Computer-Aided Scaffolding in Communicative Language Teaching Environments

Abstract

Educators in communicative language teaching (CLT) environments must provide scaffolding to help students process language that is beyond their competence (Nunan, 2004). Difficulty in providing such scaffolding by computer is one reason that most teacher-less mobile-assisted language learning applications are not oriented towards communicative competence. We created a language production tool that helped learners represent meaning through picture maps that encode words, word attributes, and the thematic relations between them, following Universal Networking Language (UNL) (Uchida, Zhu, & Della Santa, 2006). The tool then transformed these maps into grammatically accurate sentences in the target language. The overall effect of the transformation was to convert semantically-encoded meaning into grammatically correct phonetic form, and thus serve as a scaffold for learners to create intelligible sentences in the target language. When the tool was tested in a CLT environment, we observed that the tool provided effective scaffolding even in the absence of a human teacher.