Good to see you again to another post, buddies! In this post I would like to do review and paraphrase of the Literature Review section. But before, I would like to clarify about the structure of a good journal refer to Bates Collage that I stated on the last post. Bates Collage didn't mention (or maybe consider) Literature Review as a part of good journal, it is a little bit contradicted with my opinion which Literature Review is an important part of a journal. Thus, I decided to include and having a review about this section of journal. Let's get started !
Literature Review
Developing speaking skills in MALL
Many variety of opportunities offered by Internet and mobile apps for language learning, listening and speaking practice. Authentic material such as radio and TV channels can be used by learners for practicing listening skills, chatting can be language practice as well (e.g., Face Time, Skype) or through voice recording (e.g., podcast). Some of these media have recently been investigated as supportive tools for second language learning (e.g. Lys, 2013; Pegrum, 2014).
Lys (2013) had done a fascinating research in an upper level of German class, researching the combination of the iPad in the classroom and its leverage toward the development of learners’ oral language. The author specifically concerned on how the quality of the students' oral language ability could be impacted by an instructional setting which brings additional conversation opportunities in and outside classroom through iPad device. The research was an implementation project of one-to-one iPad, and in a private American university it was a part of larger research; it was going on for nine weeks, implicating 13 students. They were used several types of speaking, listening and recording tasks. They worked on a scaffolded task for each week, using Face Time to make a real time video chat and they had to provide an open-ended recorded speech. Outcomes showed that real-time conversational activities could support to advanced learners’ speaking proficiency. As comparison, a standard non-iPad class had less time to speak rather than iPad class, and they seem to be ardent about it. The use of scaffolded activities in this study beneficially impacted by different aspects of the study presented of Lys (2013), however we should also pay attention in some important boundaries: the deficiency of a pen and paper group, the hardships of evaluating speaking performance and the limited number of students participating.
Moreover, there are a number of studies that analyzing the use of podcasting to improve students’ pronunciation. Some of these found certain improvements (Lord, 2008), others did not (Ducate & Lomicka, 2009). Recently, University of Cyprus does a study, their learners used mobile devices (iPod Touch) to make improvement in the fluency of oral reading (Papadima-Sophocleous & Charalambous, 2015). They were firstly practicing by watching a native speaker speaking English on Youtube platform, students then recorded themselves while reading a text. After a set data of analyzes produced by the learners, an improvement in speed and word decoding accuracy had found by researchers. It was might be due to the how much time that learners spent for practicing with the mobile device.
Focused on speaking production, the iPad, and mobile devices, in general can also provide unlimited opportunities for fluency (Pegrum, 2014). For example, in a study conducted in a Japanese university, teacher gave an activity where students had to make a 30-seconds video about the topic given by teacher (Gromik, 2012). The author triangulated the video/audio data produced by the students with survey data. Outcomes described an enhancing number of words used by students task after task, and students felt the activities proposed enhanced their oral fluency.
Even though the research deliver above show positive outcomes, and commonly follow a well-designed approach with a coherent data analysis process, the reliability of their findings could be limited by some aspects as we can argue such as (limited number of students and teachers participated). In additional, the use of mobile devices into the second language classroom by teacher can't be supported by these researches because they don not report on innovative ideas. They provide a description of standard and general use of mobile devices. The need of expertise from the field of language learning technologies can be seen from that.
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