Week 3 and 4 - Updating and refining the proposal

Since my last blog post I have been absolutely swamped with work from other courses, and marking assignments for a subject I'm tutoring. Therefore I haven't been able to post as regularly as I would have liked, but from now I am going to make it a priority to set aside at least 1 hour each week to write a post, even if it's brief.

What I'd like to do in this post is reflect on the changes I've made for my proposal and how these came about. A major motivator for changing the proposal came from the peer review we conducted over the holidays. I teamed up with another Sophie who is also basing her challenge around French and she gave me some great feedback! Here are a few major changes I have made since:

• I have moved the section I originally had in 'My Challenge' which explained the different methods of learning I used when in high school to 'My Learning Styles and Strategies'. This seems like a much more suitable place as it helps give a clear analysis of my own learning methods.
• I have also really refined the actual learning styles and strategies section to not only describe my survey (VARK and SILL) results, but also to truly incorporate these in the challenge. I explained more clearly how I can use being aware of my strengths and weaknesses to my advantage in creating the most effective possible learning challenge. 
• The technologies I had explored previously were presented quite poorly, making it hard to understand how I decided to use certain technologies. In my final proposal I have therefore created a table including a description, advantages, disadvantages, and the learning pedagogy of each method. I have also tried to evaluate each technology more in terms of its pedagogical implications. 
• After Sophie's suggestion about finding an evaluation method more quantifiable than writing a paragraph, I found a great verb conjugation trainer online. This technology is very well suited to my challenge and will adequately record my progress.

These four points encapsulate the main changes made to my proposal after peer review. I have found this process of marking each other's work early on of invaluable help, and feel as though I have really been able to improve and finalise my proposal. To avoid making this blog post awfully long, I will post my proposal in my next post.

Besides the progress made on the learning challenge, the past few weeks of classes, readings, and online lectures have also captured my interest and allowed me to improve my proposal. I will talk briefly about some points I found interesting from week 3 and week 4. 

Week 3

- Mike Levy (2013) explained in his week 3 lecture that "personal technologies are becoming more relevant and Centrally Provisioned Technologies are possible becoming less relevant." In his lecture he also mentioned the top technologies used in language learning, some of these including online dictionaries, web-based translations, mobile phones apps, and conjugation websites. I found myself relating to this well as these are the main technologies I have used during my language learning journey, especially in the past few years, where I find textbooks have become of less critical use.

- I identified my learning styles as described by Wong & Nuncan (2011) as mostly communicative and concrete. These styles were described as being used predominantly by effective language learners, and therefore I included these points in my learning challenge. 

Week 4

- From reading 2 (Kennewell, as cited in Steel & Levy, 2013), I thought it was interesting how he basically described the teacher's role as being to "orchestrate the supporting features, including technology, of a learning context so that learners can use these features together with their existing abilities to achieve learning task outcomes." This is similar to the week 4 lecture which explained how a computer can be used as either a 'tool' or 'teacher'. Equally, the role of the teacher is evidently also interchangeable between these two. 

I will end my blog post on this note, and post my proposal tomorrow. 

À demain :)

References:

o   Levy, M. (2013). Week 3: Evolution of technologies for language learning [Lecture recording]. Retrieved from SLAT2002, University of Queensland Blackboard Online: https://learn.uq.edu.au/

o   Wong, L. L. C & Nunan, D. (2011). The learning styles and strategies of effective language learners. System, 39, 144-163.
o   Steel, C. H., & Levy, M. (2013). Language students and their technologies: Charting the evolution 2006 - 2011. ReCALL, 25(3). 306-320.