Sunday, March 13, 2005

Help! I've gone completely IELTS.

Now, for my Databases and CALL module I've decided to design an 'activity bank' of exercises for the reading section of the IELTS test. This is partly due to the fact that I can't think of anything else to do. Not because I'm a lazy git, but because, whilst databases have many uses, I'm very skeptical of their usefulness in the language learning environment. Dictionaries are obviously one area as are massive databases of authentic language - corpora. However, apart from the three uses mentioned, I can't think of much else that is useful. I have seen many uses of databases design for language learning but they all have one thing in common - they're a bit crap. They mainly seem to be behaviourist drill and practice exercises, which help people to the learn the answer to the question but not a lot else. For example, why it's the answer! Luckily I have the opportunity to vent my spleen in a critique once I've finished the database.