Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1637] Pre-discussion paper
From: Kinshuk (Kinshuk@massey.ac.nz)
Date: Thu 10 May 2001 - 12:56:05 MEST
From: "Kinshuk" <Kinshuk@massey.ac.nz> Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1637] Pre-discussion paper Date: Thu, 10 May 2001 22:56:05 +1200
Dear colleagues
Please find below the pre-discussion paper on the theme 'CALL: Can a teacher do it alone?'
by Charles Adamson, Miyagi University, Japan, our moderator and summariser for the discussion.
The discussion will formally end on 25 May 2001.
The HTML version of the paper is available at:
http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss_may2001.html
Please send your comments on the paper to IFETS list at
ifets-discussion@catfish.valdosta.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"CALL: Can a teacher do it alone?"
1. Definitions
CALL - Computer Assisted (Aided) Language Learning
CAL - Computer Assisted (Aided) Learning
In the following I will refer to CALL, specifically CALL for EFL/ESL (English as a Foreign
Language/English as a Second Language), but I suspect that everything would also apply to
CAL in general with only a few relatively insignificant adjustments needed for the specific
content. Also my comments will refer to the situation in Japan because that is the only
country about which I have relatively accurate data. Again, I think that most of my comments
will generalize.
2. Introduction
One of the recent trends in language education has been the tendency for more and more of
the textbooks and materials, both print and electronic, to be written by a large team working
for a publisher. Such study materials require specialists, including programmers, editors,
materials writers, and art and music directors, all working together under a project director,
who may or may not be an educator. This makes the project expensive, which in turn requires
that the educational objectives be as broad as possible in order that the course can be sold
to the largest number of students and teachers. This, almost by definition, means that the
materials will not exactly match the goals for any individual teacher's class. Frequently only
a small amount of the content of commercial CALL materials will be included in the goals for a
specific course. The remainder of the content will be things the students have already studied,
things that they do not need to study, or things that the curriculum designer plans to include
in later courses. For other possible types of CALL programs (role plays, games, etc), the
commercial product will probably include activities that are not a planned part of the course.
For example, I teach first year nursing students. A needs analysis showed that, in the first
year required courses, they need to learn the basic English related to nursing theory and
practice. They need to prepare themselves for reading academic papers about nursing, papers
that they will need to understand in order to complete their fourth year research projects.
They do not need the language that is used by nurses when working with English-speaking
patients, which is what is covered in most nursing English courses. They definitely do not
need, or I should say can not afford to spend the time, to study the content that appears in
most general English CALL courses: shopping, visiting friends, paying rent, or going to a
restaurant, for example.
For the record, printed materials are similar to the electronic courseware. The books are
designed to sell as many copies as possible, not to present the material that students in a
particular class need. In the past ten years or so, the large publishers have been rapidly
buying out the smaller companies so that now there are only a few remaining and they have
large advertising budgets aimed at convincing students, teachers and administrators that
their non-specific materials are what the students need. These same companies are now
beginning to publish large budget, well-advertised electronic study materials that contain
the same broad contents.
If we turn to the web, the situation is no better. There are numerous websites with EFL/ESL
materials. The Kelly brothers' site at http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/index.html and Dave
Sperling's site at http://www.pacificnet.net/~sperling/ are excellent sites that contain huge
amounts of useful material, but they are even more general in content than CD courseware. There
is a large amount of material there to support the broad, fuzzy goals of commercial materials,
but little for a course designed to meet specific goals.
3. Potential solutions
There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Some of them are outlined below and
hopefully additional ideas will develop during the discussion.
3.1. Ignore the needs analysis. This is probably the most common solution. Many young teachers,
fresh from graduate school, now believe that a needs analysis is simply the result of asking the
students what they want to learn. This was apparently caused by Nunan (1988) and his followers.
This position contrasts with the traditional gathering of information from a wide variety of
sources and then determining using it to determine specific goals for the class (Dubin & Olshtain,
1986; Benesch, 1996, Ferris & Tagg, 1996). Teachers who adopt the Nunan definition tend to accept
whatever the publishers include as being appropriate course goals.
3.2. Use portions of the commercial material. This is another time honored and popular solution:
the teacher pre-selects the portions of the material that the students will be expected to
complete. This solution, however, has a number of related problems.
3.2.1 First it involves a lot of the teacher's valuable time. The course goals must be determined
and then commercial materials must be screened and compared. In Japan, and I assume the rest of
the world, language teachers have more hours in class than any other teachers of any other
subject. In Japanese universities this is related to the student/teacher ratio (S/T ratio).
Lecture classes often have 100 or more students. Thus, a teacher who has a work load of three
90-minute lectures a week will have an S/T ratio of 300 to 1. Most language teachers believe
that 10 students constitute an appropriate class size. This means that, in order to have
equivalent S/T ratios, the language teacher would have to have 30 classes a week. Usually a
compromise is reached and language teachers have two to three times as many classes as other
teachers but the class size is limited to 40 to 80 students.
3.2.2 A second major problem with this solution involves cost and the question of copyright.
CALL materials are expensive and asking the students, or the school, to buy the materials so
that only a small portion of them can be used will not ingratiate the teacher to the
administrators or the students. Copying only the appropriate portions is a copyright violation
that may trigger legal proceedings. Also in the case of CALL materials it may not be
technically feasible to extract portions of the program.
3.3. Build the materials to fit the results of the needs analysis.
This is the option that holds the most potential for student learning, but it can also be the
most difficult and time consuming. The materials can be prepared to support, supplement or
replace classroom activities. The materials can be used and distributed on various types of
disks such as floppies, MO, ZIP or CD, by LAN, or over the WWW. The question is can a teacher
do such developmental work alone, considering their work load, preparation, classes,
administrative duties, research, in-service training, and the like. There is also the problem
of many teachers having a non-technical education and background, so the learning curve for
the tools might be steep and long.
As a preliminary to the discussion, this possibility can be broken down into two approaches
the teacher might use. One is to utilize available tools, freeware, shareware, and commercial
products that are designed to make the development process easier, quicker, and more
transparent. The second is to learn to program in an appropriate language and design materials
from scratch. Each of these possibilities is introducted below.
3.3.1 Utilize available tools.
There are many things that are available for free or at little cost which will allow the
individual teacher to apply CALL to specific classes. For example, writing courses can be
improved by using programs such as MS Word, which is preloaded on many computers, or any of
the numerous freeware word processors. Reading courses can utilize websites to tailor the
content to the students needs and interests. E-mail can be used, with or without mailing list
software, to allow communication between students or between teacher and students.
The use of email and a website is discussed in a New York Times newspaper article (Mar 14,
2001) by Rebecca Weiner. In this case on a day when school was cancelled because of snow, a
high school history teacher posted questions on the class website and then emailed the
students, inviting them to conduct research and answer the questions. Out of 112 students,
15 completed this extra credit project. This project also highlights the possibility of
students doing independent research utilizing web-based sources. Also there are many free
or inexpensive study sites that offer non-academic courses in various subjects. An example
of such a site is Smart Planet http://www.smartplantet.com/learn.asp, which offers more than
650 courses.
CALL with quizzes and exercises is now extremely easy to prepare. For example, the free-to-
educators software Hot Potatoes, available at http://web.unic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/, includes
six applications that allow the user to quickly produced web-based multiple-choice,
short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering, and gap filling exercises.
Another possibility is to use a web page authoring program such as Microsoft Front Page or any
of the other freeware, shareware, or commercial programs of the same type. These programs
allow the teacher to quickly build a class website that might contain such things as
additional readings, references, or links to related websites.
3.3.2. Build Materials from Scratch
The more ambitious and technically inclined teacher might decide to build the materials from
scratch. However, there are a number of decisions that must be made before actually beginning.
3.3.2.1. What language to use
I first learned to program in 1959 when, as an engineering student, I was required to learn
FORTRAN. Later I worked other languages that are no longer in general use and then taught
myself BASIC in 1972. I have also studied C and C++, which both have very steep learning
curves, and I am now in late phases of learning Visual Basic. For about ten years, I was
heavily involved in developing, designing, programming, and maintaining CALL programs at
Trident College in Nagoya, Japan. Our language of choice was BASIC, because it was easy to
program and was the best for handling string data. See Adamson (1997) for additional details.
Based on this experience, I would recommend Visual Basic as the language for most development
projects. However opinions vary and this topic may arise during the discussion.
3.3.2.2.Reusability and Modularity
As with all good programming, some thought should be given to designing the programs so that
they can be used in future projects. This will minimize the overall amount of programming
time that the teacher must devote to CALL projects. For example, I am currently working on
the design of a program which will present a 20 chapter novel to the students and will have
a built-in English-to-Japanese dictionary that will display the definition by clicking on the
unknown word. The novel is now given to the students in book form. The program is being
designed so that other written materials with their own dictionaries can be plugged into the
program, creating a new study program. It is also being designed so that the reader can access
other study materials, exercises, and quizzes. These will be contained in the program as data
that can be changed when the novel is changed.
3.3.2.3. Modularity
Programs by the individual teachers should be designed as groups of independent modules rather
than as complete packages. The individual modules can be designed, programmed, tested, and then
given to the students without having to wait for the complete package. Once a sufficient number
of modules are available, the teacher could build a simple interface that would allow the
students to select the modules from a menu or a window. Visual Basic is ideally suited for this
form of programming, which allows the modules to come online as soon as they are ready.
3.3.2.4. Scheduling the adoptions of the programs
A teacher trainer once suggested to me that a good habit to get into would be to look at the
results of each week's teaching and determine which exercise or activity was the least
effective. This would then be discarded and a replacement written during the following week.
One new activity a week is not an unbearable workload and will, within a year or two, result
in a huge improvement in the teacher's performance. An individual teacher could such plan
their CALL development along these lines. The project can be broken down into minimally sized
modules that can function independently which are produced on a fairly regular schedule. A
college teacher, for example, might plan to finish one module during each semester and one
during each of the summer and winder vacation periods. This would result in four additional
modules each year, and a completed project within just a few years.
3.3.2.5. Size
Based on my personal experience (Adamson, 1997), I would estimate that most programs could be
broken down into modules containing only a few hundred lines of author-generated programming.
This is especially true of Visual Basic, where the software does much of the programming.
3.3.2.6. Mode of delivery
The two most obvious possibilities here are the WWW or a LAN and CD-ROMs. CALL materials could
be uploaded to a school's website and thus be available to all. The programs could be recorded
on CD-ROM, a process that can now be done cheaply and easily by the individual, and sold or
given to the students.
3.3.2.7. Program feel
'Program feel' refers to the users reaction to the medium, not the message. While advanced
adult students might be more than satisfied by pages of black type on a white background,
there are many cases where this would not be acceptable. Many younger students have grown up
in a culture where they spend large amounts of time playing with their family computers and
their GameBoys. The programs that they play with are likely to become the standards by which
they judge the academic programs that we require them to use. If we expect our students to
willingly spend time with our programs, we need to take the characteristics of these game
programs into consideration.
3.3.2.8. Possible activities and content
This is something that I hope we explore during the discussion. The activities and content for
CALL programs is limited only by the creativity of the authors, so brainstorming and input from
a variety of people should generate some ideas that would fit some teacher's courses. What
types of activities can be included in programs simple enough to be programmed by individual
teachers? Determining this will be one of the primary goals of the discussion.
For example, at a general level natural language processing is quite difficult and not very
accurate, putting it well beyond the capabilities of the individual teacher. However, if the
range of possibilities is reduced sufficiently, it becomes possible to handle things with
brute force methods. For example, if the student is given a list of words that can be
dragged-and-dropped to form sentences, it is possible to write simple programs that respond
appropriately to anything the student writes. You just make a table (actually a tree to
reduce storage requirements) of all possible sentences and then link the sentence to the
response that you want the computer to give. Many years ago, I wrote a demonstration program
like this that allowed the student to move two people back-and-forth between two rooms and
to open and close the door. The students were also able to ask the computer questions about
where the people were. If I remember correctly, the entire program, including all the
graphic and linguistic data, was only about 150 lines.
Visual Basic makes it easy to include multimodal information. Digital cameras and recorders
are now inexpensive and a source of both pictures and sound, but what can we do with them?
One obvious use would be to give the student oral instructions on how to drag-and-drop
objects on the screen, giving individual students extensive possibilities for automating
the listening process.
4. Conclusion
>From the above, it appears that it is possible for individual teachers to prepare CALL, or
CAL, materials that are directly related to the goals of their classes. While the programs
may not reach the sophistication of commercial programs, they can be designed at a level
that will hold and maintain the students' interest while they are working with the program.
In the on-line discussion, I hope that we will further explore the limitations and conditions
relevant to CALL/CAL design by individuals and to suggest possible directions in which the
design of such programs might proceed.
References
Adamson, C. (1997). The Growth of CALL Programming: A personal perspective. In CALL: Basics
and Beyond, edited by P. Lewis, Tokyo, Japan: Japan Association for Language Teaching,
Computer Assisted Language Learning National Special Interest Group, pages 57-62.
Benesch, S. (1996). Needs Analysis and Curriculum Development in EAP. In TESOL Quarterly,
Vol 30, No. 4, Winter 1996.
Dubin, F. and E Olshtain. (1986). Course Design. Cambridge University Press.
Ferris, D. and T. Tagg. (1996). Academic Oral Communications Needs of EAP Learners. In
TESOL Quarterly, Vol 30, No. 1, Spring 1996.
Nunan, D (1988). Syllabus Design. Oxford University Press.
Weiner, R. (2001, Mar 14). When School is Held on Snow Days. New York Times Electronic
Edition, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/14/technology/14EDUCATION.html.
--------
End
---------------------------------------------------------
List address to send message to everyone:
ifets-discussion@catfish.valdosta.edu
Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
Forum website: http://ifets.ieee.org/
Forum's contact person: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz
Info on Join/Leave List: http://ifets.ieee.org/maillist.html
---------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Thu 10 May 2001 - 14:07:34 MEST