CALL Research Perspectives

Joy L. Egbert,Gina Mikel Petrie

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135608385
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Didattica generale

CALL Research Perspectives creates a foundation for the study and practice of computer-assisted language learning and provides an overview of ways to conceptualize and to conduct research in CALL. Its core assumptions are that all approaches to research have a place, and that researchers, teachers, and students all have a role to play in the study of computer-enhanced language learning.This is not a how-to-do-research text. Written by top researchers in the field, it offers an open-ended view of what educators need to know and be able to do to answer questions that they have. It is intended to be easy to read, to provide resources for readers to explore the ideas further, and to be non-prescriptive in presenting suggestions for CALL research. The text explores problems with current CALL research and suggests ways that teachers and other researchers can avoid such problems; presents both commonly known and less explored theories that provide a foundation for CALL and language research; and addresses other issues and ideas that affect research outcomes.An outstanding feature of CALL Research Perspectives is that it complements not only other CALL texts but also research texts of all kinds. The issues found in each chapter parallel the issues in other research texts, making this text useful for addressing the needs of teachers and researchers at different levels and in different contexts. In addition, the consistent format throughout makes it accessible to readers with a variety of backgrounds. Each chapter includes an introduction, a review of relevant literature, a set of examples and/or suggestions for conducting research in CALL, and conclusions. The consistent format is intended for ease of use, but the content of chapters varies according to the author. This is intentional; it is a strength of the book that readers can hear the voices of the authors and listen to their understandings of the perspectives presented. It is the editors' hope that they will be inspired to seek out other voices as well.

II: Research Perspectives

3: Metaphors That Shape and Guide CALL Research

Carla Meskill
State University of New York, Albany

A colleague at one of the intensive English program (IEPs) where I taught while a graduate student looked at me one day with great consternation.

“What’s with you?” he asked. I gave him a distracted “Huh?” and he went on. “You do theater here. You immerse your students in it. You put on these wild productions, then you run down to The Square and play with computers. I don’t get it.”

He was right. I integrated theater techniques into my English as a second language (ESL) teaching at every opportunity and had even gone so far as to direct and produce some theatrical performances with my ESL students. My true passion, though, had become the half dozen TRS-80 personal computers at the local adult education center. Every afternoon I was programming new PASCAL code to see if I could get the screen to write out “Good job” if a student typed in the correct form of an English verb. ¹

“How the heck are you ever going to put theater and computers together? They’ve got nothing to do with each other!” my colleague demanded.

I thought about his challenge for a moment. Then I replied, “Actually, I think they might.”

Now it is decades later, and the theatrical aspects of computers and what we do with them have had long, generative lives, providing rich perspectives to theory, research, and practices. In fact, metaphors such as “computers as theater” underpin and channel a great deal of our thinking, question formation, and approaches when researching computers in general and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) in particular. In this chapter I review work that has proposed and employed interesting and productive metaphors for working in CALL, the research questions the applications of each metaphor imply, and how each serves and can potentially serve the progress of CALL research.

OVERVIEW

The ways in which we see, experience, and in turn name aspects of our world, both its physical features and abstractions, provide infinite raw material for interpreting, talking about, and understanding human experience more fully. An important tool in these undertakings is metaphor, without which we would be a thoroughly literal, and consequently fairly dull minded, species. Indeed, explain Lakoff and Johnson (1980), “[o]ur entire conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (p. 3).

When we employ metaphor, we select certain properties of one object or idea to use in comparatively expressing the characteristics of another object or idea (Scheffler, 1991). For example, when we talk about the human brain as computer, we understand that properties of computers (their design and functionality) are being applied to the design and functions of the human organ. However, not all of the properties of computers can or ever are applied in this comparison; only a socially selected and implicitly agreed-on set are used. For example, we apply the notions of input and output, information processing, calculation, structure, and systemic interface to attributes of the human brain. However, the notions of mice, motherboards, and drag-and-drop are not applied, except, perhaps, in poetry. Our shared cultural and sociolinguistic knowledge guides this selection and nonselection of comparative features to serve a particular communicative need; to talk about someone with excellent cognitive abilities, we might say, “His brain is well wired.” Pushing the use of metaphor to compare features beyond practical, socially condoned need is the domain of art and humor and results in metaphors such as “his brain got wormed.”

In the academic realm, the linguistic and imagistic tool of metaphor serves to anchor and structure complex abstractions. In this way, metaphors save us from stalling conceptually when formulating questions and their answers by illuminating features and directions that may deviate from the norm, thus expanding both our concepts and the language available to describe them. In short, metaphorical ways of knowing and talking render the abstract concrete through extensions of meaning. Through metaphor, “our understanding is our bodily, cultural, linguistic, historical situatedness in and toward our world” (Johnson, 1987, p. 128).

METAPHOR AS A RESEARCH TOOL

Metaphors occupy a good deal of our thoughts, our talk, our work, and our world, and this is especially true of the research enterprise. In research of all traditions, metaphor is used as a conceptual tool to make concrete, and make sense of, complex phenomena. Consider, for example, the term black hole in physics. This manifestation of physical forces is not like the kinds of holes we experience in our physical world, yet the metaphorical use of the term hole and its designation as black are metaphorical aids that help us to conceptualize, discuss, and hypothesize about what is not immediately perceptible. In the realm of education, consider the commonly used terms related to the metaphor of production. Such production terminology is born out of the 19th and 20th century metaphor of schools as manufacturing plants with production lines: The child goes in on one end of the conveyor belt and comes out the other end as an educated person. Being “left behind” this forward movement, behind “the mainstream” (another currently compelling metaphor), is a concept central to current notions of teaching, learning, and especially testing as well as to current, related lay concepts of education.

A range of common and not so common metaphors help to shape and constrain our everyday reasoning, and their use in formal research is no exception. Johnson (1987) notes that concepts such as “paths, links, cycles, scales, center-periphery, container, blockage, enablement, part-whole, full-empty, iteration, surface, balance, counterforce, attraction, link, nearfar, merging, matching, contact, object, compulsion, restraint removal, mass-count, scale, splitting, superimposition, process, collection” are image schemata that assist in the sense making we do in research (p. 126). Without these powerful conceptual tools, our ability to make sense of and assess known and hypothetical phenomenon would be limited indeed. The underlying metaphor that the researcher uses, either consciously or unconsciously, shapes the research questions, the method by which they are investigated, and the interpretation of data. In all cases, as I discuss throughout this chapter, the assumptions that underlie these metaphors, such as in the production metaphor, should not go unquestioned but rather be just as central a consideration in the research enterprise as is the design of sound research methodology based on the metaphor.

It is through comparing features of disparate phenomena (e.g., “cycles– curricula,” “barriers–achievement”) that useful taxonomies of similarities and differences can be illuminated and shed light on aspects of research questions that may not otherwise have seen the light of day (e.g., recurring patterns in the content emphases of courses; television as a block to academic achievement). It is through the interstices created via such comparisons that richer views of what is being studied can be located. Likewise, the locations where the extension of metaphorical parallels breaks down can also serve as loci for novel perspectives and insight.

RESEARCH IN CALL

In the relatively short history of CALL, compelling metaphors have been applied in both research and practice, metaphors that have in turn shaped, and continue to shape, research questions and initiatives. I discuss a handful of these metaphors for researching the computer’s place in language teaching and learning and examples of studies that apply these metaphors. I focus on how they are applied in establishing theoretical frameworks, research questions, methodological approaches, and interpretations.

The Conduit and Berry-Bush Metaphors

The conduit and berry-bush metaphors comprise a colorful manner of describing whether computer-assisted instruction is preprogrammed (conduit) or open access (berry bush). These metaphors parallel another set of terms that describe the same phenomena albeit less imagistically: computer- controlled instruction, where instruction is through dictated paths, and learner-controlled instruction, whereby learners determine their own paths through the instruction.

The conduit metaphor has been one of the oldest, most pervasive, tenacious, and ultimately influential of all the metaphors used in educational research. In its purest, most traditional sense, the conduit metaphor describes the phenomenon of a body of knowledge passing into the waiting brains of learners. From the analogy we also acquire commonly used terminology such as instructional “delivery,” “exposure” of the student to instruction, and “transmission” or “imparting” of knowledge to the learner. By extension, once this knowledge has been “transferred” into the learner’s mind, one assesses how well and completely it has been received by testing its presence there. In contrast, the berry-bush metaphor would direct assessment toward learners’ sociocognitive development as revealed through the successful performance of authentic tasks, as opposed to discrete bits of information in the conduit scenario.

In one of the earliest theory-based empirical studies of CALL, Stevens (1984) employed both the conduit and berry-bush metaphors to shape and interpret his study. He designed and conducted an experiment that compared language learning during computer-controlled (conduit) versus learner-controlled (berry-bush) computer-assisted activities. Stevens borrowed the conduit and berry-bush metaphors from Scollon and Scollon (1982), who had earlier studied human interaction with computers and noted that children’s approaches differed greatly from those of adults; they found that adults tended to approach computer work more linearly than did children. Through his empirical work, Stevens determined that ESL students learned more of the target language when they controlled paths through the content (the berry-bush) than when instruction was the purview of the machine (the conduit).

Similar findings in subsequent studies supported the berry-bush approach (e.g., Adamson, Herron, & Kaess, 1995; Yang & Akahori, 1999), whereas other studies identified a need for more structured (conduit-style) learning (Meskill, 1991; Shea, 2000). The classic research question guided by the conduit metaphor requires a research approach whereby specific learning outcomes are predicted. The treatment or intervention is a stimulus on the computer screen that is expected to cause a specific learning outcome. By contrast, the berry-bush approach employs materials and tasks that encourage learners to make decisions about their own paths and their own learning and might predict positive learning and attitudinal outcomes. Subsequent comparison studies of the two paradigms, whereby one group received controlled instruction (conduit) and the other group received open-ended instruction (berry-bush), evidenced mixed results. Weaker learners, it turns out, appear to benefit from controlled instruction, whereas stronger students tend to be more responsive to open-ended learning opportunities on the computer.

Even though conduit learning studies continue to be undertaken, their limitations continue to be a concern when considering results for their validity, reliability, and practical implications. Such studies have recently become the minority, overtaken by a growing number of studies that closely examine contexts of use rather than the formal features of learning materials in isolation. Nonetheless, the conceptual differences between the berry-bush and conduit approaches to instruction and research on instruction remain important ones because they open up new questions, new perspectives, and new ways to understand CALL and its many affordances.

The Magister and Pedagogue Metaphors

In the mid-1980s, John Higgins applied a dyad of compelling metaphors to computers and how they are used for language learning and teaching. Like the conduit and berry-bush metaphors, these metaphors are useful to contrast both instructional and research approaches to language education. On one hand is the machine as magister (the director and controller of instruction) and on the other the machine as pedagogue (the slave whose sole function is to respond to and serve the learner). Higgins pushed these colorful metaphors into actual images in his 1988 book Language, Learners and Computers, where he writes the following:

[The magister] wears an academic gown to show that he is qualified in subject knowledge. Visible in his top pocket is his salary cheque, symbolizing the security of tenured appointment. In one hand he holds a handkerchief, symbol of the care and concern which (we hope) he feels for individual learners. In the other he carries a cane, symbolizing his authority to evaluate, praise and censure. In front of him is the book, the symbol of the order of events, the structure which is imposed on him by the syllabus makers and which he will impose on the learners by means of the lesson plan. (pp. 12–13)

On the other hand, pedagogue is as follows:

... a word which originally meant “the slave who escorts the children to school.” So think of a man in sandals and a cheap cotton robe, walking five paces behind the young master. He carries the young master’s books for him, but no cane. The young master snaps his fingers and the pedagogue approaches. He answers the young master’s questions, recites a poem, translates words, plays a game, or even, if that is what the young master demands, gives a test. The young master snaps his fingers again, and the pedagogue goes back to his place. (Higgins, 1988, p. 14)

The similarities between the roles and functions of both the magister and pedagogue and those of computers can be readily grasped. At the time Higgins’s work was being published, however, the paradigm for designing and using computers very much resembled the magister. The machine was viewed as serving as an infinitely patient interlocutor that could remediate until quantifiable learning was achieved. Like the conduit metaphor, the magister metaphor shapes experimental research questions of the “if treatment X, then learning outcome Y” sort. Instructional software that has a fundamental conduit or magister learning design—such as integrated learning systems (ILSs) in which learners drill and practice with programmed instruction—has traditionally been evaluated by comparing gains in reading and math by children using ILSs compared to children in classrooms without the technology. Although no significant difference has been the typical outcome of such comparative studies, one large-scale study that closely studied the contexts of ILSs in U.S. public schools determined that their use can be more effective if learners are encouraged to work in pairs rather than alone with the materials (Kulik, 2003). This case demonstrates a research approach that overcame possible constraints of the instructional metaphor it examined and that consequently illuminated critical dimensions of learning and teaching that had immediate implications for practice. This study illustrates what careful examination of learning contexts might achieve when researchers look beyond what might otherwise be restricted by metaphors.

Even though our understandings of learning, accompanying pedagogies, and methods for assessment have greatly matured since Higgins first introduced this set of metaphors, the genre of research based on a magisterial point of view persists. Indeed, today the magister paradigm for computer- assisted learning continues to have an impact on how...

Indice dei contenuti

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ESL & APPLIED LINGUISTICS PROFESSIONAL SERIES: ELI HINKEL, SERIES EDITOR
• PREFACE
• I: INTRODUCTION TO CALL RESEARCH
• II: RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES
• III: CONCLUSION