Continuing with the Promise of “Scratch” in the Applied Linguistics Classroom

Students and student-teachers of applied linguistics (LN400/G) taught at the University of Guam continue to explore the promise of SCRATCH, a free downloadable program from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). For the past three fall semesters, students and student-teachers were required to design class projects with Scratch. They were instructed to integrate principles of second language teaching/learning and or other subfields of applied linguistics into their projects, and told that they should be able to use these in the language, literature, or other content area classroom. A CD Rom of their individual projects, accompanied by written reports evaluating SCRATCH, were submitted at the end of each semester. In Fall 2012, students were required to integrate their computer projects into their lesson plans for elementary, middle, and or high school students. This presentation will propose criteria for evaluating students’ computer projects and summarize their evaluations of and comments about MIT's SCRATCH computer program.