Technology, Social Interaction, and FL Literacy

New Ways of Learning and Teaching: Focuson Technology and Foreign Language Education Judith A. Muyskens Editor Et.Heinle & Heinle Publishers An International Thomson Publishing Company P Boston, Massachusetts 02116, USA 5 I Copyright © 1998 by Heinle & Heinle. No partsof this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or anyinformation storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing fromthe publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America. Heinle & Heinle Publishersis an International ThomsonPublishing company. ISBN: 0-8384-7809-3 10 9 8 76 5 43 2 1 6 Technology, Social Interaction, and FL Literacy Richard Kern University of California, Berkeley Introduction Technologies of writing are always tied to particular forms of social interaction and conceptions of literacy. From stone tablets and papyrus scrolls, to paper and the printing press, and now to computers,technological advances have always created new possibilities as well as challenges for written communication. "Technologies are not mere exterior aids," contends Walter J. Ong, "but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word" (1982, p. 82). Not only "interior" transformations but also profound social transformations arise from changes in the ways writing is producedand disseminated. The transition from vellum to paper during the twelfththrough fourteenth centuries in Europe, for example, had a significant impact on literacy practices. The relatively high cost and scarcity of vellum books had meant that reading was most often a pub- lic event, with the text delivered orally to gathered groups of people. As Howard puts it, "...almost everyone's experience of a book was chiefly the experience of seeing the precious object at a distance on a lectern and hear- ing someone read aloud from it" (1976 , p. 63). As paper books were intro- duced and became increasingly available,reading became a more widespread, yet also a more individual and private, practice. The solitary reader, as Howard describes, "could possess his own books, pick and choose what to read, stay up late with a candle, skip, select, compare, turn back, and reread. He had more power over the bookcould stop reading to think, could write notes in the margin" (p. 65). With the advent of widespread computer use and global communications networks, technology continues to affect how we read, how we write, and how we use written language to learn and to communicate with others. The computing revolution of the 1980s has given way to the "social" computing revolution of the 1990s. Networks such as the Internet, charac- terized in a recent court decision as "the most participatory marketplaceof 6 G 57 58 New Mys of Learning and Teaching: Focus on Technology and ForeignLanguage Education mass speech that thiscountryand indeed the worldhas yet seen" (Lewis body of published 1996,P.Al), not only permit access to an ever-expanding information but also allow the creation of unique learningcommunities. The most profound effects of computertechnology on literacy and language learning will likely arise not from language pedagogy softwarebut from the new forms of information dissemination and social interactionmade possible by local and global computer networks. The implicationsof networked communication for language learning are important not onlybecause computer networks potentially expand the number and diversityof people one can communicate with, but also because they influence the waysin which people use language to interact with one another. Thischapter will focus on three "social"usesof computertechnologysynchronousconferencing, e-mail, and MOOs (Multiple user domains ObjectOriented)which present new opportunitiesfor reorganizing classroom interaction, for extending person-to-person communication toworlds beyond the classroom, and for developing literacy and cultural literacy among foreignlanguage learners. Local Area Networks and Synchronous Conferencing Writing in ESL and foreign language teaching hastraditionally been seen as a linguistic exercise.Students generally write for a limited audience (their teacher) and for a limited purpose (to display their masteryof grammar and vocabulary). Recently, however, many language teachers haveadopted more social and developmental perspectives on writing,emphasizing collaboration among learners at various stagesof the writing process. Computers, many teachers have found, can promote this collaboration. Local area networks (LANs), consisting of interconnected computers located at a particular site, provide groups of individuals anelectronic space," somewhat akin to a bulletin board, in which to postinformation, ideas, opinions, and questions, and to respond to others'postings. Often used in business settings to improve the productivityof meetings, LANs tend to encourage both the free exchange of ideasand critical feedback presumably because they allow many of the conventions andconstraints of oral face-to-face communication to be suspended.Unlike conversation, for example, in which speakers' turns follow one anothersequentially, networked communication allows people to express their ideassimultaneously, increasing the flow of ideas and reducing thelikelihood of domination by one party. Sincecommunication is written and contributions can bemade anonymously, a certain distance is created between participantsand the dis- S7 Technology, Social Interaction, and FL Literacy 59 course that may contribute to anatmosphere of critical receptivity. One innovative LAN application that has caught the attentionof language teachers is synchronousconferencing, made possible with software such as Daedalus Inter Change or Group Logic's Aspects or in MOOenviron- ments.' Unlike electronic mail exchanges, in which the postingand the reading of messages may be separated by hours or days, synchronousconferencing provides all members of the discussion group instant access toeach message as it is sent. Students andteacher sit at individual computer terminals linked together electronically (for example, in a computer lab, although synchronous conferencing in MOOs can involve participants in remoteloca- tions). The teacher presents a discussion topic, which appears on all participants' computer screens. To respond, participants compose messages in an editing buffer and then "publish" them (sending them to all or asubset of the other members of the discussion group) by a "send" command.Messages appear immediately onrecipients' screens, appended to previously posted messages. Participants readthe posted messages and can respond to whichev- er ones they choose. Their responses arein turn "published" to all members of the discussion group. This is an ongoing process in which one may compose and send a message at anytime, even as other group members' messages are arriving. When new messages appear onthe screen, the reader can scroll backward through the file to review earlier comments. Each posted message is identified by the participant's name or alias, although complete anonymi- ty is possible by allowing all students tolog in with the same designation. Just as in oral classroom discussions, the teacher can choose to participate actively or to observe students' exchanges of ideas. At the end of the session, the transcript of this text-based discussion can be printed and thendis- tributed to the students at the next class meeting. This transcript can serve as the basis for subsequentoral discussion, composition drafting, grammar analysis, or other activities. The obvious question at this point is: why would a group of people hold a "discussion" in writing,when they could simply talk face-to-face? The point of using synchronous conferencing is not at all to replacetalk but to supplement it with discussion that is governed by a different set of conventions and constraints in order to open up new possibilitiesfor an alternative, or even oppositional,discussion.' What synchronous conferencing offers is an entirelydifferent medium of interaction that offers participants the pos- sibility to voice their thoughts at will without interrupting other participants' thoughts or expression. By virtue of being written, allparticipants' comments are availablethroughout the discussion for review and response- 68 60 New Ways of Learning and Teaching: Focus on Thchnology and Foreign Language Education the most recently posted message need not be the first to be addressed. Participants can not only easily pursue independent threads within the con- text of a main discussion (much like small group discussions)but also can unobtrusively change from one thread to another. Before elaborating on this point, let us consider a brief extract of a synchronous conference in order to see how discourse conventions operate. The following session took place during the third week of a second-semester French class. It illustrates not only the dynamics of student-to-student interaction, but also the potential for exploring individual and cultural variation among classmates. The topic was differences betweenfamily generations, and students were asked in what specific ways they and their parents were different or alike. Alda and Billy are ethnic Chinese, Kang is Cambodian, Claudia is Anglo-Saxon. I am the instructor. (Intervening messages from other conversational threads have been edited out in order to make the excerpt more readable.) Alda: Je pense

Load more