Week 10 TEBPLL projects

We examined two major projects that Dr. Sadler and Dooly conducted in the past few years. These projects were carried out between schools in different countries. In project 1, students were learning language through appreciating arts. They gained a lot of improvement through this project as it could be seen from their entries in the journal. Their vocabulary were expanding, and the level of their vocabulary were rising. This outcome really shocked me because the participants were mostly involved in enjoying arts. However, their competence in different areas were boosted.

Project 2 is probably my favorite. A lot of scaffolding was integrated in this project. Students were firstly provided with flashcards to learn vocabulary, and then they were guided to use those new vocabulary for the technology-enhanced section. In technology-enhanced section, students started to apply what they have learned in previous section to diagnose and deal with patients. Based on cases presented from Machinima, they needed to give suggestions using those vocabulary. The entire process was amazing because the scaffolding was designed very well. It let me see that scaffolding could affect the design of the project. This takeaway has changed my perspective of conducting collaboration project, and it also gave me some insights into constructing activity sequence in my final project.

Week 9 Presentation

In group meeting 4, my group discussed about Uni-collaboration website where university educators can share their resources with each other. This website is awesome because it collects a lot of useful resources from educators around the world. University educators can upload their projects on the website and also use projects designed by other people. This seems to be a group brainstorming which expands the potential of critical thinking. Other than sharing their projects, those educators can also collaborate with each other. They can create a collaboration project between their classes. This idea lets me realize that collaboration is not just for students. More interestingly, I found that there were a couple of Chinese universities participating in this big project. It illustrates that collaboration is also getting popular in China. This is great because it means I can obtain more sources to conduct collaboration projects in the future in China.


Aside from the presentations, we also explored some interesting tools: Blogger, WordPress and Wix. All of these websites are designed for creating a website or a blog. They serve well for our teaching. My instructor used blogger to create his own course website. His course website looks awesome because you can customize it and put images or videos on the website. This can be beneficial for teaching because students can easily find what they need on the website.

My technical review

Week 8 Discussions

We had lots of discussions this week. Firstly, we discussed about articles about TEPBLL. I was assigned to read the article Promoting competency-based language teaching through project-based language learning written by Dooly in 2013. This article really gave me a lot more insights into TEPBLL and other theories. It let me see the differences between PBLL and PBL as well as PBLL and TBLT. It was quite interesting to see that language learning theories were evolving. From Project based learning, task-based language teaching to project based language learning, the theories have grown so much. Undoubtedly, PBLL theories share a lot of common features with the other two theories, but its focus on authentic purpose really help learners gain more in learning. The scaffolding that is integrated in PBLL gives learners more opportunities to explore by themselves. This will enhance learners' ability to solve problems and also their competence in many different areas.

Another thing that I liked about this article is the author brought up the topic about low-level language learners in a collaboration project. Whether low-level language learners need more training and scaffolding before the project really interested me. I believed they did need more scaffolding than higher level learners since their language proficiency may caused issues in a project. This article did not specifically pinpoint this topic, but offered some suggestions to get low-level learners engaged in a project. The authors' suggestions were focused on enhancing those learners' confidence in speaking since a collaborative project requires interaction. The author suggested that teachers should slowly build on the scaffolding to help learners overcome their fear of communication.

Aside from the discussion about TEPBLL, we also investigated some word cloud applications: Tagul, Wordle and Tagxedo. These applications can be used for language teaching. They can be applied to a warm-up discussion where students need to find out what they will be learning based on the words presented. Other than that, those applications can be used for teaching high frequency words used in academic papers.

Week7 Virtual Worlds

We mainly explored 5 interesting virtual worlds: Haboo, Club Penguin, Weeworld, Woogi World and Chit Chat City. Not all of these VWs are designed for language learning, but you can always discover its pedagogical application.

My group did some investigation about Club Penguin. This application was mostly designed for children. Although it was not aimed for language learning, it still had some pedagogical potential. One of its application is the games in there can be used to expand children's vocabulary. Take the game Smoothie Smash for instance, we can use that to teach the vocal of fruits to children. This method sounds a bit simple, but it is useful because we integrate games into language teaching. In addition, it may be more effective than merely teaching children vocabulary by reading. Some studies have found that children absorb knowledge faster when they are really interested in learning something.


Another application of Club Penguin is we can use it to teach children practical skills in our life. For instance, you can keep pets in this virtual world. In this case, we can teach them how to take care of pet in real life by showing them how to feed a pet. These simple things in Club Penguin can be used in many different ways as long as you are creative.




Aside from exploring these virtual worlds, we also had a discussion about the readings. My group read the article Second language use, socialization, and learning in Internet interest communities and online gaming written by Thorne, Black and Sykes. One thing that interested me was the online learning community. This type of community is beneficial for language learning because it's interest oriented. Having passion about something can really improve learner's efficiency. However, one thing that concerns me is whether this type of community can also hinder learner's language acquisition because some active community members are non native speakers. If they provided problematic feedback in terms of linguistics, would that hamper other learners' learning?