Instructional Designer's Perspective

A couple of weeks ago, I reconnected with a former colleague. She is one of those lucky people who can officially call herself and "Instructional Designer." Very cool.

Nima Salehi, works at Metro State University where she trains faculty in online course design and pedagogy and assists with online course development. She just finished co-teaching an online graduate course for ESL educators at Hamline called "Technology Enhanced Language Learning." This fall she'll be co-teaching a Business English class at the U of M.

Our e-mail "interview" covered a range of topics but one point really stood out to me.

Authenticity

Reading through Nima's responses reminded me how committed she is to using meaningful and authentic materials with her students. She builds lessons around news websites and other lifeskills oriented materials that help students learn about bus routes, rental information, or local support services.

This is something that I need to keep coming back to as I expand my work with both pronunciation and technology integration. It is so easy, especially when focusing on a skill like pronunciation, to get caught up in the details of designing the perfect assignment or lesson that you lose sight of bigger picture of communication.

Nima says:

"Practically, many technologies provide language practice for activities language learners may need to do in real life. For example structured phone call practice can be done with real phones, or through the Internet using tools which mimic phone calls (Skype or Audacity) and can role play activities such as calling English speaking friends, or setting up medical appointments. Language lessons on writing email to professors, or clients (Business English) can be done using real email messages written in student pairs either through message boards or through email, with feedback provided by peers and the instructor on appropriate register, content and other language skills. In these circumstances, the language practice is embedded within technology skills practice for authentic purposes."

It's great to connect with someone who's not only putting the principles of instructional design into practice...but also making a living at it!

Pronunciation Practice: Kennedy's Famous Quote

This sample pronunciation lesson is still a little rough, however, I think it illustrates what I'd like to do with this software. Here are the assumptions behind this approach:

1. Students appreciate the opportunity for independent structured practice in which they can listen repeatedly to sample audio. This came out of my discussions with students after my first pronunciation lesson involving instructional technology (see earlier post).

2. In the adult ESL context, pronunciation instruction and practice should be organized around meaningful and engaging content. In this case, the lesson is designed to tie into the current content-based unit on U.S. history.

3. Students need explicit, individualized feedback about their pronunciation. Imitating native speakers through "listen & repeat" exercises is not sufficient for forming correct pronunciation habits in the target language.

Here are some of the affordances that I think Voicethread offers:

1. Learners can listen and record repeatedly. It is easy to add new comments and erase old comments.

2. The video comment feature not only makes the interaction more personal, it also allows the instructor to give specific visual feedback about placement of the jaw, tongue, and teeth.

3. The technology promotes authentic interaction! Students can respond to the teacher and to other students.

4. The drawing feature makes it possible for the student or teacher to draw attention to a particular word in a script that they're having difficulty with.

The sample lesson above is fairly teacher driven and limited in scope. But once students are familiar with the format, I think there are nearly endless possibilities for interaction among students and instructor.

Voicethread

I'm working on another lesson plan for students in the Advanced ESL class. Over the next few weeks they're going to be studying U.S. history from 1960-1975. So I'm working with what appears to be a very slick little program, called voicethread. If all goes well, students will be able to hear a very short audio clip from me and then practice and post their own version.

Here it is.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Teaching Syllable Stress with Praat Language Lab

As other teachers can attest, a really complete lesson plan is a beautiful thing. By virtue of being a graduate student in Education, I recently had an excuse to spend hours researching the perfect tools for my lesson and writing a plan complete with objectives, time limits, and materials.

The result was better than a I could have hoped for. Students in our "Advanced ESL" class studied word-level stress in English Pronunciation using Praat Language Lab and WordCentral.com.

Praat Language Lab is discussed in an earlier post. WordCentral.com is an online dictionary with audio files of each word. The audio at WordCentral.com is particularly well suited to studying syllable stress as the stress is clearly pronounced.

Here's a link to the text of the lesson plan and my reflections on it.

If you do take the time to look it over, please leave a comment. I'd love to hear your feedback and learn about other tools and strategies that you've used to teach this skill.

E-mail Gateway to Online Learning

I've been learning a lot about the fundamentals of teaching English pronunciation. As a result, I'm thinking more about how to share some of this knowledge with volunteer English teachers.

Professional development for volunteer teachers presents some challenges similar to PD for professional teachers, as well as some unique ones:

• Some teachers have little to no ESL coursework or experience
• Volunteers are only required to complete 2 hrs of professional development per year
• Teachers may not be motivated to complete PD for a volunteer commitment
• Workshops offered by 3rd party trainers may not be viewed as relevant to the volunteer's particular teaching assignment
• Scheduling group trainings has been difficult due to scheduling conflicts
• Volunteers posess a wide range of technology skills and some may not be comfortable with the format of online trainings

Recently I've been considering the possibilities of e-mail as a tool for online training for those who may not be comfortable or motivated to use an online message board or online course managment system. E-mail offers some useful affordances. For example, e-mail is a familiar medium that already carries a social expectation of responding to others in a timely manner. Furthermore, many webmail providers, such as gmail, now make it easier to keep track of discussion threads in e-mail by lumping replies together.

Imagine that you receive an e-mail invitation to participate in a small group (3-5) training that will take place through e-mail over the next 3-4 weeks. Twice a week, you receive a short message from the moderator including a reading, research, or reflection assignment that is designed to take 20-30 minutes. Each assignment has a deadline within the next 2-4 days. You complete the assignment by responding to the e-mail using reply-all so that your cohort can see and reply to your responses.

In many ways, this training would be very similar to other forms of online training. The advantage of using e-mail would be to introduce participants to a form of distance learning without requiring them to sign up for a new account or learn a new interface. Initial enrollment is one of the main hurdles to getting volunteer teachers to participate in either F2F or online trainings. By using a familiar format, such as e-mail, volunteers may be less intimidated by the technology and feel that this is a training opportunity that already fits in their routine.

I'm also curious to see if the medium of e-mail encourages greater participation and persistence. I think it is possible that the routine of regularly checking e-mail and the arrival of "reply-all" responses directly into one's inbox may keep participants more engaged.

Skeptical about Tech. for Language Learning

Throughout my studies in learning technologies I have been plagued by a fundamental question: do I really believe in all this technology? Am I an enthusiastic early adopter or a skeptical laggard? Hopefully I have a healthy balance of both.

I've been asking myself these questions again as I read research on the use of speech technologies for teaching and learning second language pronunciation. Many of these articles point in the direction of computerized language tutors and independent language study (most also admit that the technology has a long way to go). Imagining a pronunciation tutoring program that could provide the user with feedback on the "nativeness" of his or her pronunciation left me wondering...If this is the direction that computer assisted language learning (CALL) is headed, do I even want to get on board?

So I was somewhat relieved to be introduced to a new acronym in the context of language learning. CMC (computer-mediated communication) seems to represent the new interactive, multi-media component of CALL. In other words, CMC is to CALL what Web 2.0 is to Web 1.0 (I guess all that studying of SAT analogies finally paid off!) I had seen CMC used in other contexts but when it was juxtaposed with CALL something clicked.

In the age of CMC, learners and teachers can take advantage of computer networks, online collaborations tools, and interact with information in a variety of modes (audio, photos, video, interactive text). To me, the affordances of these technologies are in line with what it means to learn a language. Language, after all, is about communication. Computer-based language tutors, on the other hand, fail to recognize the inherently social nature of language learning. Effective language learning results from the negotiation of meaning with others and includes subtle elements of culture, tone, and body language.

Speech technologies, such as voice-recognition software, may play a role in providing a particular type of feedback to learners who want to improve their pronunciation. Tools such as audio/video conferencing online, text chat, and other online collaboration tools, however, offer greater affordances for language learning that will result in authentic communication. Furthermore, using these technologies in an educational context will help students develop literacy skills that may prove useful in other social and workplace contexts.