaningfulness and adaptivity promote learners’ engagement with reading as a social practice and thus support the claim that using blogs represents opportunities to enhance L2 reading comprehension skills.
-
ItemUsing a radical-derived character e-learning platform to increase learner knowledge of Chinese characters(University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2013-02-01)The present study is aimed at investigating the effect of a radical-derived Chinese character teaching strategy on enhancing Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners’ Chinese orthographic awareness. An e-learning teaching platform, based on statistical data from the Chinese Orthography Database Explorer (Chen, Chang, L.Y., Chou, Sung, & Chang, K.E., 2011), was established and used as an auxiliary teaching tool. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest quasi-experiment was conducted, with 129 Chinese-American CFL learners as participants (69 people in the experimental group and 60 people in the comparison group), to examine the effectiveness of the e-learning platform. After a three-week course—involving instruction on Chinese orthographic knowledge and at least seven phonetic/semantic radicals and their derivative characters per week—the experimental group performed significantly better than the comparison group on a phonetic radical awareness test, a semantic radical awareness test, as well as an orthography knowledge test.