CHAPTER 5 LEARNER EXPERIENCE
5.5 TECHNICAL SUGGESTIONS FOR SLEND DEVELOPMENT
Learners’ great interest and engaging role in the course is also reflected in their active contributions to the development of the SLEND. They pointed out a few challenges and accordingly they also put forward a variety of insightful suggestions during the interview.
5.5.1 Pedagogical Suggestions
More real-life topics reflecting Deaf cultures are needed. Diversified topics are
enumerated by the learners, such as celebrity and history videos, stories, news, formal dialogues, English songs, drama, jokes, and formal governmental letters and the like. Some learners even suggest the learning of official documents issues by the government, such as laws relevant to Deaf people, etc.
Real-life topics should be classified and sequenced. One learner from the Vadodara
Centre proposed, “Basic level and then advanced level are clear categories, which will made in SLEND. Now basic level and advanced level are mixed in SLEND.” This echoes the project group’s call for classifying and sequencing of the topics during several project meetings (January, February, March, April 2016). Due to technical limitations, the topics were not differentiated.
5.5.2 Technological Suggestions for Multimedia Materials Development
Learners’ intricate feelings shed light on the necessity of multimedia materials, yet also reflect their high expectation of multimedia materials. A series of improvements are proposed by learners.
Videos should stay clear and short. In-class videos are meant to record the interesting
and inspiring ongoing discussions among learners during offline learning. Unlike ISL video explanation, in-class videos tend to be long and unclear due to the fact that multiple learners engage in the process and it is real-time impromptu processing. Many learners stated that lengthy and unclear videos create barriers for understanding, and that it would be ideal to keep them clear and short. Alternatively, the peer tutors should be trained how to use lengthy and unclear videos with Deaf learners. For instance, peer tutors can fast forward the videos, focus on the essential part of the videos and give more explanation if needed.
ISL signs are necessary to explain new vocabulary. The current entry of new vocabulary
starts with the explanation through content and context pictures, followed by text explanation and ISL video explanation. Some learners argue that it is necessary to provide an ISL sign for the specific vocabulary.
All the videos should be subtitled with English. Learners from Vadodara and
Coimbatore Centre have made the request for adding English subtitles to the videos uploaded onto the SLEND platform. As a matter of fact, English videos are suggested to be developed with subtitles, which can be seen from the example videos developed by the research assistants. Nevertheless, from the Focus Group Discussion in the second round, Deaf peer tutors and learners are not confident about their written English and avoid developing subtitles, exercises. One Deaf peer tutor admits,
I need to take care students learn features well without error. I suggest that first I send draft subtitle dialogue to Research assistants and then they check and make correct to draft subtitle dialogue. They send it to me and I put it in
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useful language of SLEND. But I am not happy because I failed to make exercise in SLEND as my grammar is not good. If I put wrong sentences in exercise of SLEND, students learnt wrote. I need to care take students. I can put picture and video in SLEND exercise. I can put materials in RLE and in class video. I am happy that research assistant make exercise related to my session.
Thus, lack of subtitles in the videos developed by peer tutors and learners is a sign of lack of confidence in English literacy which also affects their development of exercises on the SLEND. Therefore, it might be meaningful to consider English language support to the peer tutors and learners in the future projects.
5.5.3 Suggestions for Support Provided to Peer Tutors
Comprehensive training on the CEFR is highly suggested for Deaf Research Assistants and Peer Tutors. It is worth mentioning that this suggestion is inferred from the
feedback of no awareness of the CEFR by learners and incomplete implementation of the CEFR elements by peer tutors.
English language support needed by peer tutors without undermining Deaf-led approach is necessary. The underdevelopment of subtitles and useful language reveals
insufficient English literacy skills from the Deaf peer tutors and learners. To tackle the problem, the optimal option could be including a Deaf peer tutor who is near-native in English. Alternatively, the inclusion of hearing English teachers might be another option while not undermining the Deaf-led approach.
5.6 CHAPTER SUMMARY
Sections 5.1 and 5.2 present overall learner experience and experiences in relation to each characteristic of the SLEND. The overall learner experience of the SLEND is moderately positive based on learners’ responses to the learner experience questionnaire and the interview. Generally, learners are satisfied with the course. They feel the course is easy for them, and most of the features of the SLEND are welcomed. By attending the course, they have built their confidence to use English more. They also indicate that they are willing to continue using the SLEND in the future.
With respect to each specific characteristic of the SLEND identified in Chapter 4, learners are moderately satisfied or satisfied with the key elements of the SLEND as well as most of the characteristics of SLEND and its context, such as sign bilingualism, peer-to-peer interaction, ethnographic and Freirean literacy approaches with learner-created real life English materials, and Web 2.0 technology-enhanced collaborative learning. Learners confirm the usefulness of real life English and consider that learning useful language, such as vocabulary and grammar, are conducive to their understanding of real life English. Learners find English topics on the SLEND developed by themselves or by other groups interesting and useful. At the same time, they also somewhat enjoy seeking out real life English materials outside the classroom. They feel ISL is useful for English literacy attainment by means of ISL videos and face-to-face ISL interaction. As for peer-to-peer interaction, they agree moderately that peer tutors support and guide their English literacy attainment. They enjoy sharing their experience and knowledge on the SLEND platform for collaborative English learning. After class, they resort to Web 2.0 social tools, such as WhatsApp, which they regard as beneficial to their English literacy
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development. Learners are satisfied with the “Our sharing space”, “Real-life Vocabulary/Glossary” and “In-Class Video” on the SLEND to some extent. These findings corroborate previous research on the facilitating roles of peer tuition (Herring-Harrison et al., 2007; Cannon and Guardino, 2012; Sahasrabudhe, 2010; Denmark, 2013), sign bilingualism (Evans, 2004) and Computer-Mediated Communication (Garberoglio et. al, 2015).
The data also uncover some unsure experiences for participants: SLEND access, multimedia materials and CEFR benchmarking. The access to the SLEND through computer/laptop is not entirely user-friendly due to the ‘limited’ or ‘low-tech’ settings (Egbert & Yang, 2004). The interviews with the learners reveal that Internet speed and mobile phone quality cause the dissatisfaction with access. Participants are unsure of how to inform others of their English level. This indicates their unsuccessful integration of the CEFR benchmarking, which is consistent with the finding of unsuccessful implementation of the CEFR on the SLEND platform in Section 5.2.7. Participants’ expectation of the use of multimedia materials is not fully addressed. They require much more advanced multimedia materials such as non-signing videos and high-quality signing videos.
The above-mentioned learner experience is demarcated by the contrast between learners’ overall satisfaction with the course and access problems caused by infrastructure and Internet access. This contrast sparks the argument that it is possible to compensate for the hardware deficit, for example with human factors, which is in line with the viewpoint of Gonzalez & Louis (2013). They point out two factors affecting Computer-Assisted Language Learning: human constraints and physical obstacles. They believe that the human constraints are more important than physical problems such as limited access to the technology resulting from slow Internet or low computer to student ratio. Peer tutors and participants accommodate themselves to the ‘limited’ or ‘low tech’ settings with their techniques, such as downloading videos to compensate for the physical problems.
It is worth noting that each centre differs not only in experience of overall intervention but also in experience of different key characteristics of the SLEND, despite the same platform used and intervention received. In general, the Vadodara Centre ranks first in terms of overall learner experience and also tops the experience of most key characteristics of the SLEND. The differences between centres are further explored in Section 6.3 with a focus on learning outcomes, its correlation with learner experience and potential factors contributing to the difference.
In Section 5.3, it is revealed that the overall learner experience is positively correlated with several key characteristics of the SLEND, including real life English, vocabulary/grammar learning, sign bilingualism, peer-to-peer interaction and computer-mediated communication technique. The correlation consolidates the view that these are indispensable to the SLEND. At the same time, the positive correlations between some key characteristics including real life English, sign bilingualism, peer-to- peer interaction and SLEND access corroborates the internal logic and connections of these key characteristics in an e-learning ecosystem discussed in Section 7.1.4.
Strikingly, a large body of evidence from learners’ interviews articulates the unique catalytic power of real life English (see Section 5.4). It enables learners’ instant application of knowledge and skills gained from the intervention and empowers Deaf
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learners to function better in daily life. This ultimately brings a real change to Deaf learners’ lives. It is equally interesting and encouraging to discover the peripheral gains for Deaf learners over the course of the intervention, such as improvement of ISL literacy and computer literacy.
Based on the rich data from the learner experience, it is evident that learners’ overall positive experience with the key characteristics of the SLEND spells out the efficiency of the SLEND as a participatory e-learning system for Deaf young adults’ learners English literacy attainment. Learners’ positive experience verifies the composition of the key characteristics of the SLEND. Some concrete suggestions and feedback under the key characteristics are proposed for instant or future adjustment of the development of the SLEND. Building on the initial framework for a participatory e-learning system for Deaf young adults’ English literacy attainment (see Section 4.3), the initial framework mentioned in Section 4.3 is enriched with the progressively added inputs through investigating learners’ experience of using the SLEND for English literacy learning. The inputs to the initial framework are focused on the elaboration of the key characteristics under each main component. For the pedagogical aspect, the findings uncover two ways of collecting real life English materials: taking photos with phones and collecting print documents. The diversity of topics of real life English is stressed with flexible choices of learning sequences based on personalised needs. It is revealed that the peripheral gain of ISL literacy couples with English literacy attainment, in favour of the multi-literacies development. In view of the emergence of the ISL varieties, advanced Deaf peer tutors or peers provide instant support to Deaf learners’ understanding. Peer-to-peer interaction is conducive for better understanding and efficient communication within and across different learning centres.
For the technological aspect, both one-way (receptive only) and two-way communication (both receptive and productive) appear in the WhatsApp group chats. These two ways of communication correspond to the observation of interaction and active interaction in the interaction approach (Gass & Mackey, 2014). The SLEND is friendly to multi-access with computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones, and it has been suggested to feature more non-signing English videos as well as short and clear ISL videos of in-class discussion with English captions and/or subtitles. In addition, due to the unfamiliarity with the CEFR, future training to the peer tutors is recommended to give more weighting to the CEFR.
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