L544 CALL Software/Website Evaluation

Software/Website Title: Starfall.com Where children have fun learning to read

Website URL: starfall.com

Grade/Age Level: preschool, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, special education, homeschool, and English language development (ELD, ELL, ESL)

Language & Content:

The intended purpose of Starfall is to help facilitate phonemic awareness and learn to read with phonetics in children that are either early/advanced readers and/or have reading difficulties. The main goal in Starfall is to allow students to utilize the website and create a student-centered learning environment that facilitates an effective reading environment through fun and interactive activities.

The content of the website is devoted to language arts (reading), which include stories, rhymes, games and songs that encourage children to read. Students learn the sounds of the alphabet and vowels, and then they learn to read simple stories accompanied by interactive games that allow students to create words from root words, prefixes, and suffixes as well as long vowels, short vowels etc. All this is done through audio and visual interactive books.

External guides are varied from extra reading documents, visual aids, and interactive exercises. Students are able to practice their comprehension skills by applying the information they learned in the interactive games. They can either read the book on their own, and/or have it read to them. External documents also include printouts that accompany the visual aids. There are Level Journals that supplement the “interactive books” so that students are able to grasp letter-sound relationships and practice on the worksheets with digraphs, blends, word families and creative writing exercises. (http://www.starfall.com/n/N-info/level-1.htm?n=downloadcenter&educators)

Students like Starfall mainly because it is an interactive website. Students are able to answer questions, create words, play games and listen to rhymes. The stories have a natural appeal to younger children. The stories are funny and animated. The animations result from the cause and effect of the storyline allowing language learners to grasp the gist of the story.

The goals of the website are geared towards developing phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Their reading-based resources and activities are modeled through the list found by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as well as aligning the content that meets Rading and Language Arts Standards. This website would also like to develop in students a motivation to read. Through using the computer, students are able to develop the language goals by fun and amusing activities.

  

There are many ways students are able to practice their reading, either through interactive activities, repetition, audio and visual reading activities, or through downloadable worksheets, journals or practice pages. All of Starfall’s programs allow students to give back a feedback on the “books” and “activities”. By either selecting they liked the program, did not like or did not care. There is a help section, FAQ section and a feedback page. The starfall curriculum has entry, mid-year, and post year assessments that must be ordered or a downloadable Teacher’s GUIDE (here is the site http://more.starfall.com/downloads/N-info-curriculum/starfall-kindergarten-catalog.php). Here is an example of a week 5 curriculum: http://more.starfall.com/downloads/N-info-curriculum/week5.php

This website allows students to easily navigate through the site and start performing tasks. This website is user friendly for younger students, with the large text format, graphics and pointers. Starfalls is colorful and exciting as well as encouraging for students who are low-level English learners.

Many students have taught themselves to read using this website, so that in itself is an accomplishment. Students have strengthened their reading skills, and vocab through this site.  I am pleased with the amount of external and supplemental worksheets within this site, so that students can strengthen their writing skills as well, because writing skills is just as important as reading skills. They have even added a mobile app for the user/parents/educators.

Since Starfall has incorporated Social Studies, Science and Technology, I think that they should expand their site to include 3-6 grade readers, or struggling readers in these grade levels. I did not locate a search feature, so this would be a good addition to the site. Overall, I believe this site is user-friendly and well developed which is evident by the high success rate.     

Utilizing the Concordancer

I also feel that training to use and utilize concordances might be burdensome for some low-level English language learners. If the language learner is at the lower level stage then the concordances may be overwhelming, however if the LLer is in advanced stages in learning then they have an great ability to benefit from concordances. I agree that through concordancers students are able to get a wide view on how lexical/grammar is used in meaningful context. "The call for teaching grammar in discourse contexts has its roots in functional grammar and is founded largely on the belief that grammar deals not only with forms but also with semantics and pragmatics" (Liu, Jiang, 2009, p.62). There are a wide variety of concordance softwares, therefore I noticed that some are more easier to use, while others have more corpus data than others. Students are able to use Wild Cards (if you are using AntConc) to check multiple or single words and phrases, words that are associated with the main word, and/or words etc. In regards to COCA, there is a ? next to Word (s), COLLOCATES, POS LIST etc. that, when clicked, gives you a step-by-step example on how to get concordance results and this is also available under the SECTION and DISPLAY sections. There are multiple displays, such as Lists, Charts, KWIC,and COMPARE to view your display and choose your context, whether it be in Spoken, Fiction, Magazine, Newspaper etc areas. Overall when training students in using COCA concordancer basically the training may be time consuming but once the student gets a feel of the software they will be able to utilize it during their LLing experience. 

In learning collocations, I would say that the inductive approach is more beneficial, since students are observing the concordance data to find a pattern in grammar and vocabulary usages thus deducing a relative rule concerning grammar/lexical usage. While, in deductive approach, a student will, "use corpora either to test the rules and patterns they have learned or to classify concordance data by applying the rules and patterns" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p. 62). In teaching Lexico-grammar, I would say that the inductive approach is beneficial for students since through conducting analysis of the concordance data, LLers are able to retain the lexico-grammatical patterns and usages and "conducting concordance analysis of recurrent collocational and colligational patterns leads to acquisition of more useful general grammatical rules" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p. 62). In addition, the analysis of corpus data allows LLers to view lexical usages in context forms.

The limited size of corpus data is, in my opinion, temporary. When corpus data is used more readily in LLing environments, the increasing popularity will ultimately increase the context data incorporated in the software. I think that in EFL classes will benefit from corpus data learning in greater magnitude, since they are able to "instantly explain difficult lexicogrammatical issues" (Liu & Jiang, 2009,p.69). But incorporating corpus based data learning in the classrooms, EFL teachers or ESL teachers are able to explain difficult lexical/grammatical usages and provide concordance results as examples. With the increasing usage of concordances, there will ultimately be an increase in corpus data results.