Making your work visible

An essential part of any academic community is the act of sharing our work through publications and personal connections. We are pleased to share good news about how our Gathering can support these activities.  

All those who have had a poster or paper accepted will be able to make it available online for the Gathering. And we are delighted to say that, thanks to the efforts of Research Publishing, we will be publishing an on-line volume of Short Papers later in the year. The papers accepted for EUROCALL this year are of high quality, so we look forward to having the opportunity to hear them in August and see them in print later in the autumn. Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity to share your work!

Thank you to all those who have already subscribed to EUROCALL. Please, if you have not yet done so, take out your EUROCALL membership and attend the Gathering event in August. Instructions on how to do so at the reduced 65 euro rate can be found below:

-Please visit the EUROCALL website to subscribe. You will find the membership join page here: https://www.eurocall-languages.org/site/subscribe_form.php

-Simply select the retired option at 65 euro. Complete the registration form and put an X in any of the boxes that are not applicable to you. The 65 euro button states that it is for ‘retired’ members but for the EUROCALL Gathering event in August we are opening this rate to all those who wish to subscribe. Please note - There is not a separate button to select for the Gathering rate.

-Follow the process through to payment.

Lastly, if you are joining us for the event in August we would like you to complete this form to show your whereabouts in the world. This will give us all a more visual picture of the location of our EUROCALL community.  

Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development

This recording captures the virtual presentation of Monica Ward, Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development. 

Abstract:

(I)CALL is inherently complex endeavour.  It is multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary in nature).  Natural Language Processing (NLP) involves using tools and techniques from Computational Linguistics (CL) and NLP in the language learning process. Often these tools and techniques are designed for tasks and purposes other than language learning and this makes their adaption and use in the CALL domain difficult. It can be even more challenging for Less Resourced Languages (LRLs) as they may be very few resources available to CALL researchers to adapt or incorporate into CALL resources.  This paper reports on how two existing NLP resources for Irish were used to develop a MALL app for Irish.  The app, Irish Word Bricks (IWB) was built using an existing CALL app - Word Bricks (Mozgovoy & Efimov, 2013).  Without this ‘joining the blocks together’ approach, the development of the app would certainly have taken longer, may not have been as efficient or effective and may not even have been accomplished at all.

Future proof CALL: what does it mean?

The theme for this year's EuroCALL conference, as you may have gathered from the publicity was "future-proof CALL". I had not really questioned this choice of theme at all prior to arriving at the conference, my assumption had been that the focus would be on how we could sustain the development and embedding of computer-assisted language learning into the future. I had seen the theme as a call to arms which recognised the vulnerability of this activity - something which resonates with me having seen the effects of the austerity agenda on education in the UK. 

Our keynotes really unpacked this theme and demanded that we look more closely at exactly what it means. The turning point for me came with Claire Kramsch's insights shared through our virtually connecting session . The discussion drew on other English expressions using "proof" - water-proof, fire proof, etc. What did we really mean by future proof? Did we have a shared understanding of what we meant? 

Mark Brown returned to the theme in his keynote (above) and then in the closing panel where Phil Hubbard (3 mins 20) and Mark Brown (11 mins 15) return to it with what may seem to be opposite interpretations: 
-the need to make CALL obsolete and 
-the importance of sustaining a healthy community. 
Having reflected on these views I see them actually being part of one and the same thing. 

Firstly, on obsolescence. I have often told my employers that e-learning is not about the e, it is about learning. The "e" perhaps helps them in their budget/targets, but it is unhelpful to practitioners. It encourages some to believe that "e" is an aspect of teaching or learning that is not for them but only for the technophiles. The CALL label can have the same effect. Our gatherings tend to unite folk with the same tech-leanings, we are dismissed by others as "tech evangelists". This conference identified that we should do more to clarify the pedagogy (not a word I am fond of, so maybe I should say "the approach to learning") which we adopt. 

Secondly on healthy professional communities. This is very close to my heart as I self-identify firstly as a teacher. Unsurprisingly perhaps as I have worked as a language teacher for over 30 years. I am worried about the institutions we are employed in, they have a disregard for the health of our teaching communities. I say that having co-researched the policies of HEIs looking for commitments to sustainable teaching. The publication was based on evidence from Australia but I also looked (where possible) at policies in the UK (most are not publically available if they even exist) and the same issue holds true. There is no clear commitment to supporting healthy teaching communities to underpin sustainable teaching in the future. Healthy communities need interaction, sharing, inclusive, open discussion. The ecological metaphor is totally relevant to the EuroCALL community which has seen innovation and should embrace it. The teaching community needs to be a living, breathing, evolving community of practice. This works best through open educational practice, locking people inside institutional systems only serves to suffocate the community, we need the fresh air of open educational practice to thrive.

During the conference I was able to watch Shona Whyte's presentation of research into teacher understanding of open educational practice and this clarified to me that teachers themselves are not really appreciating why #OEP or indeed what is #OEP. More work to do there on facilitating a more nuanced discussion with practitioners. All the time being aware of the monsters we are warned about in Mark Brown's keynote.