Technology-enhanced HL courses: Best tools and best practices

Florencia HenshawUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Affordances of CALL

Immediate and individualized

feedback

Greater opportunities for meaningful

communication in the target language

Access to authentic oral and written

input

Greater flexibility in delivery modes

Affordances of CALL

Immediate and individualized

feedback

Greater opportunities for meaningful

communication in the target language

Access to authentic oral and written

input

Greater flexibility in delivery modes

For HL instruction…

Meet different students’ needs

Promote HL maintenance

Cultivate positive attitudes toward the

HL

Overcome logistical obstacles

Drawbacks of technology

Resistance

Training

Access

Reliability

For HL instruction…

Scarcity of publisher-provided online

materials

Difficulty in building a sense of

community

Rigidity of computer-graded activities

Research on technology-

enhanced HL instruction

• Lee (2006)

• Meskill and Anthony (2008)

• Loewen (2008)

• Coryell, Clark and Pomerantz (2010)

• Coryell and Clark (2011)

• Henshaw (in press)

Lee (2006)

Meskill and Anthony (2008)

Blogging

• In the real world

Strengthened their connection to their

cultural heritage

• Within a course management system

Strengthened their lexical repertoire, their

spelling skills, and their composing and

editing abilities.

Loewen (2008)

Concerns about exposing HL learners to the

alternative spelling commonly found in online

discussion forums (“…exactly the fundamental

mistakes that we are trying to help our

heritage learners overcome”).

– Instructors should screen websites, prepare

students, point out and discuss alternative

spelling.

Coryell et al.(2010)

Coryell and Clark (2011)

• The experiences of HL learners in an Intro

Spanish course (for L2 learners)

Pro: The online environment promises “a safer

space for them to wrestle with feelings of

linguistic and cultural incompetence” (p. 465).

Con: Constant pressure to produce correct

forms.

Henshaw (in press)

• Fully online Spanish composition course for

HL learners at UIUC

Pros: increased enrollments, more time for

the instructor to provide individualized

feedback.

Cons: Teaching and learning online are not

for everyone…

“Technology is

theoretically and

methodologically neutral”

(Blake, 2013, p. 12)

1. Favor instructor-graded

tasks over computer-graded

quizzes.

Without the contextualization afforded by

instructor feedback, computer activities that

are limited to accept specific correct

responses may inadvertently send the

message to HL learners that their language

varieties are unacceptable.

2. Foment electronic literacy

by embracing learner autonomy.

Establishing a personal connection to the

language and culture is crucial to support HL

maintenance.

• Park and Sarkar (2007): one way in which

parents helped their children maintain Korean

as their HL in Montreal was through

encouragement of Internet use in Korean.

3. Capitalize on the text-based

nature of online materials.

The predominance of written communication

online might help to…

…develop their literacy skills

…expand their bilingual range

…gain an appreciation for context-specific

forms of communication

Language use online is not bad input but

rather real input.

4. Utilize tools that allow

learners to convey meaningful

content to real audiences

The online component of HL courses should not

be limited to activities where the only

participants are the instructor and other

classmates.

• Doing so would overlook the “desire on the

part of HL students to connect more directly

and more deeply with local and transnational

HL communities” (Martínez, in press).

Social media

• Explore interest groups

• Connect with others

• Create a page

Content curation

• Static collections

• Dynamic collections

• A collection that represents who they are

– Comments explain how each component

reflects their personality, ideology, goals

and life experiences.

• Thematic collections (e.g., immigration)

– Other users can post comments or utilize it

as a source of information for their own

projects.

– http://www.scoop.it/t/brutalidad-policial

• Curated sites and news stories that update on

a regular basis

Content creation

• Digital magazines

• Websites / Blogs

• Texts of a variety of genres (expository,

argumentative, narrative) + media (e.g.,

pictures, videos, cartoons, infographics, etc.)

Cartoons

Infographics

Synchronous communication

WeSpeke

Synchronous communication

TalkAbroad

Online language use by HL learners

The role of social media as a way to

promote electronic literacy in the HL

Computer-mediated communication

between HL learners and other speakers

of the HL

Text chat vs. audio chat

Thank you!

henshaw2@illinois.edu