Professor Ann Wennerstrom’s English 574, Research in Second Language Acquisition, has twice been offered in the CIC classrooms. Both times Professor Wennerstrom employed technological tools to forward the course goal of understanding research protocols of second language acquisition.

Early in the quarter, the local-area bulletin board, BABEL, provided an effective venue for teasing out differing student points of view toward TESOL scholarship. Later, graduate students were tasked to create actual research projects that could be presented at national conferences. The CIC-lab proved invaluable for collaborative work in this regard, as the students previewed and critiqued past proposal submissions posted on conference Web sites, wrote and peer-reviewed each other’s proposal drafts using Microsoft Word’s commenting feature, used Catalyst’s WebQ to gather primary data via survey, employed Microsoft Excel to correlate that information for statistical demos and created spread sheets that tracked project outcomes. Finally, every participant rehearsed their conference performance for the class at large with the aid of PowerPoint graphics.