Hello all,
This post is going to be related to last week’s
discussion: Games, Gaming for L/C Learning.
In this post I will summarize the main points of my
presentation related to one of the readings: Use of a game-like application on a mobile device to improve accuracy
in conjugating Spanish verbs (Daniel A. Castañeda & Moon-Heum Cho,
2016). Also, I will give my opinion about some ideas of this article.
First, I found really interesting how the authors
present the key terms at the beginning of the article, such as, MALL
(mobile-assisted language learning), game, and gamification. It is easy to understand what they are going to talk about.
Second, I like how they design the activities. From
my point of view, the most important point is that they included peer learning
in their activities. I think it is important to integrate this component
because students can negotiate meaning using the app Conjugation Nation. Also,
it can motivate them because it gives a sense of competition. I would have liked to know more about how the students
interact with each others. The article does not give details about it. During our Zoom, we realized that the authors should have added more information (e.g. quiz data, peer learning, etc.).
I have also enjoyed reading students experiences and
it made me think that what works for some students, it does not work for
others. For example: one student said that he enjoyed working with peers, but
other student said that he did not enjoy working with less proficient speakers
because it is not his job to teach them or correct them. What would you say to this student?
All in all, I
think it is engaging to learn verb conjugations with an app (at least more than writing
conjugations on paper until internalized). It can make learning fun. In my
experience, I have learnt to conjugate verbs in Spanish and Romanian writing the
verbs over and over, and it was boring.
Finally, I do not believe that the
feedback that Conjugations Nation offers is the best. As we have seen during the course, feedback and evaluation are complicated to address using online tools.
What are your
thoughts about this app or this kind or learning?
Best,
Samanta.
Samanta.
Hello Samanta!
ReplyDeleteI was waiting for your post since I was really interested in reading your opinion about the article. I really liked your presentation. You did a really good job on Zoom :). It was not easy because it was our first time having the class online.
I agree with you in some aspects you mention on your post. I also found really interesting how the authors presented the key terms at the beginning of the article. Although I already knew most of them, I learned new terminology and they made everything really clear.
Second, I also liked the design of the activities. They did a good on on that. Furthermore, I have also enjoyed reading students experiences and it made me think that what can work for some of my students as well. However, what is your opinion about the results and conclusions of the article? Weren´t you a little disappointed as well?
Alexandra Lopez Vera
I agree that a nice addition to this study was the inclusion of peer learning, and I was also disappointed that the authors didn't say more about how the peers actually interacted with each other and negotiated meaning with each other. That would have been more interesting, in my opinion, than the results of the tests. In my experience (both personally and from reading many other studies), there are often great differences of opinion among students with regard to peer learning/critique and pair or group work in general. Maybe the bottom line is that you can't please everyone all of the time, so you use a variety of activities in the hope of engaging most of the learners most of the time.
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