Tasks for building a grammar e-book: an application in the Albanian context.

The question “how can students learn grammar and have fun doing so?” prompted us to adopt a taskbasedapproach to learning Albanian literature and language, on a course offered within a virtuallearning environment. Twelve Italian students who were beginner-level Albanian Language learnersparticipated in the study in which students used digital tools to complete tasks that mainly involved thedevelopment of comic strips and cartoons in which the characters spoke Albanian. Each task-cyclebegan with a pre-task where the teacher exemplified the linguistic structures. For example, a cartoonin which the teacher presented himself provided the students the necessary syntactical chunks tocreate their own introduction-cartoons: the teacher’s video thus provided a scaffold by modelling boththe language and the expected cartoon product. During the second phase of learning when studentscreated their artefacts, they used Pearltrees as a learning notebook to compile ideas, keep notes ontheir own progress and catalogue sites which contained useful learning material. This enabledstudents to work autonomously yet creatively and also made it possible for students to view the workand progress of others, provide suggestions, request clarification and collaborate when they wishedto. As the course progressed, each student came to occupy a branch of Peartrees which grew as thecourse proceeded, thus becoming an e-portfolio of each student’s learning progression. The third,post-task phase involved the use of focus on form activities to draw attention to various aspects ofAlbanian grammar. In this phase, the teacher called upon students to reflect on the language formswhich they had used to complete their tasks and invited them to demonstrate their understanding ofvarious grammatical rules by creating a series of related grammar exercises. The students worked incollaborative groups to co-construct sequences of grammatical rules which formed branchesof Pearltrees. These branches were selected and gathered in an e-book of Albanian grammar usingthe epubeditor software . The creation of an e-book thus made it possible to not only conserve thestudent’s artefacts which had been created during the course but also obliged students to reflect onthe grammar forming the various branches on Pearltrees. This way of organizing grammar informationoffers meaningful and authentic opportunities for students to speak about and thus internalize theirunderstanding of the grammar and the language at hand. The final exam confirmed that all thestudents had successfully learnt the necessary Albanian grammar even though they were “havingfun”. We are currently transferring the learning processes developed from this elementary-levelAlbanian language course into a blended intermediate-level course of Italian as a second language.