Call Teacher Education for the Internet
The Internet presents some original features with respect to CALL in general and thence needs to be analysed on its own. Online CALL is dominated by a phenomenon of great relevance for Language Learning, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), which is ind
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CALL TEACHER EDUCATION FOR THE INTERNET
CHAPTER OVERVIEW
The Internet presents some original features with respect to CALL in general and thence needs to be analysed on its own. Online CALL is dominated by a phenomenon of great relevance for Language Learning, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), which is indeed characterised by a strong linguistic and pedagogical component, if compared with CALL in general. The Internet connects real people, thus fulfilling, through CMC, the complex pattern of Communicative Competence in the practice of Language Pedagogy. The teacher who uses the Internet, for instance for an exchange with foreign learners, need not have particularly elaborate technical competences, but rather, he or she should be able to manage complex communicative situations. Consequently, also practice and research on Teacher Education is characterised by a strong pedagogical component. 7.1 INTRODUCTION: THE INTERNET WITHIN THE DOMAIN OF CALL
This chapter deals with network technologies applied to language education. By network technologies I mean, first of all, Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), online language teaching and social networks. Mobile technology, also known as Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL), is also considered, as it constitutes a development of network technology. Network technologies and the teaching thereof, because of their role in the sector, deserve to be dealt with separately. The Internet’s innovative role is an important topic in specialised literature: in the heyday of the mass diffusion of PCs (1996) Warschauer clearly envisaged the power of CMC for CALL: Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), which has existed in primitive form since the 1960s but has only became wide-spread in the last five years, is probably the one computer application to date with the greatest impact on language teaching. For the first time, language learners can communicate directly, inexpensively, and conveniently with other learners or speakers of the target language 24 hours a day, from school, work, or home. This communication can be asynchronous (not simultaneous) through tools such as electronic mail (email), which allows each participant to compose messages at their time and pace, or it can be synchronous (synchronous, “real time”), using programs such as MOOs, which allow people all around the world to have a simultaneous conversation by typing at their keyboards. It also allows not 125
Chapter 7
only one-to-one communication, but also one-to-many, allowing a teacher or student to share a message with a small group, the whole class, a partner class, or an international discussion list of hundreds or thousands of people. Warschauer and Kern (2000) maintain that the use of the Internet1 “forms a new and different side of CALL, in which the focus is on communication among people” (p. 6). Although the role of the Internet for CALL is not limited to CMC, it is difficult to envisage online language teaching without it: it is the relationship between this technology’s affordances and commu
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