\nHigher Colleges of Technology, CERT, KBZAC, Al Ain, UAE
\n<vancestev
![\"atmark\"](\"http:\/\/www.tesl-ej.org\/atmark.png\")
gmail.com><\/p>\nJennifer Verschoor<\/strong> When I was studying my MA\/ESL in Hawaii in the early 1980s and trying to get my head around how people learn languages, I was struck by something Earl Stevick said in one of his books, in a chapter on games in language learning, <\/p>\n The quality of the learning that takes place when we focus our attention only on the items to be learned is different from (and probably inferior to) the quality of the learning that is incidental to something else that we are trying to do (Stevick, 1982; pp.131-132). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n In my career as an English teacher, I\u2019ve always been on the lookout for tasks with incidental language learning outcomes. In my first job after earning my MA at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, I was responsible for planning and implementing a curriculum for teaching ESL to foreign students at Hawaii Preparatory Academy, a boarding school on the Big Island of Hawaii. There were only a few ESL students, mostly Japanese and Chinese, and they tended to keep to themselves and speak together in their language rather than mix easily with the predominantly native English speaking students at the academy. I was an early adopter<\/em> of CALL for language learning, and tried to use computers with my students to the extent possible. This was in 1983, at the cusp of the age of ubiquitous personal computing, so most student computing at HPA was done at terminals connected to a mainframe computer in a single room where all the students went when they needed to compute or print assignments. When I gave my foreign students writing assignments to be done at those computers, I noticed that while they were there in the room with the other students, sitting randomly next to them at the available terminals, they would often have questions, not usually about language, but more often about how you got the mainframe to do this or that, format or print a document, for example. My ESL students mentioned to me that such moments were rare opportunities to interact naturally but meaningfully with the native speaking students there. I had sent them to the computer lab to write sentences and paragraphs, and they had come away having had authentic communication experiences with other English speakers that hopefully led to more such opportunities in other contexts. This could only have improved their language development in ways that I could not have arranged for them if I had tried to develop assignments to focus on that.<\/p>\n I was also an early adaptor<\/em> of CALL programming at HPA. I had succeeded in budgeting my program for a lab with a few Apple II computers but I was surprised to be told when the computers arrived that there were no further funds for software on top of my request to buy hardware. Personal computers had only recently been invented, I hadn\u2019t realized I\u2019d need a separate budget for software as well, and it had not been obvious to anyone else at HPA at the time that such hardware was of little use without software. <\/p>\n Fortunately, in these early days of personal computing there was a budding community of hobbyists who were writing programs on Apple II for simple games and distributing them in the public domain. My Apple Club in Honolulu held swap meets occasionally where such programs were exchanged on five-and-a-quarter inch floppy disks, and I had a trove of those I had brought over with me to the Big Island. The programs were written in Basic and the code was visible and could easily be changed. A lot of the programs were word games or cloze programs where I could simply change the text in the program interface or items in the databases, while keeping intact the subroutines that did the actual work, to produce my first CALL software programs (Stevens, 1985). This was one of my first forays into coding.<\/p>\n There was a popular commercial game program at the time called Mystery House<\/em> whose developers had decided to donate it to the public domain. Armando Baltra had been promoting use of this game for language learning in conference presentations and articles at about this time (e.g., Baltra, 1984). I acquired the public domain version for my lab and encouraged my students to play it. They communicated with the game in subject\/verb utterances such as \u201cgo west\u201d or \u201clight match.\u201d The game used stick-figure graphics but somehow managed to give the students the impression they were exploring a house and meeting people there (but then the characters in the house started turning up dead, and the object of the game was to find the killer from among those remaining in the house before the killer found you). The students had explored almost everywhere they could until one of them issued a command, quite by accident, that caused a wall to move and revealed passages behind the walls. This stirred very real excitement in my classroom, which in turn led to communication with and among the students that took on greater urgency and motivation than any I had been able to elicit in any English class before then. <\/p>\n This was my first palpable awareness of the power computers have to create situations in which students have genuine needs to communicate on topics not teacher-directed, but teacher-facilitated. Since then I have been exploring the benefits of serendipity in language classes, and the importance of promoting chaos as a way of getting students to discover solutions to problems they were motivated to solve, and to communicate the processes involved in those solutions to others in the target language.<\/p>\n At a more recent job this century, where I was teaching computing at Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, we had a curriculum that focused largely on Microsoft Office applications, but I managed to convince my colleagues to allow me to create some units teaching HTML, in which the students coded their own web pages. Since the students were non-native English speaking engineering students, I called what I was doing LACL, language-assisted computer learning, a play on the better-known acronym CALL (computer-assisted language learning). My colleagues tolerated my contributions to the program for a while but eventually over-ruled me since they didn\u2019t feel they or their students needed to know the code that underpinned most of the content on the Internet. Their attitude was that we all have browsers for that, and if you need to produce code, you can usually find an HTML editor to produce it for you. However, sites such as PBWorks, Wikispaces, or Blogger, have underlying HTML code which can be used to troubleshoot problems when the WYSIWYG interfaces don\u2019t work as expected, as sometimes happens. As Dudeney, Hockly, & Pegrum put it (2013, p.162): <\/p>\n Knowing how to recognise and change elements in coding languages allows us to escape the constraints of templates, and gives us greater control over the format and appearance of some online communication. A basic familiarity with the common coding language HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which underpins most webpages, including blogs, wikis, etc., is a good place to start.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Having recourse to the underlying code, and knowing enough about coding to be able to tame a WYSIWYG editor, can be empowering, satisfying, and save a lot of time trying to tweak an interface that will not bend to your wishes until you get under the hood and see what wires are crossed there. Just wanting to know how to tweak code can pose seemingly wicked problems that networking within a community commonly helps resolve. Knowledge gaps are venerable language teaching ploys, and as with my students at HPA, in an environment where help is available from asking others, a post on a social media site can elicit help and start conversations. If this post is from a non-native speaker in a target language, but is answered by a native speaker or even another NNS who uses the target language as the lingua franca for the discussion, then authenticity of purpose and motivation to learn converge with availability of interlocutors, all catalysts for success in learning a foreign language. <\/p>\n We see this dynamic play out not only in the examples above but in gaming communities where NNS players achieve fluency in English while playing with others in games such as Minecraft, all the while speaking in English. They typically engage in a host of peripheral behaviors such as researching tips and \u2018cheats\u2019 on wikis and YouTube (in English), recording themselves communicating in English with others while playing the game, and in posting their own tips and how-to videos on YouTube (e.g., Smol\u010dec, Smol\u010dec, and Stevens, 2014). So we see that this combination of ingredients for success in language learning — authenticity of purpose and motivation to learn plus an availability of interloculants — applies not only in the 20th century language learning I was facilitating in the mid-80\u2019s at HPA, but even more so this far into our present millennium.<\/p>\n A common catch phrase for this is 21st century learning. As Rich (2010) puts it, \u201cthe term \u201821st-century skills\u2019 is generally used to refer to certain core competencies such as collaboration, digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem-solving that advocates believe schools need to teach to help students thrive in today’s world.\u201d In an era where schools realize they are training students to excel in jobs that haven\u2019t been invented yet, employers are looking for students who can learn on the job, and who have a skill-set that includes the three C\u2019s: creativity, communication, and collaboration. These skills are needed to enable employees to adapt to dynamically shifting work environments, communicate with others not only in the immediate environment but across networks, and in so doing absorb on-the-job training through collaboration with others. To these C\u2019s others, for example, Thoughtful Learning (2017) add a 4th C for critical thinking, as well as the literacy skills of information, media, and technology literacies. World Economic Forum (2015, p. 3) characterise this in an infographic giving a comprehensive breakdown of 21st Century Skills, as quoted in Table 1.<\/p>\n Table 1. 21st Century Skills<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nSt George\u00b4s College North, Buenos Aires<\/p>\nVance reflects on 20th century learning, as an early adopter and early adaptor<\/h3>\n
CALL and LACL<\/h3>\n
21st century learning<\/h3>\n