-337-
2014 CALL Conference
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be
Therefore, a conclusion can be reached that modern information technology has provided
teachers of English a new way to cultivate students’ learning autonomy. Although further
researches have to be conducted, there are reasons to be optimistic that the intelligent
EFL platform can bring students a lot of benefit.
However, the following challenges
have been encountered in cultivating students’
learning autonomy. First, it is difficult to measure students’ learning autonomy. The
practice of measuring the ability through performance was adopted because it was
believed that learners will demonstrate their ability in task performance. Presently, only
the time students spent online, the columns they visited, and the exercises they did can
be traced. It is still impossible to identify whether it is the student him/herself who left
those traces. Another challenge going together with this one is that it is difficult to
observe students’ online behaviors due to the multidimensional features of autonomy
. To
be specific, it is hard to observe students’ progress so that their learning behavior can be
controlled, because some behavior is implicit which may not leave any online traces.
Furthermore, the lack of a “test” method to measure autonomy is also a pr
oblem.
Next, it is hard to reward learners’ online autonomous behaviors. Currently, students are
given online credits according to the traces they have left. They are also ranked
according to their credits and their ranking is posted on the homepage with their real
names. However, it is not certain whether it is necessary to associate their online
behaviors with the scores of the course or there are other effective means to motivate
the students.
Finally, it is not easy to provide instant feedback of subjective exercises for students
because of the difficulty in the technology of natural language processing. The intelligent
EFL platform was intended to be designed in such a way that it is able to provide instant
feedback for all language skills, namely listening, reading, writing and translating.
However, it is hard to develop the modules of the feedback for writing and translating
due to the complex technology of natural language processing. At present, the platform
cannot provide instant feedback of writing for students. Although efforts have been made
to develop a T-rater which is able to provide instant feedback of online translation for
students, the precision rate still needs further increasing.
In a word, the challenges come from approaches to cultivating autonomy as well as from
the technology to support the accomplishment of these approaches.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: