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The article that I have chosen is entitled Opportunities in Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) Classroom Environments, taken from IATEFL Poland Special Computer Interest Group , Teaching English with Technology, a Journal for Teachers, Volume 4, Issue 4, October 2004. The authors responsible for this article are Hee-Jung Jung from Washington State University, Pullman, WA, USA and Sang Hyun Kim from University of Mississippi University, MS, USA.
The authors offered this study by unraveling on how the teachers of EFL have opened the opportunity for the students to meet their language literacy goals by tackling the positive benefits of technology-enhanced language learning classroom environments. This qualitative study’s aim therefore is to underscore the importance of language learning environments rather than technology itself. The idea is that EFL and ESL teachers shouldn’t rely too much on computers and ignores other learning factors that can hinder the outcomes of language learning process. The authors presented other previous studies from other researchers as citation backups for their journals, although the researches were not similar, but they conclude one outcome, which is the high need to study language classroom environments more holistically. This review presents CALL studies in three areas, which are those that investigate CALL in comparison with traditional methods, those that look at instructional strategies and also the research that examine attitudes and interactions through CALL.
Studies were done a lot to determine either a computer does help students to learn better or not. The research done was typically between a CALL-materials provided group and also the traditional method controlled group. Unfortunately, the research ignore several factors that may hinder the outcomes of the experiment, which are ignoring the nature of the learning tasks, the characteristics of the learners, and the characteristics of technological application when the research is designed and interpreted. Clearly the authors realised if they didn’t specifically point out any factors that may hinder the process of learning, then they might not understand the specific student’s trait that may actually influence the outcome of the experiment. Another comparison study was conducted by doing dialogue journal between a group using e-mail as the medium and a group using traditional pen and paper method. The result showed that the e-mail group showed more session entries, more active participation by asking and answering more questions with their teacher, used greater variety and applied effective language functions more frequently, and were less formal and communicate better with the teacher. In another ESL study, researchers found that all the students participated in the electronic discourse while half participated in face-to-face discussions. The study was to examine the effectiveness of technology itself and not considering the classroom environments factor of learning. The author stressed out that this cannot be done for the reason that learners learning style, the nature off learning task, characteristic of technological applications should be put together when the research was done. Then, another study investigates the discourse function and syntactic complexity in ESL learner output achieved through two different modes of computer-mediated communication; asynchronous and synchronous. In this study, two instructors and twenty five advanced ESL writing students participated. The result showed the discourse function type in synchronous discussions were almost the same to the modes interaction of the face-to-face conversations to acquire second language acquisition while the asynchronous discussions were more constrained and similar to the question-response-evaluate sequence like in the traditional learning classroom. Concluded with the concern of syntactic complexity, the slow process of asynchronous discussions gave more opportunities for learners to produce a syntactically more complex language. That was the conclusion of the study.
The research in my opinion is quite interesting to me despite the fact it didn’t give quite the steady outcome due to the fact that they missed a lot on controlling the factors that may hinder the sharpness of the findings. Therefore the research was rather not well conducted. But it gives us the new idea about the right ways to use technology in language learning. This is due to the fact that many educators today give an easy conclusion that technology will benefit all students when the true fact is that there is a possible small percentage of students that won’t get the benefits of using technology to strengthen the goals of acquiring second language. Possibly to me, I strongly believe that the research should make us teachers realize that the factors of both CALL materials and language learners differ from one another in ways that affect learning and we cannot observe students' learning effectively by focusing on technology as treatment only. As quoted by the authors, many other elements such as the nature of learning tasks, the learner characteristics, and the characteristics of technological application should be put together in classroom together with the use of technology so that EFL and ESL learners can perform more effective. Definitely I have to agree on these points the authors had raised out earlier. Hopefully in the future educators in Malaysia may learn from these mistakes.

Article Review by Yours truly,

Reiko