Enza Antenos-Conforti, aka @iVenus on Twitter, who has been the first to leave a comment on this blog – thanks for that, Enza, I am currently drafting a reply – is a professor of Italian who has been experimenting with the use of Twitter in language teaching. This is something I am very interested about, as I have been thinking of trying to use twitter in the intermediate French class I am teaching as part of theSalford‘s University Wide Language Programme during the next academic year.
Enza has recently asked on her blog, An academic at work, a question about Correcting language mistakes on Twitter, which is really crucial for anyone who wants to use Twitter, or micro-blogging in general, for language learning.
In her own experience of learning Spanish, and more recently Portuguese, she has come accross two ways in which her Tweeple were drawing her attention to mistakes she has made in the target language:
“a direct message explicitly stating [the] error, the other in a reply message using a recast to note [the] error.”
and asks
How do others approach error correction on Twitter?
In the comments, Jose Carlos, (@ zecarlosjr) suggests, if I understand correctly his portuguese, another possibility which is to retweet a corrected version of the original tweet.
I was wondering whether there would not be some merit in establishing a new convention to make explicit that a sentence in a tweet has been corrected. The trick would be to find a letter, a couple of letters, or a sign which would be pertinent and which could be used for everyone who engages in language learning on the Twittersphere.
As I like to speak of rephrasing rather than correcting, I would like to propose using RP, which would stand for rephrased, as a possible convention. Another possiblity could be to use an hashtag or a symbol, such as for instance •
What do you think of this idea?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Pascal, c’est une bonne idée.
As to the best way to create uptake of your idea – I think start using it and see if it will catch on.
I’d like to share one of my own Twitter language learning methods with you. I’m learning French. From time to time I follow @lemondefr to increase my vocabulary and practice my reading. I now use the?Twitter Inc. iPhone app which has a “translate” button.
First I look at the tweet from Le Monde and try to read it. Then I click “translate” to see if I’m correct and to fill in any words I don’t know.
Hi, Pascal.
First of all, my congrats on this blog. I’ll certainly stop by more often to read your posts and, whenever possible, try and contribute with some comments. I guess it’s going to be easy now that we’re following each other on Twitter. We owe this meeting to Enza Antenos-Conforti, our friend @iVenus there on Twitterville
Just loved your suggestion about rephrasing and indicating it thru a symbol. Many students realize their mistakes just by simply reading the right version in a reply but many others don’t. Maybe for them your suggestion comes in pretty handy (the only problem is the damn 140-character limit, but it’s not unsolvable). I’ll test it asap and give you some feedback on it, ok?
I’m no Terminator but I’ll be back…
See ya on Twitter!
I have been thinking this over repeatedly since your post and I am wondering how to do this. I think the idea of a new acronym is perfect, using “RP” (rephrase) but I also like the idea of recasting too because it is “the least intimidating type of corrective feedback” (Liskin Gasparro et. al, 2000) (see her chapter in this preface here: http://www.cascadilla.com/slrf2000intro.html).
Recasting, however, applies to discourse practice and I wonder if in an asynchronous environment (i.e., when the people are not on Twitter at the same time), whether it is as effective as it would be synchronously (since Twitter accommodates both types of communication).
More food for thought…or maybe I’m overthinking it!
bon journée