Computer Assisted Learning
Teacher Training Methodology
and Evaluation of a Seminar
for Language Teachers
Martin Kreutzer
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canarias LPGC
Wilhelm Neunzig
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona1
ABSTRACT
Commissioned by the Department of Education, Culture and Sport of the Autonomous Government of the Canary Islands, the co-authors of this article describe a methodology for teaching training seminars designed to reconsider and define the validity of the design of CALL exercises devel-oped by teachers of the subject and aimed at solving specific problems presented by their own students. A three-stage system of evaluation was used to collect empirical data in support of the validity of the initial hy-pothesis.
KEYWORDS
CALL, Teacher training methodology, empirical evaluation, virtual teacher, seminar, workshop
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
In the context of the increasingly wide range of self-access language learning programs and the increased sophistication of authoring systems— especially with the qualitative change brought about by the shift from DOS to WINDOWS, it is now time to reconsider one of the most often focused on aspects of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL, or ELAO to use the Spanish acronym): the design of CALL exercises by sub-ject teachers aimed at solving specific problems of their students. For some time now, self-instruction among teachers based on the manuals included with the various programs of educational software (authoring systems)
has been confined to a limited number of addicts or “freaks,” since, as a result of the heavy teaching load, secondary teachers do not have suffi-cient time to pursue their interest in the matter, or to design self access exercises of sufficiently high quality, not only in terms of pedagogical cri-teria but also in terms of technical and ergonomic factors. To facilitate access to CALL for secondary teachers, various training seminars were organized, which would, it was hoped, serve as a springboard to enable the teachers to go on to design their own self access exercises for their own language students (see Kreutzer et al. 1993 and Ensinger et al. 1993). In the light of the vast technical possibilities which were becoming avail-able in authoring systems, the seminars gradually took on the nature of more a demonstration of these technical possibilities rather than a work-shop, as they had originally been conceived. The practical results (that is, the actual exercises designed by the seminar participants) became more and more disappointing, and subsequent application of the acquired skills to continue the ongoing production of exercises seemed increasingly im-probable.
APPROACH
Within the Enseñanza de lengua y traducción asistida por ordenador (ELTAO) working group (and also within other working groups), there began to be heard voices questioning the viability of continued involve-ment of teachers in the design of CALL programs for their own students, and implying that the field should be left to the specialists who had suffi-cient time and skill to design the exercises, as had been the case with other teaching materials such as textbooks, workbooks, and teaching videos.
Faced with this dilemma—which can basically be formulated as a ques-tion: Is there any point in continued teacher training in the field of CALL?— our research set out to find a reliable answer which might clarify the issue. The authors approached the Department of Education, Culture and Sport of the Canary Island Government with a proposal to run a teacher train-ing seminar which would include a traintrain-ing phase, a controlled applica-tion phase, and an evaluaapplica-tion phase. The seminar was held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 22-27 April 1996, and the evaluation took place on 27-28 May 1996.
PHASE 1: THE SEMINAR FRAMEWORKOFTHE SEMINAR
In order to obtain reliable results which would be applicable in practice, it was necessary to run a seminar which would exhibit many of the
stan-dard characteristics of such seminars. 1. Open Enrollment
The only entrance condition for participants was that they should have some language teaching experience and basic knowledge of Windows.
2. Twenty Hours of Class
The seminar was divided in four-hour blocks which were conducted after working hours, as is normal practice in Spain for such training courses;
3. Award of Curricular Credits
The curricular credits awarded for the seminar were amounted to official government recognition leading to an obligation to partici-pate and to carry out the required exercises.
4. Small Groups
Seminar groups were limited to a maximum of ten students per trainer. This ten-to-one ratio is the optimum ratio obtainable in Spain in semi-nars which include practical or workshop sessions.
Since teachers in Spain do not (yet) have much experience in CALL programs, classes in Spain generally follow a set textbook (so that teach-ers are not accustomed to designing their own specific materials), and computer users have a tendency to “play” with the machine (experiment-ing by trial and error) and set themselves unobtainable objectives, it was necessary to develop a methodology for the seminar which would opti-mize the use of our time to ensure the following:
• a wide pedagogical overview of the field of CALL;
• a view of the range of possibilities offered by CALL programs and their objectives;
• systematic learning of a basic repertoire of computer commands for the design of standard programs; and
• the complete design of at least one exercise which could be subse-quently put into practice with the teacher’s own students in the appli-cation phase.
RUNNINGTHE SEMINAR
It was decided to adopt a trainer-led approach to the seminar so as to achieve the above objectives and to prevent tangential discussions (though recognizing that they can be positive in other contexts). The seminar had 18 participants and was divided into four blocks: theoretical introduc-tion, practical introducintroduc-tion, demonstration and workshop.
Block 1: Theoretical Introduction.
concepts, beginning with a historical look back at the first programs mak-ing use of the computer for language learnmak-ing, which were based on the concept of one question and one associated correct answer, and gradually moving on to a theory based examination of the multiple possibilities of modern authoring systems (parser, multiple answers, prompters, windows, hypertext, colors, type fonts, graphics, audio, etc.). Parallel to the intro-duction of the various concepts of CALL, the trainers presented the vari-ous commands and syntax of the language of the authoring system chosen for the seminar.2 In this way, the conceptual input—of utmost importance
for the understanding of the new medium in which participants were only beginning to work—was related to the actual language of authoring sys-tems per se within a pedagogical perspective. This approach allowed the trainers to save time and enabled the participants to associate pedagogical concepts with computer commands. The trainers also hoped to avoid the participants’ merely playing with the commands at machine level.
Block 2: Practical Introduction
In keeping with the concept of a “trainer led” seminar, it was decided to begin the practical section (the learning of the computer commands) by developing an initial script consisting of a single sentence question which required a single correct answer. Participants copies this script on their computers. Based on this single phrase, which to some extent reflected the earliest days of CALL, the various concepts and basic commands re-quired to design a (simple) CALL exercise were introduced (see fig. 1).
Siete islas forman el Archiélago Canario. La isla más poblada es Gran Canaria.
La capital de Gran Canaria es:
Fig. 1. Example of Window
Later, in the evaluation phase, almost all of the participants approved of this learning model; it allowed them to acquire confidence with the me-dium gradually since every stage of programming was directly reflected
on the screen. The participants stated that their acquisition of the same basic knowledge at the same time facilitated participation in the debates and discussions which emerged outside the actual seminar itself.
Block 3: Demonstration
Having presented the basic skills for the design of an exercise, in the next block the presenters focused on a guided presentation of CALL exer-cises which included the following demonstrations:
1. A demonstration of the most common errors made in designing CALL exercises
These errors were arrived at by analysis of commercially available CALL materials. The demonstration was carried out with the aim of helping the participants to avoid making these kinds of errors. The most important errors were
• errors in man-machine interaction
Especially serious are unclear signals of what students are sup-posed to do at each stage of the exercise. If the screen gives stu-dents various ways of achieving the same objective (e.g., typing something or using the mouse), this lack of clarity can lead to confusion rather than facilitating the task. The same can be said about technical instructions. Very often, all the instructions are given at the beginning of the exercise, and, when the time comes to use them, students cannot remember them.
• errors in the programmed response
This error is very widespread. Instead of including “intelligent” comments or explanations (e.g., a clue to guide students to find the solution or to help in some other way), the computer is limited to answering, good/bad, correct/wrong, etc., which can be ex-tremely frustrating for students. An “intelligent” response which strikes us as being especially inadequate is the one which gives praise to students after five attempts at finding the right answer in the absence of any clues.
• errors in pedagogical design
A frequent error is the underuse or indeed overuse of the medium. A language exercise which offers so many simultaneous options that the screen begins to resemble a high-tech cockpit has a nega-tive effect on the primary objecnega-tive of the exercise, which is lan-guage learning. On the other hand, if the exercise does not offer pedagogically adequate possibilities, such as employing graphic resources (or voices in a dialogue exercise), students will quickly lose interest in learning through CALL. Many exercises also con-tain discrepancies between the linguistic level of the language used in the exercise and the proficiency level of the student for whom
the exercise is intended. Often, for example, the vocabulary em-ployed in an exercise is at a much more advanced level than the grammatical problem which the exercise sets out to address. • errors arising from not recognizing the limitations of the medium
It is sometimes quite evident that the designer of an exercise has not borne in mind that the more open an answer, the more possi-bilities there are for correct answers from the student. Since it is impossible in such cases to program all the correct answers, the computer’s response will be limited to a censorious “incorrect” in the case of many totally correct student answers. This situa-tion is clearly unacceptable from a pedagogical point of view. 2. A demonstration of advice, clues and criteria which should be borne
in mind when designing exercises or teaching materials for computer assisted language learning.3
• “warm-up” phase
If we are to consider the computer as a “virtual teacher,” then a “warm-up” phase should be included at the outset of each exercise just as in a real class. Teachers do not launch into the heart of the lesson’s subject matter outright but, rather, try to stimulate student’s interest in an introductory period before gradually moving towards the area to be dealt with. Therefore, in addition to detailed infor-mation on the content of the exercise, introductory screens should present necessary information in an enjoyable way.
• student-machine interaction
Student-machine interaction should be fluid with no obstacles that impede students from following the programmed steps. This fluid-ity means the instructions to students should be absolutely clear. The screen design should draw student’s attention to essential in-formation in an attractive configuration and should also incorpo-rate the findings of ergonomic studies with respect to colors, letter size, text, photo, and graphics distribution.
• “virtual” teacher-student interaction
Since students cannot ask the teacher questions, it is important that an exercise fully achieve its teaching objective. The objective, therefore, must be clearly defined before beginning the design of the exercise. It is especially important to achieve “intelligent” re-sponses to student input, whether correct or otherwise. When stu-dents cannot find a solution, they must be helped to do so, and the computer affords many ways of helping. Clues can be incorpo-rated in the form of comments, rules, dictionaries, graphics, voice aids, highlighted or marked words and phrases, etc. It should also be possible for students to obtain correct solutions or to give up if the exercise is beyond their level of proficiency. The “virtual” teacher
must formulate questions in such a way that the number of antici-pated answers is limited. In addition, a standard default “incor-rect” response is to be avoided in cases in which it is impossible to foresee all the correct answers. In these cases, a response such as “This answer has not been anticipated.” is more suitable.
• presentation of the topic
In the presentation of the topic, care must be taken not to provide too much information. When the topic requires a considerable amount of information, as can happen in exercises involving a lot of grammatical rules, well-defined sequences containing different objectives and requiring different knowledge should be employed Menus permitting the student to tackle the topic in a number of sessions should also be included. It is especially important to avoid mixing different skills in a single exercise. If an exercise focuses on morphology, then matters such as vocabulary and spelling should not be allotted importance.
3. A demonstration of a program of self access exercises which had been installed in all the computers beforehand (see fig. 2).4
Fig. 2. Presentation Screen of ¿Ahora, tú?
The purpose of this demonstration was to acquaint the partici-pants with a wide range of possible applications of what had pre-sented in the Practical Introduction. The participants were invited to pay particular attention to one or more exercises which they would later copy and adapt to their own subjects in the workshop phase. This block also included reading a number of exercise scripts
¡Ahora, tú! ejercicos
with the support of the trainers in order to study the script in a visualization-result relationship.
Block 4: Workshop
As has been pointed out earlier, the main objective of the workshop was to have participants, with the help of the trainers and the benefit of the guidelines and models already presented, design an exercise which would later be used in school with their students in the Application Phase. This objective was an essential element in the design of the experiment. The workshop ended with group presentations of the exercises that partici-pants exchanged, so that all of them would have a stock of exercises for classroom application and various models to enable them to continue de-signing additional exercises.
PHASE 2: APPLICATION
Since each seminar participant had a series of exercises ready for appli-cation in the classroom, our main concern now was to determine stu-dents’ reactions to the exercises. We also wanted to see whether the semi-nar participants continued designing CALL exercises at home, which is essential if we are to continue with the concept of CALL development outlined at the outset of this paper. To this end, the exercises in the “¿Ahora, tú?” program were made available to the participants to serve as a pro-gramming model. Regarding the classroom students’ reaction, the report of the secondary schools EFL inspectors contained the following state-ment:
In the practice stage, the students were delighted with the exercises, which the teachers had spent many hours preparing. The teachers made a great effort to adapt the exercises to their own programs, and next year they are going to take their students to the computer room. Working with the computer is seen as relaxing, it stimulates the stu-dents and they can correct themselves (de Diego 1996).
PHASE 3: EVALUATION
The evaluation of the results of the seminar was a key element in the experiment and was carried out meticulously. It was decided to employ three interrelated assessment systems to ensure valid results.
• a questionnaire • group discussion
• individual participant report
QUESTIONNAIRE
A 14-item questionnaire was developed which covered the following areas: benefits of the seminar, assessment of CALL as a teaching instru-ment, motivation for attending the seminar and for continued use of CALL, the role of the teacher and the computer in the teaching of foreign lan-guages in the future. Participants responded to items on a scale of 1-5. Results
The results concerning the benefits of the seminar could not have been more encouraging for the trainers. Almost all the participants believe that the time invested was extremely well spent (see fig. 3).
Fig. 3. Subjective View of Seminar Benefits (Participants’ Responses to question 4)
The results of the question on the assessment of CALL as a teaching in-strument were unanimous. All the participants would use CALL programs if they became available (see fig. 4).
Fig. 4. Positive Response to the Medium (Participants’ responses to ques-tion 7)
The need to advance their training in new technologies was the motiva-tion of the majority of teachers attending training seminars. Virtually all were highly motivated (see fig. 5).
Fig. 5. Ethical-Professional Motivation (Participants’ responses to ques-tions 1, 2, and 8)
That the computer will have an important role in the future of language learning is accepted by the majority of respondents, though the question of the separate roles of the human teacher on one hand and the computer on the other still arouses suspicion among the teachers (see fig. 6).
Fig. 6. Future Roll of CALL (Participants’ responses to questions 3, 9, and 10)
Perhaps this result might be interpreted as a subliminal rejection of the new medium. The graph illustrates the global responses to the questions designed to gauge the future vision of the role of the computer in the school.
Regarding motivation to continue working with the computer, the vast majority of respondents had no intention of stopping, despite the fact that it may not mean any form of career bonus. They seem to feel an obligation
to enable their students to benefit from the new learning techniques (see fig. 7).
Fig. 7. Perspectives for Continued Work in CALL (Participants’ responses to questions 5, 12, and 14)
The last group of questions sought to shed light on an essential point in the conception of this experiment: whether participants felt they should go on developing their own exercises or whether materials development should be left to full-time CALL experts, as has happened in other areas such as the design of audiocassettes and video teaching resources. Since no discernible tendency emerged in the global results, we examine the responses to questions 6, 11, and 13 in some detail (see fig. 8).
Fig. 8. Teacher Developed Exercises (Participants’ responses to questions 6, 11, and 13)
The responses to question 6 (“In my opinion, the development of self-access language exercises is very important, but teachers do not have suf-ficient means or skills to do it.”) highlight a somewhat pessimistic view of
the real availability of technology to teachers. However, the responses to question 11 (“Exercises such as the ones we have tried to develop in this seminar should be left to CALL professionals rather than class teachers whose training and experience is in the area of class teaching”) show that the participants rejected the contention that it was lack of training that prevented them from developing CALL resources. In response to ques-tion 13 (“The problem that I see for the future of CALL is that publishing houses will contract computer experts with no teaching experience to de-sign self-access programs.”), participants did not show any de-signs of gen-eral mistrust in this respect.
GROUP DISCUSSIONAND INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPANTS’ REPORTS
These two elements of the evaluation phase can be dealt with together since comments made in the group discussions tend to correspond to the written evaluations made in the individual participants’ reports. While the results of this section of the evaluation phase corroborate in general the results of the questionnaire, they also shed light on additional aspects of interest which were been contemplated in the original design of the seminar. Analysis of verbal comments and written reports centered on the three main points: (1) the seminar itself, (2) developing CALL exercises, and (3) implementation issues in secondary schools.
The Seminar
Participants generally agreed that such seminars were positive and that they would like to attend a second seminar to pursue the subject further. At 20 hours, the seminar was felt to have been too short but long enough to learn basic concepts. The fact that theory had a relatively secondary role and that priority was given to the practical side was also seen as a positive aspect. Regarding the practical element, all the participants agreed that the “trainer-led” approach was successful because all were happy to have been able to “take something real home with them” and because everyone knew the same commands and could therefore interchange opin-ions and results. This last point motivated them to keep in touch, person-ally or by telephone, after the seminar and form small working groups.
Developing CALL Exercises
The lack of previous computer experience emerged as an important con-straining factor in the development of exercises. Because of the absence of written documentation, the participants had to become gradually accus-tomed to using on-line help and a quick reference list to make progress. On further examination, this problem turned out to be little more than the lack of practice at seeking help within the context of the computer itself. The time factor was extremely important. Almost all the participants agreed that developing the first exercise(s) took a lot or even too much time. On
later realizing that they could work much faster by using the previously existing schema in the development of new exercises (i.e., by changing the content and retaining the structure of an exercise), they concluded that the time/exercise development ratio was reasonable. That graphics and sound can be inserted in the exercises relatively simply was seen as a posi-tive point. Some participants who had already attended other seminars in which they had worked with other authoring programs agreed that incor-porating graphics and sound was relatively easy in the program chosen for this seminar.
Implementation Issues in Secondary Schools
A positive response from secondary school students to the self-access exercises developed by the seminar participants was essential to the suc-cess of the evaluation phase. Although the working conditions, computer room capacity, and the actual capacity of the computers themselves varied greatly from one school to another; the results in all schools were similar. The students took to the new form of learning with enthusiasm. In all cases they quickly learned to work the programs, which showed that the design of the program and the exercises was ergonomically successful. Even changing physical locations from the standard classroom to the com-puter room proved motivating for the students. Even more motivating was the concept of independent learning which led the students to ask for more such work. These results are comparable to those obtained in vari-ous experiments carried out using highly sophisticated programs. The vast majority of seminar participants were in favor of the introduction of the computer in language teaching, and any reservations expressed centered on the working conditions in their own schools, as opposed to CALL it-self. The participants were keen to go on working in CALL.
CONCLUSIONS
To summarize, we can draw the following conclusions:
1. As shown by the questionnaire, the concept and the new teaching resource were accepted by the participants. The official report of the group coordinator (Fernández 1996) states
Basic training in the WinCALIS authoring program commands was crucial, and the trainers, correctly in my opinion, combined this basic training with immediate practice. Also, throughout the course the trainers emphasized the formulation of teaching objec-tives, without which the exercises developed would have been little more than direct copies of the kind taken from many
text-books. … We were sufficiently prepared for the implementation phase, in which we had to develop our own exercises and imple-ment them in the classroom, since we had practice in designing a range of exercises (multiple choice, gaps, questions & answers, etc.) and we had been provided with examples developed by the trainers and other participants, as well as graphic materials.
2. The results of the practical implementation phase confirm the success of the trainer led concept adopted for the seminar learning phase. 3. Despite the growing sophistication of authoring languages, such as
WinCALIS, exercise development with relatively few commands mo-tivates language teachers to produce CALL materials and to use them as a teaching resource.
4. Language teachers accept the need to self-train in the field of CALL and highlight the importance of developing their own exercises as a form of motivating their students.
5. Students react positively to the relatively simple exercises developed by their teachers regardless of the great sophistication of other audio-visual media with which they are familiar.
6. The concept of CALL, which the experiment set out to investigate, would seem to be a viable one and deserves support by way of the formation of small working groups or small interchange networks at the city or local level rather than the large-scale networks in which the contribution of individual teachers is minimal.
NOTES
1 The authors are members of the GTELTAO (Enseñanza de lengua y traducción
asistida por ordenador ‘Computer Assisted Language and Translation Teaching
Working Group’), the first Spanish working group in the field to be recognized by a university, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
2 For this seminar, the WinCALIS program developed by Duke University (USA)
was chosen since it ensured relatively quick learning of the techniques needed for exercise development. See also Ensinger (forthcoming)
3These criteria were described in part by D. Ensinger and W. Neunzig in the
pro-ceedings of the II Jornadas sobre la enseñanza del alemán ‘Second Workshop on the Teaching of German’ organized by the Institute of Education Sciences, Barcelona, 1995.
4 The demonstration program was “¿Ahora, tú?” developed by W. Neunzig
(forth-coming), containing 15 self-access computer lessons in Spanish as a Foreign Lan-guage.
REFERENCES
Pilar de Diego. (1996). “Informe del Curso: La enseñanza de LL.EE. asistida por ordenador.” Las Palmas.
Ensinger, D. (forthcoming) “Vermittung und Verarbeitung von Landeskundlichem Wissen am Computer.” In Translationsdidaktik, edited by E. Fleischmann, E. Kutz, and W. Schmitt, Tübingen: Narr.
Ensinger D., M. Kreutzer, W. Neunzig, Pique, and Presas. (1993). “La Enseñanza de lengua y traducción asistida por ordenador.” Comunicación y Pedagogía 119.
María Cristina Pérez Fernández. (1996). “Enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras asistida por ordenador: WinCALIS, Informe-Memoria.” Las Primps de Gran Canaria.
Kreutzer, M., W. Neunzig, Pique, and Presas. (1993). “ELTAO Seminar in Las Palmas de Gran Canana: Summary of an Experiment.” CALICO Journal 10.
AUTHORS’ BIODATA
Martin Kreutzer
Graduate in Translation and Interpreting from the Universität des Saarlandes, Germany, Mr. Kreutzer worked as a freelance translator be-tween 1985 and 1989, prior to taking up his present position as lecturer in Translation Studies at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canarias. Wilhelm Neunzig
Graduate in Psychology and Translation from the Universität des Saarlandes where he lectured on Language and Translation between 1976 and 1984, Mr. Neunzig is currently lecturing on Translation Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Both he and Mr. Kreutzer are founder members of the GTELTAO group (Computer Assisted Language and Translation Teaching Workshop Group)—the first research group in the field of com-puter assisted language and translation teaching to be recognized by a university in Spain.
AUTHORS’ ADDRESS
Martin Kreutzer Wilhelm Neunzig
Facultat de Traducció - GTELTAO
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Phone: (343) 581 24 69 08193 Bellaterra - Barcelona Fax: (343) 581 10 37 E-mail: [email protected]
COMPUTER-ASSISTED
LANGUAGE LEARNING
Context and Conceptualization
Michael Levy
Although the development of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has thus far been fragmented, Michael Levy herein sets CALL in its proper historical and interdisciplinary contexts, pro-viding a comprehensive overview of the topic. Drawing on published work as well as an international survey among CALL practitioners in eighteen coun-tries, he looks at the relationship between CALL’s the-ory and application, its conceptual and practical roles as tutor and tool. Levy also discusses CALL’s implica-tions for computer programming. Most books on CALL focus on specific projects, and do so mainly from a theoretical point of view, but this unique text considers CALL as a whole, analyzing the utility of the computer in language learning and teaching. A detailed review of the current literature is matched with an in-depth examination of the tutor-tool framework. An ideal introduction to the procedures and functions of CALL as a multi-faceted reflection of today’s ever-evolving technology, Levy’s study will appeal to students, researchers, and teachers of Applied Linguistics.
About the Author:
Michael Levy is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Center for Language Teaching and Research, University of Queensland, Australia. He has written several articles on CALL and related subjects.
