SLS symposium

This year the SLS symposium covered very different topics and I think that everyone could find a talk in which they were interested :-) We were lucky to have Silviana Montrul and Amy Snyder-Ohta as plenary speakers and both their talks were very interesting. Somehow, some of the talks (Baburhan Uzum and Amy Snyder-Ohta). My talk looked at gesture from an interactionist perspective but after reading Douglas and Heigelheimer (2007) article I can see some connection that I could draw with CALL, especially on the issue whether audio-visual cues are important when we assess listening skills.

Since I am familiar with the study of my fellow PhD students, I was not surprised by their talks and I did not really learn anything new. The talk which "impressed" me the most was actually Amy's talk on the ZPD. I am familiar with this construct and I feel like sometimes scholars who write on the ZPD or use the ZPD in their research are not very clear and easy to read, but Amy made the ZPD understandable to everyone, including I guess any member of the audience who did not know about it. She was very enthusiastic and her speech was not boring for a second. As for suing technology I think that Amy did a great job in her use of powerpoint. She did not simply write sentences and read them aloud but she made it very animated and she relied on pictures to prompt what she wanted to say. I think it also helped the audience to stay focus on her presentation and on what she actually said rather than on what was present on the slide.

Regarding my study, I might have done things differently but the data collection itself just allowed me to rely on 14 hrs of video-taped classroom interaction. What I could think of for future research dealing with CALL, is to look at the effect of audio files versus audiovideo-files in online instruction and see whether the learners which were exposed to a lesson where the speaker's gestures were available scored higher (at whatever test I could implement, such as comprehension test) than the learners who did not have access to visual cues.

This was my first solo presentation and I have to admit that I was freaking out, but what I noticed is that after admitting to the audience that I was nervous, I started to fell way better and I would not have mind to talk more....although at the very beginning of the presentation I just wanted someone to shoot me lol! I was also reassured to see that Silvina Montrul was reading from her slides because it shows that even when you're an experienced scholar you might still feel the need to rely on written sentences instead of improvising.