Gaskell and Cobb (2004)

In the article of Gaskell and Cobb (2004), online concordance can be used to help a group of low-intermediate level students improve their writing skills. Feedback is given to students on word-level and sentence-level errors through the authentic data base. For my own teaching environment, it seems to be impossible to implement it because my students are low-motivated and low ability students. They even don't know how to write simple sentences, let alone understand the explanations given in this software. Therefore, I think it is for high-motivated and self-motivated learners. They will find this more convenient and useful for self learning than paper dictionaries.

Schwienhorst(2003)

In this paper, Schwienhorst(2003) points out 5 misunderstandings about the learner autonomy and 3 useful perspectives on learner autonomy. They are individual-cognitive perspective,social-interactive perspective and experimental-participatory perspective. Individual-cognitive perspective emphasizes on improving the learners' existing constructs especially for their language and linguistic awareness. As mentioned by Schwienhorst, the process may be difficult and even painful. I think if we need to change our learning habit, it needs a lot of practice and psychological changes. It is really hard and it will cause a lot of tensions for learners. As to social-interactive perspective, it is based on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development(1978). Learners can learn better and improve themselves by working with their classmates through interpersonal interaction and collaborative work. Social interaction can increase consciousness through scaffolding (Bruner & Ratner, 1978)and corrective feedback(Kohonen, 1992). Students need scaffolding when they do the interaction and collaborative work otherwise they will be out of track or chatting since they don't know how to do. Corrective feedback especially written feedback can make students understand better how they have performed so that they can perform better next time. As for the experimental-participatory perspective, learners are encouraged to take control and responsibility of their learning. They should monitor and evaluate their learning process. All these three perspectives share a concern for reflection. Also, the medium of writing also plays a main role in these perspectives.
In this article, the writer also mentions one example of implementation of learners autonomy which is tandem learning(Little & Brammerts,1996).In tandem learning, two learners of complementary L1-L2 combinations are brought together in a tandem pair and they communicate via face-to-face, emails, audio or video conferencing, etc. There are many advantages and problems in this program, however, it provides empirical data for study about synchronous and asynchronous communication media.

Blogging

Blogging is really new to me. I really don't have the habit to write on my blog and check my blog for any new posts. However, as an educational tool, it is extremely useful since we can see others' work easily(of course not for copying) and comment on them. Also, it is very interesting to see others commenting on your own view. We may share the same ideas or have opposite opinions. It doesn't matter since it is only a forum for us to share our ideas out of friendly intention. Afterall, it is an useful tool for teachers to share their ideas among their students without printing a lot of teaching materials. It is environmental friendly as well.