Learning on the Web - who does it, why and how?Uschi Felix, Monash University, Melbourne, AustraliaABSTRACTThis paper contains three interrelated sections:
INTRODUCTION The use of Web for language teaching is relatively recent, with the first materials appearing in the early 90s. The impact, however, has been considerable, mainly because the technology has advantages over the previous generation of CALL. It is cheaper and easier to develop and often cheaper and easier to run, and it offers real possibilities for authentic interaction. Advantages include the ease of development across platforms, and the provision of free software such as Hot Potatoes Half-Baked Software http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked and applets, helper applications and plug-ins. All this makes in-house developments without excessive reliance on expert help easier than ever before. However, as with all IT solutions, Web delivery is not without problems: (1) access to the Web is still often unreliable and slow, especially from modems; (2) oral production skills cannot yet be supported meaningfully; (3) some students dislike/resist working with the Web (or any IT); (4) some students find the experience isolating; and (5) Web technology is still not well suited to delivery of sound and video. While much of this can be addressed, problems such as time commitment, financial return on investments and administrative concerns continue to exist as in CALL in general. Despite all this, the biggest advantage is perhaps that Web technology offers the possibility of tailoring an impressive and useful resource by speedily linking to existing sites without requiring much technical expertise, and by adding course-specific activities through Webquests and chats or bulletin boards. Where sound is concerned, early WAV was cumbersome but Real Audio is now prevalent. By contrast, online video is still very rare, and will remain so until the diffusion of much greater bandwidth. German for Beginners http://web.uvic.ca/german/149 includes examples of film clips while Italia 2000 http://www.italia-2000.com/unitsOfStudyFrame.html remains one of the very few sites using extensive video. We are also now seeing some experimentation with voice recording through the use of customised software that can be downloaded by the user in a site like Global English http://www.globalenglish.com. The most recent development is the adoption of WebCT http://www.webct.com as a course template in sites like Internet Based Chinese Teaching and Learning http://chinese.bendigo.latrobe.edu.au/index.htm. Advantages for practitioners include the tracking of students’ work, the ease with which synchronous and asynchronous communication facilities can be set up, and the user-friendly navigation structures provided. An overview of best practice Web-assisted teaching cannot be comprehensive but only representative of trends (see Felix 98 for a more extended list of sites). Where possible, early and late examples are given to demonstrate the improvement made possible by rapidly emerging software. The problem is finding early examples: active sites change with the technology and rapidly leave behind their more primitive first forms. The paper is divided into three sections: (1) A broadly categorised overview of how the Web is currently being used for CALL with an emphasis on best-practice models; (2) brief reflections on pedagogy; and (3) a report of students’ perceptions of working with such materials.
The earliest materials took the form of textbooks on the Web, grammar exercises, and large and ever growing collections of materials, often without much structure to guide the uninitiated user. They have all undergone continuous change. Examples are the Bucknell Russian Program http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/index.html; The German Electronic Textbook http://www.wm.edu/CAS/modlang/grammnu.html and German for Beginners http://web.uvic.ca/german/149.
Virtual classrooms These tend to be fee-paying stand-alone courses that are password protected, offering free trial materials open to anyone. They range from one person operations like Cyberitalian http://cyberitalian.com and Interdeutsch http://www.virtuelles-kaufhaus.de/interdeutsch/index.htm to large organisations like GlobalEnglish http://www.globalenglish.com that employ considerable staff and offer a 24 hour attended chat site and other extensive services.
Grammar exercises There is a multiplicity of grammar exercises on the Web, most of them using fill-ins, usually but not always in the context of a whole sentence, or multiple choice questions. Some are an integral part of a structured course. Occasionally, this is a Web-based course, with exercises linked to pages that explain the structures. More often the exercises supplement an off-line course, and may be linked directly to specific textbooks. Grammar exercises are also available in more or less unstructured heaps with the user left to pick out the bits that will be helpful without much in the way of guidance. The grammar exercises offered in First year french@ut austin http://www.lamc.utexas.edu/fr/home.html and Spanish 506 at Texas http://www2.sp.utexas.edu/SP506/student.qry are by contrast sorted into structured sets which can be worked through sequentially. Further, all follow the same pattern, so the student has to learn only one set of conventions to navigate around the site. French Grammar Central, on the other hand http://globegate.utm.edu/french/globegate_mirror/gramm.html draws on a variety of sites (nearly 400 claimed) with a variety of approaches from across the Web, and sorts the material only roughly into 12 very general categories like Adjectives, Articles and Determiners. Some sites such as Interdeutsch http://www.virtuelles-kaufhaus.de/interdeutsch/studien1.htm make a real attempt at teaching grammar in a communicative approach.
Quizzes, games, templates There are a large variety of ready-made templates for the creation of quizzes and games online to choose from. The most user-friendly and extensive Quia http://www.quia.com is an excellent source both for developers and for users. It offers templates allowing games and quizzes to be created very quickly in several languages. Students can then access the material and the site will keep global statistics on performance. It also houses thousands of activities that are freely available. An indication of the size of the collection is that it claims to include nearly 600 activities for languages as at 12 April 2000. Similarly Hot Potatoes http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked offers six applications for the creation of interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the Web. There are now a large number of sites that can profitably be used for meaningful creative game- type activities. One example is http://www.makeoverstudio.com where students of ESL can be given a large amount of exercises in the context of changing their personal appearance.
Webquests This has been one of the most rapidly developing areas in Web teaching. Activities have shifted from early task-based activities like Deutsche Internet Übungen in which students were given a task to carry out which involved them accessing relevant Web sites and compiling information on a specific topic http://www.uncg.edu/~lixlpurc/publications/NetzUeb.html to elaborate experiential quests like Dream Holiday in which all activities are embedded online http://home.vicnet.net.au/~flemrw/dreamholiday. A good introduction to the latest developments is A WebQuest about WebQuests http://edweb.sdsu.edu/webquest/webquestwebquest-hs.html An interesting variation on
the theme is Polar file http://www.polarfle.ovh.org/index.html
– a French detective quest which attempts to teach grammar, contextualised
in the mystery to be solved. This is a poor persons’ version of Spywatch
(see below) and a similar idea has been flashed out in German in the Wild
West Story in Interactive materials for German
Publishers’ Web material This is another of the fastest growing areas with publishers like Heinle & Heinle and Prentice Hall among others providing a large variety of supplementary materials geared to their textbooks. Web activities range from simple on screen pro-formas for printing out (in more recent developments for emailing to the tutor) as in Adesso http://adesso.heinle.com to online animated problem-solving activities created with Macromedia Flash as in Spywatch http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/lookandread. The latter is one of the best examples to date of using animation (rather than video) to great effect.
Sites for younger kids Until fairly recently there
was deplorably little available for younger kids on the Web. This has
changed significantly with beautifully presented materials such as Die
Blinde Kuh in German The first is a German search engine developed specifically for children aged 5 to 14. As well as a search engine, it includes a large variety of categories around which activities can be structured. The site has a very friendly feel to it, with lovely illustrations, and children are encouraged to contribute to the development of the pages by posting interesting URLs, advertising their own home page, contributing to email exchanges and providing feedback. The second is a colourful and beautifully designed site, designed to link play and education in an environment where the young can meet each other, learn, amuse themselves, discover things and exchange ideas. As well as different categories of activities and information, there are also opportunities to write for the shipboard diary, to correspond with others and to follow links.
Metasites Collections of resources have perhaps been the fastest growing area on the Web, with virtually every site including collections of links either for single languages or for multiple ones. As a result, enormous duplication is being generated. If there is a problem here, it is that it is fatally easy to build up comprehensive collections but difficult and time-consuming to create select collections that are well structured and well indexed. Comprehensive collections include the Human Languages Pages (over 100 languages and over 1800 links) http://www.june29.com/HLP and the Language Hub: Worldwide resources for Languages (164 languages) http://www.cetrodftt.com. Naturally, the larger the collection, the less user-friendly it becomes, and well structured single language sites can often be more helpful to users with limited time on their hands. See, for French, the pioneering Tennessee Bob’s Famous French Links http://www.utm.edu/departments/french/french.html, or ClicNet http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/clicnet/index.html.
Virtual Connections Connecting students to authentic environments is getting easier and more user-friendly with threaded discussion groups becoming very popular. Early Chats, MUSHES and MOOs tended to be very daunting text-based environments but some pioneers got good results nevertheless (see Warschauer 1995, 1996). Strictly speaking, these developments used the Internet and predate the Web by a decade. Still, the boundary between the Web and the Internet is increasingly blurred, and, in any case, Websites routinely include Chat and e-mail in what they offer. The environment has since progressed tremendously with students being able to create their own three-dimensional characters through which to communicate as in Active Worlds http://www.activeworlds.com. There are also now examples of entire collaborative courses run in several locations via Active Worlds Educational Solutions http://www.activeworlds.com/edu. A site for Japanese http://133.6.43.88/jems.html is currently under construction. The most interesting version of these in which users can construct their own avatar through which to communicate can be found on: http://www.communities.com/ka/loginhome.jsp The site is still under construction but well worth keeping an eye on.
Professional development These sites exist for various
professional purposes - dissemination of information, exchanges of ideas
and discussions as in WELL http://www.well.ac.uk,
training as in ICT4LT http://www.ict4lt.org/en/index.htm
or ESL in the Mainstream
Co-operative ventures The Web lends itself perfectly to co-operative and collaborative activities between students at the same or different institutions, often with the final goal of publishing the work online. One excellent example is the Project-driven Foreign Language Learning http://www.glen.hlc.unimelb.edu.au/glen/hll which integrates multimedia tools into project-driven language learning and in which students share the outcomes of their work with worldwide audiences by publishing on the Web.
REFLECTIONS ON THE PEDAGOGY Technology, ideas and implementations are changing too rapidly for it yet to be possible to provide a definitive picture of the pedagogy that drives CALL on the Web. It is easy to see, though, whether individual developments have been directed by technicians or by teachers, or by a team of instructional designers with expertise in IT, graphics and pedagogy. Excellent things are being done, especially through synchronous and asynchronous forums like discussion groups, bulletin boards, Chats and MOOs. The Web provides wonderful potential for creative teachers to motivate students and keep them interested in the work. Individual practitioners are using different combinations of approaches in a variety of ways. Included among these are hybrid approaches (designed to avoid potential problems) such as downloading activities from the Web on to a self-contained Intranet, integrating CD-ROMs and the Web, and running audio or video conferencing with Web activities. Pedagogical approaches adopted online vary greatly from traditional grammar-based teaching to innovative goal-oriented quests, with the former still dominating. However, it is difficult to determine the overall teaching approach since what is freely accessible on the Web is often only part of a larger package that also invariably includes face-to-face teaching. Nevertheless, while the Web is providing an increasingly rich shared free resource to CALL practitioners, the often alluded to 'radical rethinking' of the teaching approach still has a long way to go. The goal remains to use the Web for meaningful, realistic activities, to rethink the teaching approach, and to exploit the various communication resources available in the most motivating way possible.
WHAT DO THE STUDENTS THINK? During 1999 and 2000 we carried out two studies on students’ perception of the Web as a viable environment for language learning. The studies included 85 tertiary, 62 secondary and 17 primary students. It must be emphasised that we are here talking about on-line learning in the broadest sense. Students were engaged in a variety of approaches to Web learning, and all had access to a teacher, either face-to-face or by e-mail. It is also important to note that the majority of students used the Web as an additional resource to face-to-face teaching. We will only report broad results here; more detail is included in a forthcoming book Beyond Babel: Language Learning Online to be published by Language Australia. On the whole there were not too many differences in perceptions between the tertiary and school-aged students. Both studies confirmed the Web as a viable environment for language learning activities. Noted differences, however, were found in the following: The school children were more comfortable and enjoyed the environment more right from the start while some 17% of tertiary students felt uncomfortable to begin with. They also found the materials more useful, despite the fact that they rated them less highly overall. Younger students were also more impressed with graphics. Although still leaning towards the positive, the qualitative feedback from the school children was on the whole less enthusiastic than that of the tertiary students. This may have had to do with the fact that a large number of the technical problems reported came from this group. It may also reflect a more critical attitude of this group since many are already used to sophisticated computer games far beyond the scope of the educational materials used here. In terms of reported advantages and disadvantages of using the Web for language learning (listed below), responses were very similar between older and younger students but the categories learning culture with authentic materials, fun and variety were exclusively mentioned by the school-aged students.
In terms of preferred mode of access to Web-based learning the most favoured option by older and younger students was within face-to-face teaching in class, while the worst option was distance education without a tutor. The primary students, however, had an especially poor view of distance education with a tutor. By contrast, this option was highly rated by adults. It may well be that this sort of judgement is beyond the younger students. Looking at study preference, overall preferences were very evenly divided between those who preferred to work alone (31.1%), with a partner (33.5%), or in a group (35.4%). These distributions were slightly altered in the breakdown relative to gender, but the data still showed no significant difference between males and females or tertiary and school-aged children.
Finally, where learning styles are concerned, an interesting finding was the strong preference expressed for kinesthetic and tactile styles as a major learning style and for visual and auditory as a minor style. This preference appears to be conducive to working with the Web, especially when one of its great strengths is the potential to engage students in real experiential learning which engages students in meaningful, goal-oriented activities in authentic settings. After all, the ability to be engaged with authentic materials was a strong feature of what school-aged students perceived as an advantage of the environment.
References Felix, U. (1998). Virtual Language Learning: Finding the Gems Amongst the Pebbles, Melbourne: Language Australia. Warschauer, M. (1995). Virtual Connections: Online Activities and projects for Networking Language Learners, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press. Warschauer, M. (1996). "Computer-mediated Collaborative Learning: Theory and Practice", Modern Language Journal, 18 (4), pp.470-481. Biodata Professor Uschi Felix is Director of Arts IT, Associate Dean and a member of the School of European Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University in Melbourne. She has a research background in applied linguistics, and during the last decade her work has focussed on CALL in all its various aspects, concentrating on the systematic integration into the curriculum of tested CALL applications from stand-alone software to WWW sites. She has contributed to the development of multi-media software and Websites in several languages, published many articles in international journals on the use of technology in language teaching, and her book Virtual Language Learning: Finding the Gems among the pebbles has become a bestseller for Language Australia. Note Parts of this paper are being exhibited as posters as part of the History of CALL exhibition at CALICO and EUROCALL 2000 http://www.history-of-call.org |