March 13, 2005

Setting up a High-Tech Language School?

Do you wish to upgrade your language school and do not know how to go about it? What kind of technology is worth the investment? These were the questions posted on slashdot in a forum at the end of last year. The forum post received a staggering 322 commentsin a matter of 2 days and includes a host of technical gems and at the same time criticism, not to use any kind of technology at all in language learning.

The following story was posted on “Ask Slashdot” on December 17th, 2005:
Bakerybob writes "My wife and I are currently setting up a small Japanese language school, and I am in charge of all of the technical aspects, with a small but not tiny budget. What would Slashdot recommend as technologies we could use to improve the student experience (and hopefully to interest more students in the school!)? We have the easy bases (free Wifi access for students, a stunningly poorly designed homepage, and a few cheap computers lying around for them to play on between classes) covered, but I'm sure there are a lot of better ideas out there. Has anyone used Moogle? What about online lessons via webcam? Give it your best shot, revolutionary thinkers!"

What kind of technology is suitable for language learning? Why criticise the use of technology in class? What is missing in the overall picture?

Technical highlights for language learning

• Web Based Training (WBT) and Computer Based Training (CBT) is digital learning material very similar to our old language textbooks. It is designed for self-study. The production of multi media learning packages is very costly and so are the prices. There are lots of images, conversations in written and audio form, grammar and vocabulary as well as many games and exercises to train the newly learned sentences. More often or not, these learning packages are supplemented with speech recognition software. When a student repeats the same word or sentence he has just heard, a visual display of bars will show him whether he matches the sentence in its entirety. Samples can be found at Rosetta Stone, Eurotalk and Tell me more by Auralog.
• Students enjoy reading and writing exercises with the help of Wiki pages are web pages, which can be freely edited by anybody without the need for html programming. Start writing a story and let the students continue as part of their project assignments.
• Reading and understanding Internet websites are a real challenge and nothing for beginners. A great example of a newspaper for children can be found in Japan: Asahi Children Newspaper
• There is no doubt in the mind of the learners, that listening to audio files and watching movies in all formats are great tools in language learning. TVs, cartoons, games, CDs, podcasts, DVDs with subtitles, mp3s and audible books with authentic voices and screen play to retain the spoken word. It was also recommended to record your own voice and listen to it again.
• Time consuming vocabulary drills are best done at the computer at home with the aid of flash cards, Super Memo and digital dictionaries. Vocabulary learning with handheld PDAs are valuable tools when spending great amount of time travelling.
• Moodle is a Learning or Course Management System used mostly by universities and learning institutes. It resembles a modern digital library with search functions to find and list courses, resources, forum postings, chats, surveys, quizzes and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text to anybody registered. Teachers can enrol students for courses and they can monitor the amount of times a student logs in and whether he/ she has read the course. Moodle is cost saving as it requires very little administration, is self-explanatory and is free of charge. It received high praises by those who are using it.
• Technology for the real classroom environment is available even though it is quite expensive: Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs) or Smart boards. An interactive whiteboard is a flat computer screen in XXXL size mounted on the wall. A pen in the hand of the teacher or the students annotates the computer screen or acts like a mouse to open or close programmes. Anything a computer can display can be seen on this screen, such as video and audio files, a whiteboard, computer programmes or websites. These whiteboards cannot be knocked or scratched.
• An interesting authoring tool was mentioned by a company called inpiration.com. Authorware is used to create courses and this usually requires quite some skills. Not so with Inspiration, which allows for the creating of simple mind maps even during class.

Low-tech approach and outright criticism

With such an array of tools at hand, it seems that language learning can be fun, interesting, efficient and rich in multi media.

Why then, were a large number of posts on the forum at Slashdot anything else than enthusiastic about a modernization of language learning? Nearly half of all answers recommended a low-tech approach and seemed to imply that technology is not needed and money spent wiser on recruiting teachers.

• Video and Audiofiles Whilst the use of Video and Audio file come closest to this downpour of language during total immersion, it is criticized because the choice of word might not even get close to what you need in day-to-day life. Here a comment of a reader of the post: DVDs with subtitles.

  Because it's critically important for your students to learn how to shout out "Look out! That giant tentacled demon is molesting that ninja-school girl!" (Wait, you mean they make other kinds of cartoons, too?)

• WBT/CBTs wrong appraoch
  Technology should supplement and not replace the trainer. In the case of WBTs and CBTs however this is tried, with moderate success. The wrong approach of WBTs and CBTs is best described with the answer of bratboy (wordchamp.com), a language learning professional, who owns his own website with flashcards for vocabulary learning.

  I would be hard-pressed to count the number of language tapes and CD-ROMs I've gone through which have promised interactive environments and turned out to be complete garbage. I've also sat through language classes in which the professor spent time helping students memorize vocabulary - time which could have been used interacting, or practicing different aspects of grammar, or learning something for which we actually needed a teacher. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental divide - that there are some things which can only be done in an immersive environment, and some which can only be done alone. For some reason, all of the "interactive language media" tries to solve the first problem, which is (at least at the current state of the art) somewhat absurd.

• Expensive hard and software
  These costs have to be recovered somewhere and might result is lower wages of educators or higher course fees.
• Untrained teachers
  Teachers do not know how to use high tech in class and are untrained. Often or not, computers distract rather then aid language learning.
• No digital teaching material
  Digital language learning material has been designed for self-study. It is unsuitable for teaching. Due to copyright restrictions language trainers are still forced to produce their own teaching material. A poll at tefl.com on March 6, 2005 revealed that 58% of all teachers still create their own material.
• Students need encouragement and motivation
  Assessment, tests, quizzes and project work, which students need to hand in are all valuable tools to motivate the students. Motivation seems to be the key in language learning and is one of the reasons given, why so few American speak a second language. Not because they don’t try to do so, but they give up easily because everybody whom they meet abroad likes to try their English.
• Qualified language trainers and a good lesson plan
  Native speakers who correct the students’ mistakes seem to be the recipe for good language learning as nicely expressed by a language learner:

  I honestly can't think of anything that would beat the low-tech approach with small groups, many teachers, and lots of plain old-fashioned *speaking*.

Synchronous, communicative tools

Just as a child needs the social interaction with the parents in order to learn the language, many answers at slashdot pointed to the fact, that no technology can replace the learning with a native speaker. Unless you go to the target country (which many language learners cannot do) how can technology help to gain access to qualified language trainers?

A mere handful of posts addressed this very subject.

Naiy puts it in a nutshell, how technology should assist the connecting people across the world.

we spend all this time making faster, fancier computers that can do so many things, so much faster. but little work has been done to make them work better with people. like what doug engelbart says. the real power of computers is their ability to network people together. but where is this networking? we network our computers, not ourselves. there are no permanent logs of internet sites…we cannot work real time on projects together. we just sit sit around in forums and email eachother. we should at least be able to by now have a network of people, all sitting together over, looking at the same document, as one person works on it, and then they can comment with them and all decide what to change as it is happening, while the one person in charge mediates all the suggestions and enacts them. or something like that. instead, we all work at our own little computers, hunched over, type up stuff, and send it to eachother when we are done. you can get a lot more collaboration when you work together on documents, rather than passing it back and forth. and perhaps it wouldnt work for all types of documents (productivity wise) but we should be given the option.

• One language learner pointed to the use of Skype voice chat to “ connect to an overseas education or conversation tutors of this world”.
• Instant Messengers like MSN, Yahoo or AIM were mentioned by another person, as an option to connect to peers in the target country, yet not to qualified teaching personnel.
• Virtual classroom technology was found wanting by a third reader. It was regarded as unsuitable for language learning due to high bandwidth requirements, poor audio and little interaction.

The slashdot community is renown to be "a highly skilled nerd" of Linux and Opensource users. Programmers, language professionals and language learners voiced their opinion. They reflected quite clearly that the old idea of computer replacing people is still strong in everbodys minds.

I am curious to see whether this attitude will change as soon as "computers start connecting people".

Posted on March 13, 2005 at 10:38 PM

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