2023 Conference Workshops, Plenary Speakers, Technology Showcase Presentations and Poster Presentations
Tuesday, June 6 — Workshops
An Introduction to Virtual Reality Social Environments and Language Learning
Conducted by: Randall Sadler
This ½ day workshop will introduce educators to VR for language learning. First, a brief introduction of VR and how it has been shown to improve language learning will be given (Stage 1). Then, attendees will be taught how to use Meta Quest 2 VR headsets (Stage 2), which will be provided by the presenters. Stage 3 will introduce participants to 7 existing free social VR spaces with pedagogical potential for language teaching. All participants will be given access to a website with full tutorials for the various apps, lesson ideas, and a list of research on the topic.
Gamified Learning: Integrating Modern Gaming Design in the Classroom
Conducted by: Mahmoud Amer
This workshop aims to equip educators with the tools necessary to institutionalize gamified learning not only as a resources for teaching, but as an important part of syllabi and curricula. Despite the existence of a plethora of digital and traditional tools to engage learners in all types of learning contexts, learner engagement is still an ongoing issue that many educators, teachers, and instructional designers face in their classes. This engagement crisis exists at the backdrop of a large body of literature confirming gamified learning as high impact learning experiences (Li et al., 2021; Reinhardt, 2018; Munday, 2016; Sundqvist & Wikstrom, 2015).
Walking the Land: Urban Geoliteracy and Footsteps toward Impactful GIS-Enhanced Place-Based Language Learning
Conducted by: Lara Lomicka Anderson and Liudmila Klimanova
This workshop immerses participants in culturally diverse linguistic spaces in Minneapolis to see how local heritage, urban gastronomic diversity, and cultural practices can assist in intercultural learning. Included is an overview of critical pedagogies of place and hands-on practice. Participants explore activity design with mapping tools and mobile devices. Next, participants will engage in a place-based GIS-enhanced cultural exploration around the campus. Attendees will gain an understanding of place-based learning and articulate the benefits of digital mapping tools in their language classes. At the end of the workshop participants will briefly share their findings and how they can adapt the activity at their own institution.
Wednesday, June 7 — Workshops
“Spotifyied” Narratives: From Songs to Narratives
Conducted by: Maria Razcon
This workshop invites instructors to develop classroom-curated playlists into narratives and write exercises focusing on lyrics and underlying narrative elements. This technology-mediated writing activity based on popular songs allows instructors to create different song-based and pluricultural writing activities to motivate students and improve narrative writing in English as an additional language.
It’s Not What You Say, It’s the Way that You Say It: Using AmPitch for Improving L2 Intonation
Conducted by: Robert Elliott
Attention to intonation can be critical for producing proficient speakers in an L2. The presenters will demonstrate two models of incorporating a free and openly available real time pitch-extraction program, AmPitch, that can facilitate improving intonation. They will model how they have used this tool with two very different languages, English and Achumawi (Pit River), an endangered tonal language of North America. Participants will discuss incorporating metacognitive strategies into teaching intonation, learn to use AmPitch on their own, brainstorm ideas of how they might use pitch extraction in their context, and develop activities to be reviewed by the group.
Supercharge your Language Classroom with Interactive and Multimedia Content (H5P)
Conducted by: Juan Carlos Casan Núñez
H5P (HTML5 Package) is a free and open technology that allows teachers to create, share and reuse more than sixty types of interactive multimedia content. It is integrated with most e-learning platforms (Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) and has plugins for WordPress and Drupal. H5P content can also be created with LUMI Education free of charge. In this workshop participants will learn to create H5P content with LUMI education to enrich the student’s learning experience. First, participants will experience H5P content types. Then, a short theoretical introduction to H5P will be given. After that, the presenter will demonstrate how to create two or three types of non-complex H5P activities and one complex H5P activity. After each demonstration, participants will create the content types on their laptops. Next, time will be dedicated to presenting the H5P content created by some participants. Lastly, participants will complete a satisfaction survey. If participants agree, H5P content created during the workshop will be shared among participants.
Saturday, June 10 — Workshop
Building Community Online: Make Fun, Personable, and Engaging Videos for Free
Conducted by: Marlene Johnshoy and Daniel Soneson
Many language classes continue to be hybrid or completely online, and instructors worry about connecting with students and developing classroom community in online spaces. We recommend short videos created by the instructor and students for helping the online class “come alive”! We’ll start with an overview of the 3 online presences, and share guidelines for building community with and among students and the instructor. Then, using free software, you’ll learn to create and upload short, personable videos quickly and easily! Handouts will be provided.
Wednesday, June 7, Opening Plenary Speaker
Katie Brown
CALL as a Driver of Equity, Access, and Outcomes in an Increasingly Connected World
The pandemic spurred a massive and abrupt shift online, with technology mediating almost all aspects of our lives, essentially overnight. And while the hasty transition to online learning was certainly not perfect, often exacerbating existing disparities, it has created consensus that technology can open opportunities at incredible scale – if we use it the right way. Building on decades of collective research, CALL researchers and practitioners have a significant role to play in creating a sustainable path forward as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computer-generated speech advance at an astonishing clip. It is time to apply 40 years of insights to secure a more equitable, inclusive future of learning and work.
Thursday, June 8, Plenary Speaker
Müge Satar
Researching Multimodality in CALL: A Methodological Exploration
Multimodal CALL can empower learners by offering opportunities for self-expression beyond the limits of linguistic capacity. Yet digital spaces are not inherently equitable and can in fact widen the digital gap: those who are not adept at multimodal communication can risk being marginalised. To offer more inclusive multiliteracy practices, as researchers and practitioners, we need to better understand how multimodal digital communication works. In this talk, I first offer a brief retrospective on multimodal research in CALL. I then explore three research methods: multimodal conversation analysis, social semiotics, and multimodal (inter)action analysis with respect to their epistemological perspectives, approaches to transcription, and research questions each can best address. Going forward, I hope this kind of methodological exploration will contribute to increased rigour in multimodal CALL research as we continue to experiment with research methods from other disciplines to better make sense of sensorially rich learning spaces.
Saturday, June 10, Closing Plenary Speaker
Philip Hubbard
Exploring Openness in CALL
Along with sustainability and multimodality, openness is a central theme of CALICO 2023. On a first pass, open means something like “free and freely accessible”. However, as the call for proposals noted, there are other interpretations and applications of the term: access to learning in K12, higher education, lifelong learning; inclusive design; virtual exchange; hybrid and flexible learning; formal, informal, and non-formal learning; multilingualism; and interdisciplinarity. Covering a number of these areas and more, I address the concept of openness in CALL broadly, exploring some of its many dimensions. I begin with the past, including notions of public domain software, freeware, and shareware. I also revisit Bax’s (2003) view of “Open CALL” as a descriptor for a particular historical phase of our field. In the main part of the talk, I take a journey through examples of current incarnations of openness from the teacher’s and learner’s perspective, the researcher’s perspective, and the developer’s perspective. In the final section, I acknowledge some challenges for the present and future, including a recognition of the costs of openness.
Thursday, June 8, Technology Showcase Presentations
Vocabulary Learning in the Age of a Mobile Saturated World
Mahmoud Amer
In this showcase, the presenter will share a newly designed web-based and mobile-centric vocabulary learning platform that language teachers can easily use to promote vocabulary learning (www.vocabee.org). Games have been considered high-impact learning experiences, mainly because of the way they incorporate a variety of principles in language learning, namely, meaning-focused, adaptable, and the potential they have for language learning, and positive impact (Chapelle, 2003; Gee, 2008).
iSpraak – Automatic Speech Recognition for Everyone
Dan Nickolai and Lillian Jones
iSpraak is a pronunciation activity platform designed for foreign language educators. This online tool is meant to serve as a supplemental resource for instructors seeking to incorporate automated and individualized pronunciation feedback into their courses. Now generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, iSpraak has expanded on its previous feature set and is available at no cost to users. The developer will be on site to answer questions and provide conference attendees a chance to interact with the program.
A Taste of 4 Social Virtual Reality Environments for Informal Language Learning
Randall Sadler, Uliana Ovsiannikova, Mikako Masuda, Yao Zhang, Martin Lehrer, Suhyeon Lee, Jillian Keng and Tricia Thrasher
This Showcase will allow those snacking during the tech showcase to visit for a ‘taste’ of four currently available Virtual Reality environments with potential for informal language learning. The table will have multiple headsets available (already logged into one of the environments) for easy exploration. Attendees will be guided into the spaces and their experiences will be viewable by others via livestreams of two of the spaces viewable on laptops on the tables. Attendees will also be given access to a website with full tutorials for the apps, a review of existing research, and pedagogical suggestions for their use.
Dissemity—For Disseminating Research with Clarity
Stephanie Link, Robert Redmon and Yaser Shamsi
Dissemity (DISSEMinating research with clarITY) is a web-based intelligent tutoring platform designed to help emerging or novice researchers develop skills in writing for publication. Dissemity immerses users in a reading-to-write, genre-based learning process (Cheng, 2009) using four interactive modules where users can learn about genre conventions (Swales, 1990), analyze model writing, explore additional writing features, and write with the aid of genre-based automated feedback. Automated feedback is powered by a neural network trained to recognize genre features in scientific writing, which is used both to automatically assess student annotation and to the norms of published writing in their fields.
Creative Literacy Activities in Your Classroom with FanTALES
Frederik Cornillie
In this technology showcase, you become familiar with tools and open educational resources for implementing fanfiction-based creative literacy activities in classrooms, developed by the FanTALES project (www.fantales.eu). You get a taste of the lesson ideas, the storytelling kit comprising convenient tutorials and physical assets for creative writing projects, and the online storytelling platform. The materials are intended to accommodate a wide range of teaching and learning contexts. They support single lessons and larger projects, individual work and group work, in monolingual and multilingual contexts, and low-tech (unplugged) to high-tech activities (e.g. writing interactive fiction around 360° photos).
Canvas Course Design for an Asynchronous Spanish Course: How to Effectively Organize and Design a Fully Online Course
Angel Añorga
One of the biggest challenges learned during the pandemic was how to move to online teaching effectively. Language instructors are always looking for ideas and examples on how to effectively design and set up a fully online language course. In this session, the presenter will display a product that has been in use for three consecutive semesters. The process of preparation of this asynchronous course incorporates several aspects recommended by the Quality Matters Rubric for higher education in addition to practical applications of Universal Design Learning (UDL). This presentation provides insight into how to organize Canvas and prepare an online, asynchronous Spanish course.
Word List Victor – A New Vocabulary App!
Heidi Brumbaugh
Word List Victor is a word learning app inspired by vocabulary research. Learners choose a word list drawn from the New General Service List Project (Browne, C., Culligan, B. & Phillips, J. 2013). They then learn the words in the list by moving through learning stages based on The Degrees of Knowledge framework (Laufer & Goldstein 2004). Learning is “gamified” in that if the learner gets the word correct it advances to the next stage and if they get it wrong it reverts to the previous stage. In each stage, learners either choose or produce a match (translation or synonym). Learners may also study word definitions. When words have been learned they are stored in the learner’s “Word Deck”; when all words are learned they can go to the next list in the series.
Dynamic Assessment of Grammar: New Module on Online Diagnostic Assessment (ODA)
Sun-Kwang Bae
The Online Diagnostic Assessment system, developed by the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, recently added an interactive grammar assessment module to its existing reading and listening assessment modules. Its purpose is to provide formative feedback to language learners regarding their grammatical ability during and after the assessment sessions. When a user fails a particular feature, the system gives out immediate feedback relevant to that feature and the user has a second chance to correct his/her answers. This dynamic feedback makes the system a more responsive and learner-centered assessment. Upon completion, a two-tiered written report is produced on the user’s performance.
ImmerseMe: Looking Into New Lessons, User Interface, and Evaluation
Denis Uebiyev
This technology showcase will overview all of the new changes to ImmerseMe, a web-based VR language learning website. In the showcase, participants can explore the new user interface, and new homestay content that has been developed for Spanish and French, as well as explore the previous content that has been developed within ImmerseMe’s support 12 languages (Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish). In addition, participants will get a look into a new pre and post-test analysis integrated into ImmerseMe so that teachers to see their student’s progression through units.
Lesson Magic: Effective and Efficient Lesson Planning
Hope Anderson
World language teachers get overwhelmed with lesson planning, classroom management, grading, dealing with student (and parent) concerns, and required meetings and extracurricular events. Good lesson planning takes time and often takes a backseat in the face of competing demands, especially as understaffing gets worse, teachers have more and larger classes, and student engagement suffers. Lesson Magic provides lesson planning templates that align with language acquisition theories and modern pedagogical approaches, along with tips for their use, to assist busy teachers in effective and efficient class preparation. Come see a pre-launch demonstration of the software and provide feedback for its improvement.
Using Intelligent Personal Assistants to Enhance English Learners’ Proficiency
Mazen Alyobi and Ali Asiri
At the Technology Showcase, we will introduce AI-based Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA). IPA is a software or device that collects data from the user, analyzes them, and provides rapid and appropriate answers and recommendations. IPAs can be a great opportunity to help English Learners (EL) breakthrough and enhance their proficiency. In this session, we will demonstrate how to access and perform various tasks using IPAs that may help ELs. The audience will also learn about the different types of IPAs, and get a physical experience with them.
Immersive Realities in Language Learning: Teachers as Creators
Ali Asiri and Mazen Alyobi
This technology showcase aims to show and demonstrate how immersive realities can be implemented in language teaching and learning. We will present both AR and VR in the format of language learning activities and experiences that we designed while explaining how both technologies are implemented in these activities. Besides, we will provide handouts for teachers to: 1) show available technology platforms; and 2) show how to create similar activities and experiences for their individual language classrooms using these platforms. We will provide results from our user testing that show how learners’ experiences, and how it has facilitated their language learning.
Interactive Multimedia Content (H5P) and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in the EFL Classroom
Juan Carlos Casan-Nuñez
H5P (https://h5p.org/) is a free and open technology that allows educators to create, share and reuse more than fifty types of interactive multimedia content. It is integrated with most e-learning platforms (Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas, etc.) and has plugins for WordPress and Drupal. Higher education is a key actor in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This poster describes how H5P content was employed to integrate the SDGs in an EFL course for pre-service teachers at the University of Valencia (Spain). This work is part of the R+D+i project CIGE/2021/131 (https://ci5ods.blogs.uv.es/).
Engaging Students in Goal Setting and Metacognition with a Can-Do Self-assessment App
Claire Frances
This presentation will showcase a self-assessment tool we created for language learners. Based on the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can Do Statements and using questions from a University of Iowa Metacognitive Awareness Survey, this app helps students to understand proficiency, set goals, and reflect critically on learning strategies. These activities can help to increase self-regulation as well as self-efficacy. This presentation will provide some theoretical background regarding the importance of self-assessment and metacognition before showcasing the tool.
Collaborating with Linguaculture: Implementing a Multi-Institutional Online Trivia Game for Students of Russian
Molly Godwin-Jones
Combining language and cultural learning into a linguacultural experience can help activate students\’ understanding not only of linguistic features, but also cultural products, practices, and perspectives. This presentation describes an interactive series of events culminating in an online team-based multi-institutional trivia game for students of Russian from eight Russian Language Flagship Programs across the US. By preparing for and participating in the game, students were exposed to a cultural aspect not traditionally covered in the language classroom while also broadening their knowledge of the Russian language through film and online activities with H5P.
SEÑAL, The Computational Assistant for the Analysis and Assessment of Spanish Second Language Writing
Falcon Restrepo Ramos and Santiago Arroniz
In this Technology Showcase Presentation, we introduce SEÑAL, a modular NLP application intended to analyze and evaluate different components of essays written by students of Spanish as a second language (L2). Currently, the program has a web-based prototype which can be accessed online. At its current state of development, SEÑAL can provide a lexical-syntactic analysis of the complexity of an L2 essay, information about the frequency of various grammatical forms (such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and various verb tenses), an L2 proficiency classifier using machine learning techniques, a machine-translation identification system, and a sentiment analyzer of Spanish texts.
Friday, June 9, Poster Session
Does Intensive Reading and Learning a Way Out for the Low-achieving Students in English Language Learning?
Leon Zhang
English language learning is a great challenge for Chinese college students, especially those want to get enrolled in graduate schools, because it is a mandatory part of the national Postgraduate Admission Test. This research seeks to investigate if the intensive learning method could work for those who have always been low achieving in their English learning. 29 participants were volunteered to take the course and all the tests. The results show some inconsistency on whether their performance increased significantly. Even though the data do not pass the paired-sample t-test, the mean score in the two sets of data increased.
Using Quest-based Learning to Increase Asynchronous Participation and Motivation among University Students
David Julien
Quest-based learning is a gamified methodology in which materials are learned through the completion of competency-based tasks. This poster presentation showcases action research aimed at using quest-based learning to increase asynchronous participation and motivation among university EFL learners in a b-learning program. A custom-built learning tool was administered to 8 volunteer graduate students over a 3 week period. Results suggest that quest-based learning had a positive influence on learner participation, with 75% of students exceeding expectations. Semi-structured interviews indicate that the tool’s methodology, relevant content and context, and game objectives activated cognitive, affective, and behavioristic motivational factors. The results of the study have implications for both asynchronous and synchronous language teaching.
Turn your Start Module into a Smart Module
Lauren Rosen
We all know what to put in a start module, the usual suspects. Let’s turn it into a smart module that puts more ownership on student learning. This session will help you beef up your start module so that you AND YOUR STUDENTS are working smarter not harder. Participants will have access to links and materials they can use when creating their own and helping colleagues build Smart Start Modules.
Implementing Asynchronous Second Language Pronunciation Practice Through Technology
Angel Añorga
Moving to online teaching has posed several challenges for language instructors and students. Moreover, due to the time constraints of virtual teaching and the pressure to follow through with the required content, the specific teaching of second language pronunciation is at times limited across lesson plans. To ease this challenge, this presentation provides practical applications of asynchronous pronunciation practice through the implementation of embedded apps within and outside Canvas. Flipgrid, for instance, is an app and a web-based technology that facilitates instructors to create grids to share different types of video discussions, conversations, and oral language practice asynchronously. The presenter will provide examples that were implemented to promote the development of Spanish pronunciation among first-year college students enrolled in an online course.