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.

Can Computers Provide Meaningful Language Learning?

I just started reading about computer assisted language learning (CALL) and speech technologies. The book is The Path of Speech Technologies in CALL, edited by Holland and Fisher. It is a 2008 compilation of chapters written by a range of researchers (and in some cases, designers) in the CALL field.

Not unlike Andy Zucker’s book, Transforming Schools with Technology, which I read this spring, Holland and Fisher chose an opening chapter that points to all the reasons why technology is falling short when it comes to CALL. Although it hasn’t really raised my interest in speech technologies as a teaching tool, the first chapter provides a very nice framework for identifying meaningful language learning and thus analyzing the effectiveness of CALL.

Clifford and Granoien, authors of chapter 1, think that the allure of technology, not pedagogical research, often leads the development of many CALL applications. Furthermore, where research is present in CALL development, it is at least two decades old and does not reflect the current consensus that language learning is fundamentally based on social interaction.

Here is where it has been interesting for me to see how theories of second language acquisition cross with more general learning theories. For example, many of the CALL researchers refer to interactivist theory. As I understand it, this theory draws upon the work of Vygotsky’s social constructivism. It sees the interaction between native and non-native speakers as a type of learning apprenticeship. Interactivism also incorporates Selinker’s 1970s concept of interlanguage. He proposed that second language learners develop their own linguistic codes that can follow rules independent of either their first or second language. Through social interaction, correction, and additional practice, this interlanguage eventually becomes more and more like the target language.

So how do Clifford and Granoien think that CALL is falling short? Well, if we assume, as they do, that social interaction is a necessary component of meaningful language learning, then it follows logically that automated CALL programs are not up to the job of effectively facilitating learners’ perception of language features, comprehension of linguistic input, and most importantly analysis and feedback of learners’ output. Therefore the following chapters promise to provide more limited proposals for the use of CALL, specifically speech technologies, to enhance individual aspects of the language learning process, especially pronunciation.

The limitations of CALL certainly did not come as a surprise for me but the framework presented for analyzing the usefulness and effectiveness of such programs helped to clarify my thinking about what is effective language learning. It builds upon many of the ideas discussed this spring in our course on Internet and schools, such as the importance of pushing technology beyond just lower order thinking tasks like memorization. Analyzing the components of language learning from an interactivist perspective also gave me the language needed to defend my suspicions about programs like Learner Web, which is about to be implemented in our consortium. Among many concerns, I worry that this program sets up the expectation for learners to engage in self directed learning that provides few, if any, opportunities for interaction in the target language. Thus students only engage in the most basic of comprehension activities and do not move toward effective production of the language.

Conversation with Colleen Meyers

Last month, I sat down with Colleen Meyers, an Educational Specialist at the U of M's Center for Teaching and Learning. Meyers has taught English as a Second Language classes for years and written several ESL pronunciation texts. She has also produced several classroom and teacher training videos. I asked her how she uses technology to teach English pronunciation and what exciting developments she's seen in educational technology for language learning.

What came out of our conversation was a list of a wide variety of resources, some created by Meyers, that she and other instructors use with English language learners. We also discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of using the available technology for language teaching and learning. A couple of trends popped out at me right away.

WHOLE vs. PART

One of my goals this summer is to improve my understanding of linguistics teminology. So I'm starting with some lay terms and hoping to eventually be able to include more exact terms. So, what I'm trying to summarize in "Whole vs. Part" was a pattern I noticed among the tools that Meyers is using in her teaching.

Most of the tools she was using were designed to sensitize students to different suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation such -as intonation, thought groups, word and sentence-level stress. In my mind, these are overarching aspects of "whole" language, rather than the minutia of forming individual sounds. She also showed me a few tools that assist students with production of individual phonemes, what I think of as the tiny "parts" of language that we string together to form words.

The majority of tools, however, seemed to focus on suprasegmental features. This may reflect Meyers' belief that suprasegmentals have a greater impact on the intelligibility of speech or it may be a reflection of the affordances of audio and video tools she is using to assist her students.

AWARENESS vs. PRODUCTION

The other trend that she and I talked about was the tendency to use technology to help students build an awareness of pronunciation features through listening activities, often with a visual component. Exercises or activities using technology were less likely to focus on production, or speaking. The available technology seems to be the biggest factor in this trend. For example, there are many options for creating listening exercises that employ recorded audio and a variety of student listening activities. Using technology to provide input on a learners production of specific language features is much more difficult. Although software like PRATT would allow students to see a visual representation of the speech they produce, it is unable to distinguish the most important element; intelligibility. The same is true of voice recognition software. The software's ability to understand a speaker is not an accurate assessment of their intelligibility with regards to a human listener.

I was also intrigued to get Meyers' perspective on the opportunities and limitations of using technology to teach English pronunciation. Here are a few of her observations...

Opportunities

• appeals to visual learners
• expands opportunities for self-study
• improves learner awareness of pronunciation features
• motivates tech saavy learners -Here she mentioned an interesting example of a graduate teaching asst. in an engineering related field who suddenly had a better understanding of suprasegmental language features when he was able to relate them to frequency and intensity of the sound wave pattern produced by PRAAT software. Sound waves were something he understood.

Limitations

• These tools are rarely self explanitory and still require a lot of teacher support
• not very helpful in working on issues of production
• Some students avoid tech use
• Unlike a skilled instructor, tech tools are unable to help the student focus on the pronunciation issue of greatest importance for improving intelligibility.
• Programs like PRAAT have technical limitations. For example, the length of audio sample in PRAAT needs to be fairly short in order to avoid distortion of the intonation pattern.

A Wealth of Resources

Here is a short listing of some of the tools Collen Meyers showed me as well as others that I found. I've written some initial impressions. In the following weeks, I'm going to be experimenting with these tools and writing about them in greater detail. I may even take some of them into the classroom to try with students.

Audio Recording/Imaging Software:

PRAAT

a free audio recording application with the ability to create visual models of speech aspects

This is not the first time that I've been introduced to PRAAT. It seems to be gaining popularity in ESL pronunciation circles. Although using the program is not intuitive, I get the impression that it can be a pretty powerful tool once you're familiar with it.

A great example of PRAAT in context is praatlanguagelab.com, which contains lessons on word and phrasal stress that demonstrate how the images created in PRAAT might be used to build student awareness of these suprasegmental structures.

AUDACITY and WASP

similar free audio recording applications with image output. At the moment I still have a lot to learn about the differences in functionality among these three applications.

VOISCRIPT

free program that lets you synchronize your own audio with the display of a script.

according to it's creators "VoiScript allows you to move around a scripted recording simply by clicking on the script. Since VoiScript also allows you to record your own voice, it is useful in many educational situations."

PROREC

turns your laptop into a portable recording device, including visual prompts for participants It is aimed at use by field researchers working in linguistics and similar disciplines for recording participant speech samples.

Educational Websites:

PHONETICS FLASH ANIMATION PROJECT

videos and animations of the mouth producing different language sounds

This flash-based website was designed by several language and linguistics departments at the University of Iowa. It uses video and flash animations to illustrate how the anatomy of the mouth changes to produce individual phonemes.

Online Courses:

Online listening and pronunciation classes at www.speechinaction.com

Educational Software:

Connected Speech