Autonomous Technology-Assisted Language Learning/Exercise

< Autonomous Technology-Assisted Language Learning

Exercise and Courseware

Introduction

While extensive L2 input, output and interaction may be necessary for developing L2 proficiency, for some (most?) learners input and interaction may not be sufficient to attain high levels of L2 proficiency and grammatical accuracy. There are often certain aspects of a L2 that are difficult to acquire without devoting special attention and practice to them.

Drills involve focused repetition of certain tasks designed to aid the acquisition of vocabulary or certain grammatical structures. WordChamp is an example of a program that allows learners to create their own vocabulary list and review them using a variety of drills using reading and audio.


Input enhancement refers to a group of techniques for focusing a learner's attention on aspects of the language that may otherwise go unnoticed and unlearned (see Wong, 2005). Enhanced input includes input flood, textual enhancement, and structured input activities.

Task-based language learning activities (see Nunan, 1999) may also be a way of helping language learners notice and learn form-function relationships in a second language. (perhaps this should be in the Interaction section of this Wikibook?)

Language reconstruction tasks may provide another way for L2 students to improve their L2 proficiency. Such tasks can involve either reading/writing or listening/speaking and involve the learner repeating (via writing or speaking) L2 segments that they have just read or heard. Tools to allow L2 learners to select their own audio or written text for such practice can be provided in a Web-based environment.

Finally, there are web- and computer-based language courses (see Courseware below) in a wide variety of formats, from total, structured immersion in the second language (e.g., Rosetta Stone) to approaches which rely heavily on the memorization of L1-L2 correspondences (e.g., the Pimsleur Method). Between these two extremes is a less commonly used method that gradually moves from L1 to L2 by gradually adding L2 words and phrases and removing L1 ones. An example of this can be found in Power-Glide's "Diglot Weave" (also called "sandwich stories in China).

For autonomous learners, factors such as cost (free or cheap being best), accessibility (web-based being best) and the ability for a learner to keep track of his or progress may be particularly important.

Vocabulary

Multilingual
German
Japanese
Spanish
English

Structured Input

Structured input (SI) activities, as developed by Van Patten and his associates, is a type of processing instruction (PI) developed to "force" L2 learners to pay attention to certain aspects of the L2, particularly those that are redundant and not salient, such as indefinite and definite articles for a Chinese learner of English and the subjunctive for American learners of French and Spanish. Structured output activities may also be useful to help L2 learners acquire difficult aspects of the L2. Providing such exercises on the Web would allow L2 learner worldwide to work on and acquire the "stubborn" aspects of their L2.

Language Reconstruction

Verbatim Reconstruction

Audio to Audio: Elicited Imitation
Audio to Written: Dictation

A program could be created to read from text (text to speech) and then check to see if the student types it correctly by comparing the student's typing with the original text.

Written to Written: Lectation

"Here's one of my favourite games called Running Dictation. It works extremely well and by doing this activity, the students get to practice all the skills.

Aims To develop clearer pronunciation. To wake up a sleepy class!

You need Choose a short piece of text (e.g. five lines) and make enough copies of the text for one per pair of students.

Procedure

Stick the texts up around the room, away from where the students are sitting. Put students into pairs and allocate them a text on the wall. Give each pair a text that is far away from them. Now ask one person in each pair to sit where they are with a pen/pencil and paper. Their partner has to stand up and 'run' to their text, read it, probably chunk by chunk, memorise it, run back to their partner and dictate it, helping in any way they can. However they cannot actually write it (e.g. 'No, "actually" has got 2 "l"s.' 'There's a new line there.' etc.). The winners are the pair with the first absolutely correct version of the text.

Extension/variation The activity can then be redone, with a different text and with the other member of the pair acting as 'runner'. NB This activity can be very noisy so you may need to check with neighbouring classes that it will not disturb them too much.

Have Fun!!"

Another individual variation of this type of task it to provide a text on one side of a sheet of paper and the student has to copy it with no errors on the other side. This will force the student to memorize chunks of the text because the student will not be able to see the text while writing.

Conclusion

Dictation (copy spoken language) and lectation (copy written language) exercises are easily provided via computer (e.g., as Moodle quiz) because the output to score is written.

These techniques can also be used as tools for assessment.

Meaning (Gloss) Reconstruction

Dictogloss

See Swain (1998).

Technology for Language Reconstruction

Available from Multilingual Books, the Instant Replay Digital Cassette Recorder ($49), (also called "Language Repeater") is a combination audio cassette player/recorder and digital player/recorder that allows you to easily an automatically repeat phrases from an audio cassette tape. This allows a language learner opportunities for repeated listening. There is also a mode that automatically pauses after playing a phrase (as defined by breath pauses) and then switches automatically to record mode. After the user has finished recording the phrase, it will playback the learner's recording and then compare it to the cassette tape. It will repeat the same phrase over and over, providing multiple opportunities for listening and repeating until the user does not say anything, at which time it will play the next phrase.

I [GC] believe that this playback and recording modes of this machine can be used for effective language-learning exercises. As the audio cassette is somewhat dated technology, it would be great if the same functions (and additional ones, such as variable speed playback) were made available on a portable music player for playing audio files and on computer software for playing audio and video files, CDs and DVDs.

This machine can also be a very useful tool for transcribing audio tapes. In the playback and compare mode, the user can just say "again" or "hey" (anything) and the machine will repeat the phrase again. If the user is silent, it will play the next phrase.

(Please note that the Instant Replay Digital CD/MP3 Recorder mentioned on the same webpage is no longer available, but the vendor is attempting to make a similar model available soon).

Here are what appear to be more sophisticated language repeaters.

The Text Presenter is a prototype developed by Richard Sproat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is a web-based exercise that allows the user to paste in any English text and have it presented by phrases in selectable lengths for retyping. It provides feedback after each entry by showing errors.

Hot Potatoes

Speaking

Online Language Labs

Online language labs allow teachers to create collaborative multimedia resources for students to complete online. As students engage with the resources, teachers can supervise and give help in real time.

Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT)

Writing

Text Exerciser

Adapted from discussion between Gary Cziko and Errol O'Neill 2005.04.04

Errol discovered an interesting French exercise at http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~creitan/clark.htm that contrasts the imperfect and past perfect tenses in French.

What is nice is about this exercise is that (a) it takes place within a meaningful paragraph, (b) provides opportunities for needed input relevant to aspects of grammar to be acquired, and (d) "forces" the learner to pay attention to form, and (d) provides feedback for each right or wrong answer.

I am wondering if this type of exercise couldn't be adapted so that it provides input flood (i.e., many examples of a targeted structure), enhanced text and structured input all in one exercise (see Wong, 2005).

This could be accomplished with different views of the same paragraph as follows:

1. Normal view with correct tenses included. To the extent that there are many examples of a target structure, this would be input flood.

2. Clicking on a button would turn all the targeted tenses into a larger font with a distinctive color (e.g., Big and Green). This would be enhanced input.

3. A different button would put the paragraph into the form of the original exercise, requiring the student to choose the correct verb form (Errol wants to make it even harder by providing only the infinitive and requiring the student to type the correct form rather than just recognize it). This would be structured input. Then as each correct form is chosen (or typed), it would turn back into normal text, that is back to no. 1, input flood again.

Students could repeat the cycle as many times as they wanted. All this could be easily set up by someone with basic computer programming and web design skills.



Now, wouldn't it be really neat if the preparation of these different views could be done automatically? That is, find an interesting text and have a program provide the three views above. For example, you find an authentic interesting text that has lots of articles, pronouns, and past tense varieties. You paste this text into a window and then tell the program that you want to focus on articles. Of course, nothing has to be done for view 1 (input flood). But then the learner tells the program that he or she wants to emphasize (enhance) the articles. The program then finds all the articles, enhances them by making them big and green, et voilà, you have enhanced text. Then the student presses another button and the program creates the structured input exercise by taking each article and adding the other two articles as choices (e.g., if the correct choice is "the", it adds "a" and [blank] (no article) as choices. This is the structured input view which requires that the student choose the correct article. As each correct article is chosen, the other choices disappear and it turns back into normal text and the cycle can be repeated, either with the same grammatical focus, of with and different one (e.g., past tense forms or pronouns).

This should also be pretty easy to set up for something as simple as articles (a, the, null) and pronouns (he, she , it , they) in English. Tenses are a bit tougher perhaps as the program would have to know how to generate other tenses to create the distractors, e.g., if it sees "bought" it would have to generate something like "was buying", "have bought", "had bought", etc.

An even more sophisticated program would first analyze the text and see what forms were most common and suggest what types of grammatical forms the student could use the text to focus on (it would not suggest focusing on pronouns if there were few pronouns).

I think this could be a very useful programming, combining the best of current input techniques that focus on form while allowing the learner to choose the text that he or she is interested in.

As it would create useful exercises from normal text, we could call it the "Text Exerciser" and would be a great ATALL tool.

Grammar Consciousness-Raising (GCR)

See Fotos and Ellis in Wong (2005) input enhancement book (2005)

Note 1: You cannot use the trick of always using a lot of or lots of for asking questions. You must instead use how + many for count nouns and how + much for mass (uncountable) nouns.

Note 2: Many languages, such as French, German and Spanish, use the same word (beaucoup, viel, mucho) to describe "lots of" for both countable and mass nouns. So the use of much vs. many in English is likely to cause difficulty for natives speakers of these languages learning English as an additional language.

Courseware (Commercial and Free)

Language-Learning-Advisor.com by language enthusiast Ron Tichenor provides reviews of commercial language learning courseware (and some free language learning products, too) for a about a dozen different languages.

Multilingual

Chinese

French

Spanish

French and Dutch

Chinese and English

Chinese

English

English and Japanese

German

Moodle for Language Teaching

Resources

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English
Spanish
German
Japanese

Miscellaneous

References

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