Learner Autonomy and Tandem Learning

Schweinhorst (2003) discusses the framework of CMC in three different perspectives: the individual-cognitive, the social-interactive, and the experimental-participatory, which are interdependent to each others. Indeed, they all help both learners and educators to reflect upon the awareness on language development through technology.

This article gives me a strong call on promoting web-based autonomous learning in adult continuing education. Nowadays, free online educational websites are easily acessible and adult students should learn to make good use of them due to their limited time spends on lessons. However, they should be aware the pedagogical value of them at first, and teachers must be the essential ones to faciliate them.

Can learners use concordance feedback for writing errors?

According to Gaskell and Cobb (2004), using online concordance can help a group of low-intermediate level students improve their writing skills. Besides, it provides feedback to students on word-level and sentence-level errors through the authentic data base.

Indeed, I found the use of concordance practical in my teaching in adult ESL classrooms since the data provided is authentic and practical, and it enhances the autonomous learning nature in adult continuing education. However, it is the lack of knowledge and awareness of the students, at first, about the utilization of this power resource, and training of using it provided to them could be a great help in their language studies. In fact, it won't take too long time to introduce how to use the online concordance to the students and I think, more important, it really worths the time!