Claire Fiona Kennedy

In "Piazza" Online: Exploring the Use of Wikis with Beginner Foreign Language Learners.

Wikis are increasingly seen as useful tools for promoting active student engagement and collaborative language learning. Unlike most applications of wikis to foreign/second language learning thus far reported on, ours concerns complete beginners. In this paper, we focus on our approach to and evaluation of the integration of wikis into our first-year Italian course with the aim of encouraging out-of-class practice and fostering students’ sense of class community, right from the start of their learning. The evaluation showed that, although the students created several attractive and interesting pages, they did not appreciate the wikis as much as we had hoped: there were technical hitches, many found collaboration dynamics challenging, and most developed little interest in participating in a cross-campus online group. Our data analysis found no relationship between the students’ perceptions of the wiki work and their gender, initial confidence or frequency of use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools. However, those who, on entering the course, placed greater importance on interaction with other students, and a sense of community in class, showed greater appreciation of the wiki experience. From these findings, we draw implications for improving our approach to integrating wiki work into our program.

Cultivating Effective Corpus Use by Language Learners.

ABSTRACT While there is widespread agreement on the expected benefits of hands-on access to corpora for language learners, reports abound of the difficulties involved in realising those benefits in practice. A particular focus of discussion is the challenge of transferring the skills of the corpus linguist to learners, so that they can explore this type of monolingual and unmediated resource effectively in a ‘learner-as-researcher’ or ‘learner-as-detective’ role. In this paper, we present a positive experience of an apprenticeship in corpus use, which we attribute to a training approach that seeks to exploit the unmediated nature of corpora rather than treating it as a problem for learners. Our approach is not aimed at equipping learners with skills that will allow them to derive rules from the systematic analysis of corpus data. Instead we aim to inculcate in our students a propensity for open-ended searches, and an observe-and-borrow-chunks mentality, oriented to copying models from a corpus to enrich and render more accurate their written production in particular. We also see this training process as encouraging their curiosity about language patterns and authentication of the use they make of such patterns, and therefore beneficial to their ongoing development as independent language learners more generally.