Kamis, 23 Desember 2010

Foreign-Language Software: The State Of The Art or Pick A Card, Any (Flash) Card

Abstract:
This article gives a report on the state of the art with respect to software development for CALI for all languages, but with some emphasis on Russian. Mr. Baker concludes that much of the software has been developed either by good language teachers who do not know enough about programming, or good programmers who do not know enough about language teaching. He concludes that our best teachers should be given released time to work as members of teams to develop good software. He describes ten areas in which much current software is deficient: 1. There is a general lack of solid instructional design; 2. The techniques of discovery learning are used very little; 3. 95% is trivial; 4. It is fragmented rather than integrated; 5. Lesson content is not accurate for the language taught; 6. The programming is not user friendly due to poor formatting and documentation; 7. There is too much cuteness; 8. There is no standard for the methods of obtaining foreign characters; 9. The software is not ready and tested when advertised; and 10. It is lacking in portability.

KEYWORDS: materials development, trends, software evaluation, authoring, courseware, Russian.
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or the past two academic years the administration of my college has given me released time to study the state of the art involving application of the new technology to the teaching of foreign languages. My duties have included reading, traveling to CAI installations, attendance at appropriate conferences, and examination of available hardware and software.
I assume that there is little need to convince the readers of the CALICO Journal of the potential of the computer and of CAI. But I will briefly outline my own background in order to give proper perspective for my own very strongly held views on the current state of the art of CALL software. Although my acquaintance with computers is only of very recent origin, my roots in materials preparation go back very far. I have been preparing materials for the teaching of Russian since I first started teaching the language, in 1948. The lot of a Russian teacher in this country has always been a hard one due to an almost complete lack of even halfway decent materials. As a consequence, I have spent my professional life preparing supplementary materials in an attempt to turn whatever happened to be the best textbook at the time into a viable course. A large percentage of these materials have been for use in the language laboratory, going back to 1948, and I am, apparently, one of the few teachers in the country still making enthusiastic and heavy use of the language laboratory. I know that it's not stylish to do that, but the result is that our students attain in one year of study a proficiency normally attained in two or more years of study of Russian at other institutions.
Results of Foreign Language Teaching
We really have never done an adequate job of teaching foreign languages in the university. We have known this since at least 1967, when John Carroll conducted his study, comparing the scores of graduating seniors on the MLA-ETS tests and on the FSI tests. The results of that study indicated that graduating majors seldom rated above 2/2+ on the FSI scale, not enough for meaningful professional use of the language. In recent years these findings have been reinforced by the dissatisfaction with our product on the part of government agencies and the private sector, by the Presidential Commission Report, and in Paul Simon's book The Tongue-Tied American.
Recent findings in oral proficiency testing experience bear out previous conclusions: graduating majors seldom receive a rating higher than 2+ unless they have had an extensive overseas experience.
Preliminary figures sent to me by the Modern Language Association giving statistics for this year on foreign languages in general, indicate a dramatic increase in Russian enrollments in many institutions between 1980 and the fall of 1983. A large percentage of these students are interested in language not as a stepping stone to literature, but for itself, as a COMMUNICATIVE TOOL.
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In this matter students are often wiser than their teachers. In today's job market a language or several languages are seldom sufficient to get a job. Employers are looking for capable, literate individuals able to communicate and organize—language is merely the frosting on the cake. Few students can expect to get jobs immediately using only their foreign-language skills, even if they are among the very few who do achieve the required proficiency.
If we are to meet the needs of the new generation of students, we are going to have to get our act together and improve the quality of our produce. The normal classroom situation does not provide anywhere near optimal conditions for language learning, even given a master teacher. Contact time is simply insufficient to provide the proficiency which students want and need. It seems unlikely that we could not resurrect the traditional language laboratory as a means of helping us. The memory of its past misuse, abuse, and underuse are too recent, and the traditional language laboratory pales before the possibilities offered by newer technology.
We must optimize our use of the small amount of time available and the abilities of the good teachers we do have. We need to explore all avenues which may help us to do our jobs better. We need to allow technology to take over those aspects of language learning which the machine can actually do better than the teacher; we must free the teacher for true teaching, free him or her to be the quintessential humanist.
Technology/Software
Jerome Popp, Professor of Education and Educational Research at Southern Illinois University, wrote:
There is considerable evidence that the monitor can hold a student's attention better than the lecturing teacher. In educational research jargon, the computer is better than the didactic teacher at holding and increasing student's time-on-task. Moreover, it has been shown that time-on-task is directly proportional to student academic achievement...We as teachers should be shifting away from pure information transmission toward relating to the human side of our students.
And who knows, if we prove up to the task and can learn to use technological advances intelligently, we may even be able to create a need for more language teachers. But even if we cannot do that, my fervent hope is that, by freeing our best teachers to spend all available class time in the use of the living language in actual communication, we can improve markedly the proficiency of our best graduates.
While in some areas we still have much to hope for in the way of technological developments, and we may expect even further enhancements to what is already available (and at lower prices), it is clear that the technological possibilities before us are already tremendous.
But my experience of the past two years have confirmed my suspicion that the hardware is the least of our worries. Almost without exception the available foreign-language software has turned out to be extremely trivial. Even the commercial products being marketed by Control Data Corporation and bearing the name PLATO, at least in the foreign languages, bear little resemblance to the best of what has been done at Urbana.
Much of the foreign-language software represents the use of the computer as an electronic page-turner or as electronic flash cards. It seems obvious that most of it has been prepared either by teachers with great enthusiasm but little understanding of the capabilities of the computer (and sometimes with little understanding of methodology) or by programmers with little or no understanding of language learning.
Extant software seems, as a rule, to display greater programming and linguistic analysis ingenuity than pedagogical soundness. The great majority of it is solely lacking in any evidence of instructional design considerations.
An editorial in the September 1983 issue of Classroom Computer Learning says:
Why isn't educational computing living up to its potential for kids? Consider...the software engineers. There's no doubt that they can do extraordinary things with computers, especially in the area of graphics. But for the most part these engineers don't have a clue as to how their new computer magic can be used to teach kids. When the best programmers team up with people who know how children learn, the resulting software can be powerful. But too often they sign on with traditional publishers who use graphics as no more than electronic M&M's to make drill and practice more appetizing.
And R. Alan Meredith wrote:
When CAI in foreign language instruction has been compared to classroom teaching...the computer often has failed to show superiority; when CAI has been matched against textbooks, one could question in many cases whether any differences shown were attributable to the inherent quality of the materials written for the computer as compared to those devised for textbooks... students working with a high quality workbook will almost always outperform those working with a poor quality, computerized practice program. While it may be true that after a two-hour session with a tutorial on programming in BASIC, almost anyone can produce a simple drill-and-practice program, expertise in both pedagogy and programming is needed to produce high-quality, effective programs for the microcomputer. Not all language teachers are textbook writers, and not all language teachers should become programmers. But neither should the language teaching community abandon the production of language teaching programs to those whose language teaching experience is limited.
The computer and related technology are with us, whether we like it or not. Will we be willing and
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able to use it to the benefit of our students, or will we repeat the sad history of the language laboratory? Unfortunately, the language laboratory did not lead to any really new teaching stratagems. The problem was not with the technology, the problem was the lack of imaginative materials for use in the laboratory, materials which took advantage of what it could do best, and left the teacher to do what he/she could do best.
Certainly the most extensive set of CALL programs, in a truly impressive number of languages, is provided by the PLATO system at Urbana. But even there, there is a great difference from one language to another in the extent to which the computer is used in optimal fashion. I quote from Robert Hart, Associate Director of the Language Learning Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign:
While it would be grossly unfair to say that standard practice has been to create on-line copies of textbook exercises, lesson authors typically stay close to a textbook model: items are arranged into drills and the student is put through each drill in its entirety regardless of performance...The micro-strategies...do not fully exploit the possibilities of CBI, particularly with respect to optimizing the instructional process for each individual student... Familiarity with traditional textbook exercises, and unfamiliarity with the computer medium, prevents instructors from fully appreciating the potential power of certain computer-based operations and the crucial role played by sequencing decisions in CBI design...Many instructors believe...that elaborate sequencing is not better than linear sequencing, and that within broad limits the details of lesson design do not affect learning... Perhaps full acceptance of more radical designs (such as, e.g., highly individualized instruction) will require a new generation of computer-literate instructors and students...
CALL Courseware Faults
What are the faults I find with the available CALL courseware?
1. Lack of solid instructional design. Too often there is no evidence that the software designers have asked themselves what is to be taught, how can it best be taught, should it be taught on the computer at all? Does the software take full advantage of the capabilities of the computer? Is this use of the computer appropriate? And the higher the educational level for which materials are prepared, the greater the lack of understanding of instructional design needs for the target group.
2. Very little of the foreign-language software available makes use of the techniques of discovery learning, of experiences in problem solving, which is playing an ever-increasing role in software prepared for early education. Our software is attempting to teach only the little details, with little or no attempt to lead the student toward generalizing and consolidating knowledge. We also tend to TELL too much, rather than SHOWING when suitable. For a thoughtful article on discovery learning, I refer you to an article by Arielle Emmett in the January 1984 issue of Personal Computing.
Drill and practice do have their place (it would take too long to teach everything by the discovery approach), but we should be using something in addition to drill and practice materials.
The existing software seldom makes optimal use of the interactive capabilities provided by the computer, and little of it allows for individualized instruction via branching and remediation on the basis of performance in the materials.
3. About 95 per cent of available software, both home-grown and commercially available, is trivial in the extreme. While most people consider the audio-lingual approach to be completely discredited now, there were some elements of it which are worth rescuing, and which I had assumed were generally accepted by language teachers. But there is little evidence of this in the available language software. Certainly the tenet that words have meaning only in context should have been carried over to any viable new methodology. But the sad fact is that almost all software consists of simple-minded electronic flash-card systems, involving either translation drills (I thought they were also taboo now) or the simple manipulation of word forms in complete isolation from any meaningful context. The July 1983 issue of Personal Computing carried an article by Craig Zarley, in which he brags about the flash-card program which he devised to help his daughter learn her German vocabulary. The crowning touch is his exultation at the fact that with his program the items could be randomized to insure that the girl was learning the real meanings and not the order of the items. But you can also randomize a 50-cent pack of flash cards by shuffling them!
Tony Jones wrote, When the computer is an electronic flash-card machine, there is no question that it runs the student, not vice versa.
4. The available software is, in general, fragmented, bits and pieces with no thematic interconnections within a particular drill and not integrated into any larger scheme. With our current interest in communicative competence, we should try to insure that each unit makes communicative sense of itself.
5. The language represented in the software is often of dubious authenticity, and often contains outright errors (but then this is a charge that we can make also about a lot of our textbooks). Not only is there no inter-relatedness of items, many of the items display samples of language which no native speaker would ever utter, or which are irrelevant to the target audience.
A particularly egregious example of this is the Russian Hangman disk, which displays many of my pet peeves, although it has been reviewed favorably in the press. I wrote to the producer of this disk, pointing out the many types of faults in the materials, including the fact that a false claim is made that the materials will help with pronunciation, when what is presented is not a phonetic
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transcription but a rather inept transliteration. The producer answered that he found that little kids got a kick out of learning to type the Russian letters. If this is true, then what possible use could such an audience have for such sentences as It took them three hours to dig the ditch?
6. Many of the materials available show inadequate attention to matters of formatting and documentation. Software must be easy to use, with adequate on-disk and off-disk documentation and instruction. The student should not be faced with any error messages, and should be able to exit easily from the program at any time without resorting to the ultimate stratagem of turning off the machine. An on-line help function should be available at all times. If the student must do more than choose among possible answers offered, the program must insure that the student is not puzzled or penalized when an unexpected correct answer is input.
Too little attention is paid to the simple matter or screen layout. The screen should present a neat and uncluttered appearance, and should not be over-loaded with information. If done in forty-character mode on most microcomputers this implies inserting an empty line between every two lines of text displayed. Appropriate means should be utilized to organize the materials on the screen and to emphasize appropriately the necessary points. I refer those interested in pursuing this matter to the excellent article of Elizabeth E. Wright and Jeff A. Pyatte, Organized Content Technique (OCT): A Method for Presenting Information in Education and Training in the August 1983 issue of Educational Technology, and two articles in The Best of Pipeline, by Marge Kosel and Karen Jostad and by John Durrett and Judi Trezona.
7. Too many of the available materials suffer from what can only be termed cuteness, which may be desirable at the lower levels of instruction, but is out of place at the secondary-school level and later.
Under the heading of cuteness I would include a number of sins:
a. Over-familiarity and over-use of the student's name.
b. Over-praise and the use of cheap rewards. I refer to such matters as using overly-enthusiastic responses to the student's answers, such as Fantastico, or rewarding every correct answer with a bit of some appropriate melody, particularly as a reward for a very trivial task. If bells and whistles are to be provided, there must be an easy way to turn them off.
Recent research and a growing group of experts seem to support my bias. Odvard Egil Dyrli wrote:
Among the issues engendering controversy in teaching is the topic of praising students: when, how—and even whether—to bestow verbal rewards during lessons. Everyone knows teachers who make a practice of launching a barrage of questions, then rewarding quick, correct answers with a steady patter of praise—fine, excellent, very good. Research has shown that is such situations, students commonly limit the length and thoughtfulness of their responses, focus their attention on cues from the teacher, and are discouraged from expressing innovative ideas. In short, too much praise may have negative effects upon students.
It seems to me that there is a real danger that resorting to such cheap rewards may well result in the student's feeling that the content itself is by nature so tedious and uninteresting that it must be sugar-coated, with the result that the content will not be taken seriously enough. Will the student become satisfied with a level of accomplishment below his/her abilities? Is the program serious, or is it all just a game?
c. I have similar feelings about the excessive use of graphics. The judicious use of graphics can contribute greatly to the effectiveness of materials, but as in all of these things we must keep a sense of measure. I refer you to the article of Glenn Fisher in the November/December issue of Electronic Learning:
One study I encountered...did look specifically at what made software effective by comparing a program with extensive graphics, sound, and animation, with another program featuring text only. When low achieving students seemed to learn more from the plain versions, the researchers concluded that graphics may have served only to distract the students, and draw them away from the real lesson at hand.
And from the article by Arielle Emmett, in which she quotes Jack Cohen of Krell Software:
...graphics without a purpose can detract from a discovery-based program...Too much graphical noise, in effect, may deflect interest away from the real challenge at hand...
Although I'm afraid many would consider B.F. Skinner to be outdated now, it appears that he has been able to change with the times more than many of us, and there are still some important things he can teach us. He too has strong feelings on such matters in computer software. I refer you to the interview with him in the February 1984 issue of Classroom Computer Learning:
Skinner takes a curmudgeonly stance about fancy graphics and game formats that try to compete with arcade-style video games. And he waxes adamant about programs that try to 'jazz up' the material...When you refrain from jazzing up a program to give students false interests, you're actually letting them discover they can learn something.
He emphasizes that if, by adding color illustrations to textbooks or animations to computer software, we are seeking only to attract our students attention, then we may actually be distracting them from what we want them to learn.
I think one of the reasons programmed instruction was rejected was that it was too powerful. It suggested that the system was teaching rather than that the student was learning. And the student wasn't getting credit for it; the system was
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getting credit.
d. Much the same considerations must govern the use of games. The use of games can provide an important motivational element, but any games used must not be trivial, and must really teach something. And if we must play games, is there nothing better than hangman with its negative connotations, upon which so many software designers seem to be hung up (pun intentional). Will the student be more interested in learning or in seeing the little man get hung? But if one is to judge from available software, one must assume that program designers think that turning a flash-card drill into a hangman (or guillotine or bullfight game) makes it thereby a pedagogically sound exercise.
8. We need to strive for some sort of consistency in foreign-language character sets and the methods used by software to allow students to input accents and other diacritic marks. I find unsatisfactory any program which resorts to unnatural methods, such as assigning the number and punctuation keys to special accented letters. The process of placing accents must be natural and logical, such as programming the accent key so that it automatically includes a non-destructive back-space.
9. A particular pet peeve of mine is software which is not ready when advertised in the media, as well as producers and distributors who do not respond to inquiries. One gets the impression that software is only in the planning stages or is being tested and debugged when the advertisements are placed.
10. We certainly need to push all concerned for greater transportability and adaptability of materials produced. The move on the part of the producers of some of the best programs to translate them from their main-frame form for use on microcomputers is certainly to be applauded.
There were many other software desiderata which all of you could add to this list—this is merely some of those which I find particularly troublesome.
Conclusions
Will we be able to act quickly enough and decisively enough to avoid disillusionment and a resultant bad taste in the mouth of the student and revulsion for the use of technology in education? Or will we become so captivated by the technology itself that we will use it badly and inappropriately, so that it will be just another passing fad?
The computer is here to stay, and probably CAI is here to stay. Computerized instruction will proceed with or without us who teach languages; we must make certain it will answer our needs and those of our students. Will we be able to make our wants known forcefully enough to influence the publishers and the producers of software so as to insure this? Unless we become actively enough involved, trashy software will flood the market. We must become more discriminating and demanding when it comes to software, and we should be more honest in our reviews of software and be willing to call trash junk when necessary. Even if we do not become program designers ourselves, we must become computer literate enough to be able to evaluate materials and to read between the lines of the publishers' software descriptions and of the software reviews.
If we are up to the challenge, we can have a real influence on the future of education. We must not let slip through our fingers the opportunity to put our own humanistic stamp on the technological revolution.
If we can learn to use the new technology effectively, we may be able to win back the respect of the general public which we lost in the sixties due to our inability to prove that we could teach languages effectively and interestingly enough to allow our discipline to assume the central role in the humanities and in public life which should be its due.
Will we be able to turn out a product that prepares people to move immediately into the job world as fully qualified professionals? Or will we fumble the ball again and fall on our collective face?
Actually, many may argue that I am being too hard on our profession. It seems quite evident that the motivational element of even less-than-ideal software may produce improved results. This reminds me of the verb wheel, which, as far as I could tell helps students because they think it helps them (but doesn't do much good when the student is faced with a native speaker on the streets of another country). I'm afraid that these results are only very superficial, and great will be our fall from grace when disillusion sets in if we rely on such materials for long.
We will have to learn to think more creatively about our teaching materials, fully realizing that creativity resides not in the technology but in the human being. We must become more aware of changing needs and help to form the future instead of reacting to change in a knee-jerk reflex. We've just begun to scratch the surface of the potential of technology and, more importantly, of ourselves.
Our major road block is the amounts of human time required to prepare the necessary software for effective CAI. We dare not trust the publishers and programmers alone, but there are few teachers with the necessary expertise to prepare materials; there are even fewer who are willing/able to devote the amount of time necessary, particularly since there has, to date, been little indication that administrations will look kindly upon that sort of effort when it comes time to evaluate an individual for advancement or tenure.
If we are really serious about wanting to improve language instruction (with or without technology), we are going to have to make it possible for TEAMS of experts to devote large blocks of time to materials preparation, and be willing to award them in an appropriate fashion. We may even have to face the probability of greater standardization of materials and curricula.
Technology provides no panacea. In itself it will not increase and sustain enrollments. The perspectives are breath-taking, the sky is the limit. But the weakest link

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