CONCULISION I have not presented an invented-here-user-friendly or user-cuddly brand new discovery, but I think that anticipation of what is going to become available in a not too distant future and trying to see what can be done in the meantime is useful. For people at the sharp end of technology, this might be a little frustrating. Consolidation is sometimes as necessary as invention even if less exciting. Research is far from being unanimously uncritical about unrealistically high expectations concerning learning gains that might be impossible to sustain. In the light of the issues highlighted in the present chapter, it seems that the need to integrate culture and its teaching into EFL classes is not a new debate . The early 1970’s had witnessed the reform of structural methodologies such as the Grammar translation Method and audiolinguialism, because within the communicative approach framework it became important that the acquisition of the target language communicative competence entails the integration of both language and its culture. Since then, few if any educators would claim that culture should not play a role in the foreign language classroom. However, there are many differing interpretations as to how this should happen and to what exactly culture learning actually means. For this reason, this chapter attempted to clarify the main issues related to the role of culture in EFL classes. Firstly, it aimed to account for the rise of communicative competence, it components and its implementation in EFL classes. Secondly, it reviewed the developing role of culture in different EFL teaching methodologies, goals of teaching culture as well as the challenges and limits of classroom instructions. Finally, The attempt was to investigate, the concept intercultural communicative competence, and how this concept could be put into practice in the classroom by reviewing the various approaches to teaching culture, the role of textbooks, the different material and activities for teaching culture . A point worth mentioning here, is, while it is clear from the literature review that the role of culture has increased its status in foreign language education, it important to investigate this issue within the current situation of the Algerian EFL classes. The following chapter looks at the teaching of English in the Algerian secondary schools. models of instructed SLA.This article focused on establishing and illustrating a research perspective using a computational platform to support the scaling up of feedback research in a way that is fully integrated in real-life school teaching. As such, there unfortunately is not enough space in this article to provide a more extended discussion of current research strands on corrective feedback, its theoretical foundation, and the role of corrective feedback research and individual differences in instructed SLA. Presenting the first results of a field study confirming the effectiveness of scaffolded feedback on grammar, our article does provide a fully worked-out link between SLA research on feedback as motivated in the introduction, on the one hand, and interventions of practical relevance for real-life learning, on the other. We hope this will help ground the public and political discussion of the digitization of education in actual evidence linked to SLA research. On the research side, it can open the door to focused studies targeting current questions in feedback research. Note that individual feedback delivered through the FeedBook platform could also be combined with in-class interventions.
For example, in a study also highlighting the value of seamlessly deploying interventions in genuine classroom contexts, Sato and Loewen (Reference Sato, Loewen, Keyser and Botana2019) provided meta-cognitive instruction to students about the benefits of receiving corrective feedback and show that this indeed helps learners benefit from corrective feedback. Such an in-class instruction component could readily be combined with the FeedBook platform delivering individual feedback to learners working on homework—which substantially reduces the work required to carry out such a study. As the feedback provided by the system is individually delivered, it can also be individually tailored to take into account individual differences, for example, providing more explicit, meta-linguistic feedback for students with higher working memory capacity, as motivated by the results of Ruiz Hernández (Reference Ruiz Hernández2018). Our approach is fully in line with the idea of a shared platform for studying SLA argued for by MacWhinney (Reference MacWhinney2017), though our focus is on fully integrating such a platform in real-life secondary schools as the place where most foreign language teaching happens in Europe. An online workbook such as the FeedBook providing individual support to students practicing a foreign language readily supports such seamless integration.In terms of a more specific outlook, we discussed the relevance of scaffolding completion of exercises involving both form and meaning, which we illustrated with a reading comprehension exercise. Extending the system in the direction of more such meaning-based activities in our opinion would be attractive, especially when extending it to more advanced learners. Currently, the highlighting of the information sources is manually encoded for a given question and text since it only involves minimal effort and ensures high-quality annotation. Information source detection as well as the automatic analysis of short-answer exercises could be automated, though, which would open up new possibilities for adaptive learning.
The question of how to automatically determine whether the information provided in a response is sufficient to answer a reading comprehension question given a text is addressed in the CoMiC project, and the results presented in Ziai and Meurers (Reference Ziai and Meurers2018) improve the state-of-the-art of automatic meaning assessment of short answers to new questions (i.e., that were not part of the training material of the supervised machine learning). It thus in principle becomes possible to generate questions on the fly given a text chosen by the reader and still assess the learner responses automatically. Such a scenario becomes interesting when moving from publisher-provided exercises to the automatic generation of exercises adapted to the interests and proficiency of individual students.