WEEK 4: Reflection on CALL in Language Skills LSRWG (Part 1)

On 26^th February 2013, Tuesday, we learned about CALL in language skills. LSRWG stands for the main language skills which are listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar. We went through many acronyms of CALL and their emphasis. Some of the acronyms were CELL, TELL, TALL, CBLT, IT and ICT, NBLT, DLL and MALL. Then we were shown a list of benefits of CALL. Our lecturer asked every group to pick one of the benefits and explain it. Among all the listed benefits of CALL, we chose to explain on how CALL has been effective in illustrating concepts and organizing facts.  

As we all know, concepts are something abstract and cannot be seen by our naked eyes. Thus, in order to get the understanding of a certain concept, we have to show it. By using a computer, illustrating concepts can be easy and interesting. The illustration can be done by using videos, animations or PowerPoint presentations. There are many things that we can do by using Microsoft PowerPoint. We can make our presentation slides to be colourful by choosing the designs that are available or we can simply use our own. We also can choose a variety of fonts, ranging from the formal fonts like Times New Roman and Arial to fancy fonts like Lucida Handwriting and many more.

Some of us might get bored easily when it comes to reading facts because most of the facts are lengthy in nature. However, this can be solved by using computer. How? Simple. Since lengthy facts make people bored, we make them simple and well-organized. By using computer, we can arrange the facts by putting the most important ones first and the least important ones later. Other than that, we can put them in tables or in boxes with animated arrows in between each box in order to show chronological order of something or some events. That will not only make the learning become interesting and fun but also successful.

There was a reason behind our lecturer asking us to explain the benefits of CALL. Our lecturer wanted to see how we explained our points. Some of the groups did not really explain their points in details but rather they gave the main ideas only. It is important to be specific and to be able to elaborate more on our points by giving examples and strong evidences. This will certainly help us in answering our examination questions, thus achieving A+ in Computer Applications on Language Studies and other subjects. In Sha Allah.