Writing to Learn: L2 writing as a gateway to effective implicit vocabulary learning and language acquisition via CALL (original) (raw)

For more than forty years, researchers investigating ESL and EFL programs across North America (Sartain, 1960) and around the world (Elley & Mangubhai, 1983), have reported on the positive impact of open-ended activities such as free reading on literacy and language development. Despite this, concerns about the fragility of contextual guessing in an L2 (Hulstijn, 1991; Ma & Kelly, 2006; Wesche & Paribakht, 2000) have limited the use of open-ended reading and writing activities. Consequently, instructed approaches to SLA often rely primarily on explicit vocabulary learning tasks. In this presentation and paper we describe the tensions between explicit and implicit learning in an L2 and demonstrate how a CALL application we created might mitigate some of the obstacles L2 language learners face in open-ended, learner-directed, implicit SLA. FunWritr (Olmanson, Farchy, & Day, 2010) is a literacy playground and language learning mashup application designed to reduce the amount of contextual guessing typically required of learners in open-ended implicit L2 learning settings. The application does this by using the learner's L2 written output as a catalyst for language exploration, opening up a gateway to less familiar language anchored in the initial learner output and conveyed through multimodality (Jewitt, 2006) and multiplicity.

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