Here’s a post I wrote for the On Demand Training blog. If you’re a teacher you might be interested:
Over the years, language teachers have been skeptical about the value of techology in the language learning classroom. We know that language learning software fails the learner on two major counts. First, experience tells us that learning is social and invovles tremendous levels of complexity - teacher/student relationships, peer relationships, cognitive, emotional, and and intrapersonal issues, not to mention the hundreds of interactions that happen from minute to minute in a real time environment. It seems to us that only a human brain (the experienced teacher) could make sense of the frenzy of the classroom to guide learners towards their goals. Nor should we attempt to rob our students of the social aspects of learning. That takes the fun, the very human-ness out of it.
Secondly, we know that the process of language acquisition itself is incredibly complex. If even the best teachers are in disagreement about how that works, we’re darn skeptical about how a piece of software is supposed to the trick. Certainly the right kind of software can act as a source of input, but it cannot help the learner reach any degree of fluency. It is also my experience that learners certainly do not want to learn that way. They know that language is about communication. To use it in any other way (through over-analyzing it, for example) is to lose the chance to use it authentically.
Despite all this, however, no-one seems to doubt that technology will come to play an ever greater role in language teaching. In fact, this process is already well under way. Through the computerized study of spoken language, for example, corpus linguistics has revelead a great deal about how native speakers actually use the language. We now have a much better understanding of lexis, collocation and the way that people combine language items in normal speech. One outgrowth of this, the Lexical Appraoch, has greatly influenced language teachers around the globe, a process that could not have happened without the technology.
In addition, the web has given us all access to masses of information that can be used to inform classroom activities, provide input, etc. Email connects us with students, and other teachers, while blogs, and bulletin boards enable discussion, the dissemination of ideas, techniques, insights, etc. Our industry is profoundly different from the one that existed 15 years ago.
To me, the vision of a future where learners sit all day, anti-socially, like automatons at computers, is naieve. It won’t happen that way, because that is not what is effective. Nor is it what people want. I’m actually very optimistic about what technology can do for language teaching as long as it is used to facilitate communication, not to upend it. That pretty much describes the ODT vision.
Ken Carroll 凯恩
Hi, Ken! For the two days I’ve known about ChinesePod, I’ve just loved your voice and banter with Jenny. Small things can be so crucial.
There is good news from the computer front (speaking as someone who’s been there for 40 years). It has finally dawned on some people that the social interactions are as crucial as the technical ones. Check out “Computer-Supported Cooperative Work” in wikipedia (although I wrote half the entry myself…). Check out the University of Michigan School of Information site on “Technology-mediated collaboration”
http://www.si.umich.edu/research/area.htm?AreaID=3 or my blog at http://cscwteam.blogspot.com that I started after taking Professor Gary Olson’s class there.
So, my other email to your site yesterday is just filled with social interaction suggestions that could be used to provide some of the necessary context (ala angry neighbors) to make the rest of the technology helpful. The teaching technology is important, and weblogs and podcasts are wonderful. I agree your tone is so incredibly refreshing after my several years with Berlitz, Dorling-Kindersly, and Ted Yao’s tapes from “Integrated Chinese.” In fact, the social networking and connections that humans make is probably a stronger catalyst, when looking at retention and drop-out rates, than the technology. As you note with your repeated requests, social feedback loops are crucial to successful mutual growth of both ChinesePod and individual learners.
So, keep those mugs and t-shirts and 24-hour chat-rooms open for people to drop by and socialize, socialize, socialize. It’s not an “ancillary” activity - it’s the primary activity for everyone except a very few academics who are learning a language for its own sake - the rest of us are trying to plug into and connect with 1.6 billion new people and if Mandarin helps, great, but so will many other things, which can provide a “thermal” or “rip-tide” than can drag along language skills.
Anyway, the essence of the class I took in CSCW was that it IS possible to accomplish interactions as strong as face-to-face over a network, and even more so, but it takes very systematic work in an area that is so new it’s often neglected. The same is true in my own area - health informatics, by the way. Everyone in the US is trying to develop national standards for health records so that they can be “interoperable” between hospitals, missing the key fact that no technical system will overcome the problems we need to face in that the hospital staffs don’t really WANT to interoperate. As soon as the first disagreement shows up between versions of patient records in two sites, this will turn into flame wars - “Whose “fault” is it, whose job is it to “fix” the one that’s wrong, who will pick up the bill to track down which one is wrong, etc. And those people all speak the “same language”, ha ha ha. Now try it globally, as in public health.
I’m in the process of trying to update Wikipedia to include more references to the serious academic literature in this area. In the meantime, let me assure you that SOME people “get it”, and there are peer-reviewed journal articles with titles such as “Beyond Being There”, dealing with how to overcome technology and the interaction-at-a-distance problem. With Podcasts, you not only are at a distance, you’re asynchronous - different time, different place. How to build lasting relationships with people that “work” using weblogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. is a fascinating area, and one that may be central to your actual business of breaking down communication and interaction barriers between people who view each other now as strangers.
wade
Wade,
Really appreciate your comments. There is so much potential for the approach that ChinesePod is (I dare say) leading. Every day I discover more anbd more about what it can do. At the moment I’m totally absorbed in the literature on ‘authentic input’ and why authenticity is potentially so important. Over the coming weeks I will try to bring these insights into the program. I think it’s going to be quite special.
It is so exciting to discover what that these new tools can do. I can only imagine where we coudl be one year fro mnow if we can continue to listen to our learners and keep innovating according to their feedback. Although there is some serious academic thinking behind all of this, I’ve always thought that the key lies in taking action. I think we will be able to show how a network like this can truly aid language acquisition, not in theory, but in practice.
It’s great to have you on board. I welcome as many comments and suggestions as you might like to make.
We now have the chane to create a user-generated program that consists wholly of authentic materials.