Multilitteratus Incognitus

This is my final AAAL wrap up post, this time focusing on Computer Assisted Langauge Learning (CALL). There were a few interesting presentations (I guess for more CALL stuff I need to go to the CALICO conference) at AAAL on computer assisted language learning. One presentation (from a colleague at UMass Amherst if I am not mistaken) focused on using WIMBA to teach Japanese completely online. David Malinowski from UC Berkely spoke about a collaboration between UC Berkely and Universite de Lyon II where undergraduate students from UC Berkeley were paired up with Masters students in France learning to become teachers of French (French as a Second Language), using Skype (and later on a homebrew system) to tutor students. Another presenter was presenting on the use of Blogs as ethnographic and reflective journals for students who were learning Spanish (in Spain) during a semester abroad program. The last presentation I went to that dealt with technology was one where (in a Japanese class) ...

Despite the couple of mis-steps (i.e. hand wringing sessions) there were a lot of great presentations at AAAL this year. There were a couple of presentations that I attended that dealt with the learning of native languages of Australia by the natives themselves. The people presenting were from the University of Melbourne - it seemed like a delegation, or at least a group of colleagues that work together frequently.   These researchers were looking at three sites in Australia, but for the purposes of the presentations they only focused on one site, the Yakanarra Community (which I tried finding on a map, but I was having trouble even locating it). So this community isn't that old, it was founded somewhere in the 1980s and it brought together a number of Walmajarri speakers. The fascinating thing was that within a generation or so the Walmajarri language was replaced by an English Creole (Kriol) which is what the speakers speak today, but there isn't a standard variety of th...

I guess I will start with the "m'eh" of the conference considering that we can only go up if we start at the bottom (and it just so happens that one of the first session I went to was one of these two).  So, I think this was partly my fault for not really reading the abstracts prior to going to the sessions (mostly going by the title), and even when I read the abstracts, not really looking up things I was unfamiliar with (thinking that I would pick stuff up in the session. The first session that was a bit  "m'eh" for me was: Title: Native or Non-native: “That is the question!” or “Is that the question?” Abstract: NNESTs find themselves in a profession wherein (a) NESTs are perceived as idealized language teachers, and (b) there exists an untenable causality between nativeness and pedagogical competence. Utilizing labeling theory, the current study aims to foment a move from a polarizing “either/or” to a “both/and” wherein professionalism will be redefi...

Well, the AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) conference is over and I am really really tired.  I can't believe that there are people that right after AAAL they are headed over to Pennsylvania for the TESOL conference... Me, I need a few days of sleep to recuperate from those four days of non-stop presentations. There were a number of really interesting sessions, and some not so interesting ones (mainly because it seemed like a lot of hand wringing and self-flagellation on the part of my colleagues presenting). In the next few days I will be posting about some of the interesting stuff I learned (or at least witnessed) at the AAAL conference.  For today though, I just wanted to write how surprised I was that there were only one or two people tweeting at the conference, and then again no so much. I did notice a lot of people taking notes on laptops, and on good, old-fashioned, legal pads - but the technology wasn't quite a big ...

Highlihgts of AAAL 2012 Day 4 (Tuesday 3/27) -Boston, MA. Check back for liveblog updates [ View the story "AAAL 2012 Day 4" on Storify ]

My Highlights from AAAL 2012 in Boston for Monday 3/26 (Day 3 of the Conference). Check back for liveblog updates [ View the story "AAAL 2012 Day 3" on Storify ]

My Highlights from AAAL 2012 in Boston for Sunday 3/25 (Day 2 of the Conference). [ View the story "AAAL Boston Day 2" on Storify ]

My Highlights from AAAL 2012 in Boston for Saturday 3/24 (Day 1 of the Conference). Also, my first foray into live blogging with storify [<a href="http://storify.com/koutropoulos/aaal-boston-saturday" target="_blank">View the story "AAAL Boston - Saturday" on Storify</a>]