New Technologies and Sla

16

CLAUDIO COLABIANCHI

INSET PLAN

A SESSION ON CALL

“NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND SLA”

Bridging the gap between ready-made and authoring software in EFL

INTRODUCTION

The computer has been largely responsible for the creation of an information-based society. It permits quick, flexible, effective and varied operations in various channels where communication and information are automatic, and it is particularly useful at school to teach and learn languages because of its high degree of versatility. Thanks to the latest technologies, there is a wide range of useful tools and operations available for EFL educators.

In an educational environment the EFL teacher can follow two different paths. S/he can approach the computer either to develop receptive skills at using the available software (SW) or to produce her/his own materials with the aid of authoring programmes. This wide choice allows her/him to present new content and new strategies that can be further customised[1]. The commonest and simplest operations for the acquisition of a foreign language are those based on word processing: copy-paste, insert, drag-and-drop etc., whereas a more complex level of programs, either pre-fabricated or not, are characterised by automatic devices such as scoring, immediate feedback and tutorials. On a higher level the computer offers more complex multimedia features: it reproduces sounds, pictures and video. The mode of programs that we are going to consider ranges from SW on diskettes and CD-ROMs, to Internet-based courses online for distance learning.

Since in Italy the majority of teachers lack adequate theoretical and practical knowledge of the application of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), it is necessary to run courses that raise awareness, stimulate curiosity and provide information of the huge potential of the computer and prepare the teachers to make informed teaching choices suitable for promoting Second Language Acquisition (SLA).

In the course I also deal with some aspects of e-mail and chat whose importance for language instruction are becoming more and more relevant for the implicit high degree of authentic language that is generated.

The course that I consider covers meaningful areas of so-called edutainment (educational entertainment). Thanks to the flexibility and variety of approaches that the computer offers, catering for both the introverted and the extroverted learner, the logical and also the creative can feel comfortable, stimulated or relaxed in front of the monitor, since the PC offers a suitable path to any learning style. Great emphasis is given to the concept of multimedia and hypertext related to the issues of constructivist pedagogy and of modularity. Moreover, these issues lend themselves to further investigation in the fields of NLP assumptions and of Multiple Intelligences. For example, the visual learner can profit from the wealth of images and graphics, while the auditory one will find suitable stimuli from the sounds and recorded language available on CD-ROMs or Web pages and last but not least the kinaesthetic student can enjoy operating on the keyboard or manipulating peripherals (i.e. scanner, or CD burner, etc).

My attention now will be focused on ‘Hot Potatoes’, freeware that can be easily downloaded from a Canadian University Web site. This SW is an authoring programme which enables the teacher to create her/his particular sets of exercises that can be customised either on a whole-class basis, or for groups, or at single student-level, for example when a learner is particularly weak and needs remedial work or has special needs, i.e. disabled students. The technical features of this SW acquire pedagogical relevance since they promote individualised tuition, a great deal of interaction, self-access and self-assessment, learner autonomy and distance learning. The learner is freer to explore and to make her/his own choices according to her/his needs and personal pace. S/he becomes even more responsible, s/he can get immediate marking, feedback and tutorial without feeling the judgmental presence of the teacher.

Hot Potatoes has proved to be one of the most popular and principled CALL programs in the last few years. Recently it has been implemented with fully multimedia features and the most appealing combinations of interactivity, so that the teacher has only to write a text and select from easy visual options to create a tailored exercise.

Since there is the risk of focusing on and developing only technical skills, a teacher’s main commitment consists not only in getting the technical know-how of various types of exercises – ranging from multiple choice to crosswords, gap filling, matching, quizzes, jumbled sentences – but also in reflecting, evaluating and choosing when to integrate a session of CALL to promote SLA.

There is no doubt that s/he will be soon rewarded in her/his professional growth by remarkable results due to this added value of the digital age.

The course will explore the technical aspects and pedagogical implementations of the following programs:

1.  Ready-made SW

2.  Multimedia and hypertext

3.  Hot Potatoes, authoring freeware

APPROACH

The trainer will adopt a variety of approaches depending on the content s/he is exploring.

S/he will open the sessions with warming up activities to elicit interest, motivation, and attention in teaching/learning with computers

When dealing with technical details the workshops will become mainly experiential involving group- or pair-work, since it is assumed that the trainees do not possess a solid competence in Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

Moving from theory to practice when dealing with pedagogical aspects in which trainees are more competent to provoke critical thinking.

Finally, this approach enacts a “loop input” experience in which the content of computers is processed and learnt through the computer.

PROCEDURE

The general procedure of all the sessions follows these stages:

Warming up – use of induction sheets or of Mind Maps to concretise a concept and to visualise it in a memorable pattern- background music (UK national anthem in order to give a hint of British atmosphere)

Orientation – slides review with MS Powerpoint

Exploration – use of ready- made SW on diskettes or CD-ROMs

Practice – use and evaluation of SW with grids and checklists

The trainer starts with a welcome message projected with Powerpoint to give information

on the programme.

Presentation: the trainer introduces the programme

The workshops will be organised at two levels:

·  1st level workshop: navigation in ready made SW, Browsing in the Internet, e-mail

·  2nd level workshop: produce automatically generated exercises/production of Hypermedia with authoring programme – in this phase the trainer gives assistance one-to-one

Technical skills will be acquired through direct instructions, tasks, workshops, reflections and discussions. The teachers will be trained to work on their PCs by following step-by-step the detailed instructions given and projected with a beamer on a big screen by the Trainer. They will also be delivered a concise written manual.

The general outline and the deductions of what has been done in a session will be normally drawn in the final plenary part.

SETTING

The computer room of an Italian state school: ‘Corrispondenti in lingue estere’ in Verona. The lab is equipped with at least 15 multimedia PCs networked to a central server. The programmes already installed are MS Office suite and the operative system is MS Windows 98, the network is MSWindows 2000 or better Linux (freeware).

Internet facilities and e-mail, beamer, a CD burner and 2 printers are available.

TARGET POPULATION

The trainees are Italian in-service EFL and ESP teachers of lower and upper secondary school, with at least three years’ experience and have an average linguistic and methodological competence. They teach in different types of schools both with classical, humanistic, technical and vocational backgrounds. Almost all are eager to discover alternative teaching paths. Some are strongly willing and quite motivated to learn about new trends in teaching EFL with CALL. A few are sceptical and resistant to changing attitudes and to innovations.

Technical prerequisites before the course: having the know-how of basic operating systems and the commonest skills in word processing operations. Some teachers have worked with AMICO[2], an Italian school SW that enables to create Hypermedia.

At this stage after 30 hours they have also acquired the skills to create web pages.

PROGRAMME OF THE WHOLE COURSE

This is an intensive course that will comprise 8 sessions of 5 hours each. I am going to focus on the phase that bridges the gap between the use of ready-made SW and authoring SW. The last session will finish with the show, evaluation and the delivery of the product (after having burnt a CD-ROM) to the trainees.

Navigation on ready made CALL SW on diskettes and on CD ROMs

Pedagogical and technical implications (see evaluation grid)

General technical instructions

Mapping and projecting hypermedia

Instruction for automatically generated exercises with Hot Potatoes

Production of HTML pages

Final evaluation of the product ready for the Web and creation of a CD-ROM

SYLLABUS FIT

This is the 7th training session and it aims to provide a detailed set of information, activities, procedures and insights to bridge the gap between ready-made SW and authoring SW, in particular for the construction of exercises with HOT POTATOES.

This comes after the teachers have worked for 30 hours with simple or more complex EFL SW. Now they are evaluating advantages and disadvantages, approaches, interactive processes, functionality.

So far the teachers have learned how to devise presentations with Powerpoint and to create Hypermedia pages in HTML, the multiplatform language of the Web.

They are thus encouraged to make a decision on the SW they consider most suitable for their teaching related to English acquisition. Among the five hours of this session two will be devoted to individual work for the creation of the exercises.

In the end they will be able to insert useful and contextualised practice exercises in the Web pages of their educational sites.

RESOURCES

Computer lab, 20 networked computers, floppy discs, CD-ROMs, CD burner, beamer, printer and scanner. MSOffice and Hot Potatoes are installed on the computer. Internet and e-mail are also available.

General problems related to traditional Italian teachers

ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS ALTERNATIVE /POSSIBLE SOLUTION

Controversy between methods and media / Making trainees aware that particular SW has characteristics that promote second language acquisition (SLA) see NOTES
How to motivate unyielding teachers / Convincing them that ICT is trendy, that PC will not replace them because the focus is on language, but that at the same time, they could be replaced by more computer-literate teachers. ‘Change can help against burnout and routine’. Guiding them gradually in pairs so that they become more confident
Lazy/reluctant teachers who don’t perceive the value of or don’t believe in CALL for SLA / Submitting SW evaluation checklist based on linguistic and pedagogic criteria
Eliciting advantages, effectiveness,
Showing products, CDs
Cost of SW and HD(exorbitant!) / Freeware available on the Web
Use school HD
Trainees’ ongoing problems in carrying out technical instructions / Delivery of written manual-
One to one tuition of the trainer
Peer tuition
E-mail tuition, newsgroup, e- Forum
System crash / Experts Technical Assistance

THE AIMS OF THE WHOLE COURSE ARE

·  Transferring to trainees insights of experimental and theoretical issues of teaching/learning English with ICT

·  Enabling trainees to use ready-made SW and exploit it reflecting on pedagogical considerations

·  Enabling trainees to acquire skills and creative abilities to develop SW in the field of exercise generator programs and hypermedia

·  Encouraging trainees to become more critical towards their teaching practice

·  Evaluate technology-mediated language learning and its effectiveness vs. traditional methods

·  Promoting professional growth

OBJECTIVES

1.  Technical

Trainees become expert in selecting suitable SW

Trainees project and produce customised SW

2.  Pedagogical

Trainees facilitate SS co-operation

Trainees counsel SS

Trainees become self- critical and classroom observers

Trainees facilitate self- access and self- assessment to learning

1st Part

11 ACTIVITIES

USE OF METAPHORS - Timing 5 min.

1.-The trainer asks for a metaphor that recalls CALL in order to reinforce a message in our mind in a multi-sensory way -

Some of the various responses may be: a Cyborg, Neurons, the human brain, a spider web, a CD-ROM, a Diskette… then others more sceptical Big brother

2.-As a recap of the previous sessions the trainer starts a discussion on CD-ROMs and diskettes and the trainees answer this ready-made SW evaluation grid on programs they have worked on at school or at home. This grid should be considered more a checklist for reference than a task to fulfil in every detail. Timing 35 min.

In order to set criteria for rapidly selecting the items of the grid, the trainer assigns a task, asking questions like these:

§  Which aspects would you take into consideration as fundamental?

§  Which elements are more suitable for your class?

§  In which points can you meet your teaching needs?

§  Is the price the first element to take into account?

questions / answers / trainer role / timing
Title of SW
Author/s
Publisher
Year
Price
Is it support material for a course-book?
Is it meant as an independent, stand alone, autonomous ’ self-sufficient’ course?
Hypermedia elements:
Format: size, pictures, graphics, lay out.
Is it attractively designed?
Are links on ‘ Hot words’ on Icons or on hot-zones?
Are there drawings?
Does it provide any photos?
Does it provide any animations?
Does it provide any videos?
Are links meaningful and functional?
Are there any sounds, music, songs, noises?
Is it ” user friendly” or difficult? Is navigation easy?
Can you take print-out?
Is it mainly designed to show spectacular effects or…?
Does it run the risk of becoming easily dated?
Is it so varied that it often becomes an element of distraction, is it balanced or is it repetitive and monotonous?
Structure
Is it divided into Units? Lessons?
How many CDs is it made of?
For which school- level is it suitable?
Elementary
Intermediate
Advanced
Is it meant for one year or more?
Is there any information about the approach?
Is the approach suitable for cross-cultural objectives?
Is there a teacher’s guide?
Is it meant for a local class and for local students or for an international class?
Are instructions in L1, in L2 or multilingual. Are they clear?
Methodology:
Does the methodology consider learner’s autonomy: “ self access”?
Is it suitable for mixed ability-classes?
Are listening activities presented at the beginning?
Is listening presented for dialogues repetition, for tasks or for both?
Does it provide any aspects of phonetics? How?
Does it provide a comparative method (physical diagrams of the sound wave of a native speaker compare to the one produced by the learner) to check pronunciation?
How much emphasis is given to oral production?
Are dialogues natural and topics relevant?
Is there one, two or three story lines? Are they coherent and organic?
Does it provide varieties of English? International E.?
Is language presented to introduce culture or to develop learners’ strategies?
Is the stress on grammar, structure or function or…?
Are the four skills balanced and integrated, i.e. audio and writing?
Are there guided and free activities? Which ones?
Are they graded from skill getting to skill using?
Are exercises mainly manipulation activities or are they task based?
Are activities simple or difficult from the cognitive point of view?
Are topics and contents relevant to students’ interests?
Is the teaching strategy line cyclical?
Extras
Does it provide cultural elements?
Does it provide literature?
Are there any games? What kind?
Does it lead to creative learning i.e. poetry?
Are there any songs?
Are there test?
Are there self- evaluating tests? Which ones?
Does it present projects to develop through language?
Is it preparatory for any institutional exam?
Do you like it?
Comments: compare relevant didactic aspects to the price and the real possibility of using it in your I.T. lab…to draw the threads. / …………..
………... / observes,
suggests procedures,
gives explanations / 35 min.

3.-Before planning a session on CALL, the trainees in groups of three are stimulated to reflect on which teaching activities and strategies may emerge from the ready-made SW they have analysed so far. They brainstorm for 15 minutes, and then the trainer asks for responses. The trainer, or a volunteer teacher who feels confident with Powerpoint, writes what follows on the server PC connected with the beamer. The outcome is displayed on a slide.