Title: The Effect of Technology on SLA (and vice versa)
Description: This presentation for the CALL IS Academic Session at TESOL NYC, April 4, 2008, reviews in general terms what is known about second language acquisition and discusses the implications of Landauer and Dumais' theory of Latent Semantic Analysis, a general learning mechanism that resolves Plato's problem of "excessive knowledge." LSA uses computer-based algebraic matrixes that in effect simulate the human brain's neural processing of inferred inductions. The presentation examines some of the reasons computers may be an optimal means to learn a language and explores some of the difficulties in CALL research in an open-ended media-rich environment.
The Effect of Technology on SLA (and vice versa)