Practice, practice, practice. Language instructors require their students to practice — outside of class — the language they are learning. They want them to practice not only pronunciation but also conversation. Language researchers also want to be able to record the last speakers of an endangered language before they are no more.
How best to do this? Having students and speakers pass around cassette tapes is cumbersome, at best. Creating MP3 files and attaching them to emails is beyond the technical skills of most of the students and speakers researchers are dealing with. To address these problems, we at The University of Arizona created the Online Language Environment (OLE) software that lets instructors and researchers capture sound recordings outside of the classroom and at a distance.
The ability to incorporate sound, graphics, and video into Internet-based learning has opened the door for the delivery of rich educational experiences online. At The University of Arizona, we are actively creating tools to promote Internet-based language instruction. In this article, I describe the genesis and evolution of our OLE system, a project currently being piloted by faculty in a variety of language instruction programs. Included here are examples of the necessary protocols for using this new technology inside and outside the classroom, cultivating learner fluency in both language acquisition and the electronic environment.
Background
The
Using these electronic tools not only gives the students the ability to practice language learning skills, but also enhances their technical skills in the process, providing them with an added advantage for operating in real world situations. We created an informal group on our campus called the Online Language Environments (OLE) (http://ole.arizona.edu) to bridge the areas of language instruction and technological support. The OLE Web site is a place to collect information on various aspects of technology and language instruction. The OLE Board is a specific tool to help with language instruction. I’ll provide an overview of OLE in this article, as well as descriptions of the functions and development of the OLE Board, and outlines of specific ideas for using the tool.
Online Language Environments (OLE)
The OLE project at The University of Arizona provides a clearinghouse of information to assist with the use of technology for language instruction. The chief aspects of the OLE project Web site are Protocols, Pedagogy, and Tools. These three areas provide strategies for using online tools to teach languages and provide practical information on how to incorporate these tools in teaching.
Protocols are ways to optimize the user interface for particular languages. This includes optimizing browsers to display fonts, information on Unicode, and keyboard hints. Also included here is information on how to use a Web camera most effectively, including optimal placement of the camera, lighting hints, and information on using a microphone to record to Web-based tools. Under the Pedagogy section, we define specific strategies that can be used for an online language lab environment. This section focuses on the particular tool we are developing, the OLE Board, but the strategies are generalizable for use with other online language lab tools. We’ll outline more on the pedagogy later in this article. The Tools section of the Web site provides information on the Web-based language tools that are available, and provides links to these tools.
Pedagogical background
For many years, second language teachers in a variety of educational settings have used language labs as a support for students. Language labs offer students an opportunity for individualized work, repetitive sessions for reinforcement, and access to oral language instruction and practice. Technological support is consistent with theories of what best promotes second language acquisition in that students can receive both “comprehensible input” as Stephen Krashen puts it, and respond with “comprehensible output” as Merrill Swain has pointed out. According to Swain, such output can force a learner to see the “gap between what they want to say and what they can say.”
As Susan Braidi illustrates, one can model processing instruction (just one avenue for second language learning) in language lab formats and one can see this as a way to make the form-meaning mappings more accessible to the learner. (Editor’s note: “Form-meaning mapping” is a technical term for a key process in learning words.) Successful second language learning results from the relationship between the input, the student’s inter-language competence, and the monitored output, which forms the basis for teacher response and can be encouraged in a technology-enhanced setting. Braidi notes that:
“... language teaching is an extraordinarily complex process ... establishing long- and short-term goals, selecting content; selecting, preparing and organizing activities, materials, and teaching strategies, meeting student prerequisite skills, predicting and avoiding problems; meeting the needs of individual students, motivating all students, managing the class, strengthening teaching skills, evaluating results, and re-evaluating teaching practices ... to name a few.”
With all these tasks in mind, the place of the language lab is to reinforce the decisions a teacher has made and to give students more support outside of the classroom environment. According to Jack Richards and Charles Lockhart, most teachers’ decisions fall into three categories: planning decisions, interactive decisions (made in the process of language instruction), and evaluative decisions with regard to students who are learning a second language.
The current work we’re discussing here — a virtual online language lab — must entail all of the above issues related to second language instruction in terms of pedagogical practice. The OLE Board can deliver well-crafted language lessons that provide students with oral or written input. It also allows for practice and the evolution of student output (when they are ready), and allows the teacher to structure, monitor, and evaluate lessons for students in an online environment.
One can categorize currently available software for potential language support in one of the following ways: Listservs, Web Boards, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Instant Messengers, online discussions, and MOOs. (Editor’s note: A MOO is a multimedia interactive environment for multiple users in virtual space.) These solutions vary in usability, installation complexity, platform support, performance, bandwidth specifications, synchronicity, and other characteristics. While these technologies are used effectively in instruction, they do not meet the need we identified for a robust interactive environment that can be customized for language instruction.
Identification of need
While there are currently online teaching tools available that promote communication and that have been used in language instruction, there is no robust online communication tool developed specifically for online language instruction. This became apparent to us while working with one of our faculty who had received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant funded efforts to enable Native Americans to use technology to create online lessons to assist with teaching and preserving their endangered native languages.
The tribes that participated in this project were located at a considerable distance from The University of Arizona campus in
The initial version of the OLE Board was very well received by language instructors, who agreed that this tool, if well developed, would meet an important need in language instruction disciplines. Once fully functional, the OLE Board will provide a robust communication tool, utilizing voice, video, and text, for teaching languages both as a supplement to classroom instruction and for students who are taking online courses. The OLE Board will recreate functions of a language lab online, enabling student feedback both from other students and from instructors.
What is the OLE Board?
The OLE Board is an online multimedia tool that can incorporate audio, video, and text elements and facilitate the creation of rich language experiences for almost any pedagogical situation. These include traditional classroom settings and distance learning programs, large group instruction, and individual tutoring. The Board combines features of online Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) programs such that it functions either asynchronously or quasi-synchronously, depending on whether a given user is online at the same time as another.
The OLE Board is usable for courses such as those in less commonly taught languages, where geographical distance between learners may prohibit face-to-face interaction, and the Board may then serve as the primary vehicle of instruction. Teachers in traditional classroom settings, where the learners meet and interact face-to-face, can use the Board to enhance their instruction at any stage of a lesson. Finally, because the OLE Board can keep audio, video, and/or textual records of language exchanges, it is also useful for collecting data, for instance, for compiling language corpora or for conducting classroom research. (Editor’s note: A “corpora” is a collection of texts, such as articles or other writings.)
The OLE Board design provides a simple structure that allows threaded voice and video discussions to take place online. The board has a Conference representing the class discussion area, a Topic as the assignment level post to a conference, and a Reply for the post that a student uses to respond to the instructor. Within this simple structure, different roles are assigned permissions, which dictate who can delete and reorder posts, how long a post can be, and what elements are allowed in a post. For example, one can turn off the ability to add text to a post so that participants have to reply by voice and video.
Technical needs
The Macromedia Flash Communication server is being used to design the OLE Board in such a way that it delivers a reliable and scalable instructional experience. The OLE Board consists of a four-tiered architecture. Its Internet service delivers a Macromedia Flash Client, which connects to a Cold Fusion MX Service via Flash Remoting. The Cold Fusion MX Service in turn connects to a database, which organizes the instructional content. The Flash MX Client also connects to a Flash Communication Service in order to retrieve streaming audio and video.
From the experience with our initial prototyping of the OLE Board, we have determined that this technology is adequate for the identified needs. Creating the OLE Board as an Open Source product will allow other institutions to use the code developed by The University of Arizona to implement their own instances of the software. For the instructors and students we have tried to make the use of the OLE Board as simple as possible: a high-speed Internet connection and a browser with Flash 7 installed, as well as a Web camera and microphone, are all that is needed for the user. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the user interface.
Figure 1 Playing topics and messages
Figure 2 Setting permissions
