Project RITE
Recipients
Angling for Language Acquisition with TACLE:
Leveraging Second Life to Create a Technology-Assisted
Constructivist Language Environment for Spanish 111/112
Dolly Young
Professor, Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, UT Knoxville
Doug Canfield
Coordinator, Language Resource Center, Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, UT Knoxville
Overview
The amount of contact time necessary for adult learners to achieve even
limited communication with a native speaker far exceeds the foreign
language (FL) requirement at institutions of higher learning. The
importance of learning an FL, however, cannot be underestimated in an
increasingly interdependent world. To complicate matters, new media has
profoundly affected today's undergraduate language student in two
critical ways that are not well-served by our current modes of
instruction. Our students are socialized in ways that are radically
different from previous generations (Prensky 2001). They require
learning environments that allow greater personal latitude in
constructing knowledge of a target language and culture. Their
technological body of practice is so unlike what is done in academia
that it has led to dissatisfaction with traditional pedagogical methods
and decreased enrollments in advanced undergraduate language courses
signaling rejection of these methods (Davis et. al. 1992). In addition,
new media has fundamentally altered the cognitive paradigm of our
students. Not only won't they pay attention in a traditional FL course,
their highly-developed multimedia and gaming literacy has come at the
expense of their ability to effectively assimilate an FL curriculum
based exclusively on a print culture. Moreover, the learning that does
occur in traditional courses often leads to surface learning (short term
memory). In addition, much of the current research in second language
acquisition stresses the social aspect of language acquisition (Gee
2001, Atkinson 2002), which is difficult to achieve in our current
paradigm. Lack of qualified personnel, instructional facilities and
funding propels the FL profession to investigate technologies and social
constructivist pedagogies that can enhance FL learning. Without
question, FL instruction has benefited from advances in technology by
promoting easy access to other cultures, allowing for different learner
cognitive styles, increasing FL input, and reshaping in-class
instruction, to name only a few. Forthcoming research results
investigating the use of technology in Second (SL) and Foreign (FL)
Language learning have consistently indicated that technology in general
yields either improved performance in a FL or is not significantly
different from traditional program performance results (Young, 2008). To
date, however, databased studies on the use of Web 2.0 technologies in
FL learning are sparse (Young, 2007) or, in the case of Second Life,
non-existent (Canfield, 2008). The pilot study proposed here will
collect preliminary data on the use of Second Life as an FL learning
environment.
