WorldCALL 3

This podcast features an interview with Peter Ruthven-Stuart of Future University in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan. He will be doing a poster session and two paper presentations.

Wed. July 6th (16:35-17:20)
Machine translation websites: communication tools but an impediment to communicative competence.

Wed. July 6th (17:25-18:10)
Factors affecting the integration of courseware into a communication course

Fri. July 8th (15:20-15:50)(Poster Session)
The question creation activity module: making autonomous learning a reality in Moodle.

Interview with Claire Bradin Siskin, WorldCALL 3 workshop presenter.

Revoluton for Language Learning site: http://edvista.com/claire/rev/.
Revolution Learning Templates: http://edvista.com/claire/rev/templates/templates.html
WorldCALL 3 website: http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/

Hello and welcome to another WorldCALL 3 podcast. This podcast features an interview with Professor Claire Bradin Siskin, a workshop presenter at this summer’s conference.

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It is early May, and there is still plenty of time to register for WorldCALL 3. This podcast is particularly aimed at those of you planning to attend the pre-conference workshops, and I really recommend that you do since there is a great selection of interesting opportunities to learn. To start to help you reach a decision on which workshops to attend, today we’re going to have our first interview with a workshop presenter, Claire Bradin Siskin , whose workshop is titled, Join the Revolution. The revolution involves a certain piece of software that allows users to easily create interactive learning applications for the computer. I’ll let her tell you more in a moment. She is director of the Robert Henderson Language Media Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-chair of the Program Committee for WorldCALL 3, in addition to being a workshop presenter and it certainly would not be wrong to call her one of the early pioneers in the field of CALL. I sent her some questions to learn more about her role with WorldCALL and the content of her workshop.

1) Could you introduce yourself and talk a little about your work and research areas?

I started my teaching career as a Spanish teacher and then taught English as a second and foreign language for many years. I first became inspired by the possibilities of computer-assisted language learning (or CALL) in 1983. That was when I first had a microcomputer at home. In those early days, my son had to help me a lot because I didn’t know much about computers. One day I took my computer to class and watched my students work with a simple vocabulary exercise. I’ll never forget the excitement and energy in the classroom that day. Even though 6 students were working at only one computer, they loved the fact that they could interact with the program and get feedback.

Today I work in a language lab, and I support the use of technology in learning many different languages. I guess I’ve never lost that feeling of excitement and enthusiasm that comes when the computers work as we intend them to and truly support the language learner. I have learned that CALL is most successful when language teachers are engaged in the process, so I am involved in teacher education. I am especially interested in software programs and tools that make it easier for teachers and learners to use computers effectively. I also teach a graduate-level course about CALL.

2) What has been your role with WorldCALL?

I attended the first 2 WorldCALL conferences – first in Melbourne, Australia in 1998 and then in Banff, Canada in 2003 and presented papers at both. For those 2 conferences, I also served as chair of the Scholarship Committee. The committee members selected CALL practitioners from underserved countries to attend WorldCALL. The opportunity to attend WorldCALL and meet the scholarship recipients at both conferences was a rewarding experience, and I look forward to meeting the 2008 awardees in Japan. For the 2008 conference, I am co-chairing the Program Committee with Françoise Blin. Françoise and I are doing our best to put together a program which will be international in scope and reflective of the multiple ways in which computers are used today in language learning. We have the help of a large Program Committee, and we are especially grateful for the support that we have received from our Japanese hosts in the LET organization.

3) After I read the outline for your workshop, I took a look at the website for Runtime Revolution. The software seems impressive, but could you tell us what the benefits are to using this tool and how it differs from other programs that could be used to make CALL materials?

Revolution is a little hard to define. It is described as a “rapid application development (RAD) tool,” and it has also been called a “software erector set.” If you liked playing with modelling clay when you were a child, you will enjoy Revolution. It gives the developer a lot of freedom to create. Some CALL practitioners may remember HyperCard, which was a popular tool for creating CALL materials for the Macintosh. Revolution incorporates many of the features of HyperCard, but it has been developed much further, and it offers many advantages over HyperCard. Revolution is cross-platform, and it is possible to develop materials on a PC and export them to a Macintosh, or vice-versa. There is integrated color, and you can capture and play back both audio and video files. It can be integrated with database programs and with the Internet. It is fairly easy to collect learner data with Revolution, so it is an ideal tool for both research and assessment in a language lab setting.

What I like best about Revolution is its ease of use. Both teachers and students seem to enjoy creating materials with it, and they don’t need to have high-level programming skills to do this. I also like the fact that I can use Revolution without depending on the Internet, but I can also use it to connect to the resources on the Internet if I need to.

4) Many people are now using course management systems such as Moodle or Blackboard and using freely available content sharing tools to add multimedia and interactivity to their courses. What benefits do you see software like Revolution offering such instructors?

In the first place, Revolution can be used to create CALL materials for those situations in which the Internet is not available at all or is not dependable. Course management systems do allow one to share multimedia resources, but the degree of interactivity with the learner isn’t as well developed as it is with Revolution. To achieve a high degree of interactivity in web-based materials requires the use of programs such as Java or Flash. Revolution is much easier to learn than either of these. I’m doing what I can to make the process of learning about Revolution even easier. If you are interested, you might want to check out my web page, “Revolution for Language Learning,” at http://edvista.com/claire/rev/. Also, I have created a number of templates for language learning. These can be downloaded from http://edvista.com/claire/rev/templates/templates.html. The purpose of the templates is to show language educators what can be done with Revolution and give them a starting point for developing their own CALL materials.

Marcel: Well that brings us to the end of this podcast. I would like to thank our guest today, Claire Bradin Siskin, for taking part. I’m sure her workshop will be interesting. You can find the exact time and place of the workshop listed on the WrodCALL 3 website. If you’re planning to attend, or if you are just interested in the software, please take a look at the websites she mentioned. You can find them linked in the transcripts to this podcast. The transcripts, by the way, can be accessed by clicking on the little blue WorldCALL link in the player located on the WorldCALL 3 website. If you downloaded this podcast from iTunes, please be aware that due to space limitations, the full transcripts do not automatically get downloaded with the audio file. Thanks again to Jeff Wahl for his Loop-o-Plane music, available from magnatune.com. And thank you, for downloading this podcast. I’m Marcel Van Amelsvoort, a member of the Kanto chapter of LET. Have a great day and see you next time.

Prof. Vera Menezes Interview Transcripts
WorldCALL website: http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/
Dr. Menezes’s website http://www.veramenezes.com/
Podcast website http://worldcall3@podomatic.com

This is the official podcast series for the WorldCALL 3 Conference to be held in Fukuoka Japan from August 5th to 8th in 2008. This podcast features an interview with Professor Vera Menezes, one of the keynote speakers at the conference this summer.

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Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I’m Marcel Van Amelsvoort, a member of LET in Japan, the group hosting WorldCALL this time and this podcast is part of a series of interviews with conference organizers and presenters. We are now less than five months away from the start of the conference and most things are in place. Information on the keynote speakers and the workshops is available on the WorldCALL website and registration is well underway. Discount Earlybird registration is also still available but will be only until the end of April.

In the podcast this time, we’ll hear from Dr. Vera Menezes, one of the four keynote speakers at the conference this summer. The title of her address is CALL: A strange attractor in language education in South America. One of the really interesting aspects of a conference like WorldCALL is the opportunity it provides to meet people from other regions of the world and hear what they are doing, and today’s podcast guest is the keynote speaker who will be making the longest journey to get to Japan, since she is based in Brazil. In the outline for her talk, she mentions that she is planning to talk about chaos theory and CALL and about CALL in Brazil and South America. In order to get to know her and her subject matter a little better, I sent her some questions.

Marcel: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your areas of interest?

Dr. Menezes: Well, I live in Brazil, a former Portuguese colony. By the way, Spanish is the main language in our continent and Brazil is the only country in South America where Portuguese is spoken. I work at Federal University of Minas Gerais, the main university in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais means “General Mines” in Portuguese). My state is famous because of its historical towns on the mountains. It has the largest concentration of historic towns in our country. Three of them are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. These 18th century towns have the best examples of baroque art and architecture produced in Brazil.
Well, let me talk a little bit about myself. I majored in English in 1971. In my masters, in 1988, I worked with the use of advertisements in EFL teaching. In my Ph.D, in 1991, I carried out a semiotic investigation on the invasion of English words in the Brazilian Culture.
I have been working with computer assisted language learning since 1997. I have been teaching reading and writing through the Internet and also some topics aiming at language teacher education.
Concerning research, I am particularly interested in language acquisition and learning and interaction in virtual environments. At present, I feel myself divided into two passions: computer assisted language learning and language learning histories. Narrative research is a fascinating methodology and in order to conciliate my diverse interests, I decided to work with multimedia narratives. My students write their language learning histories and add hyperlinks, images, sounds, and videos. A good corpus of those multimedia narratives can be found in my website.

Marcel: The topic of your keynote address seems very interesting. Without giving too much away, could you let us know briefly what you plan to talk about, and could you provide a little background for those listeners who may not be so familiar with chaos theory?
Dr. Menezes: Chaos theory deals with nonlinear dynamical systems which are apparently disordered. I say, apparently, because there is an underlying order in this apparently lack of order, but it is impossible to make accurate predictions. The dynamics of chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system.
I think chaos theory offers good metaphors for us to understand how technology has always worked as perturbations in the initial conditions of the educational systems. And chaos should not seen be as a negative feature in education, but as a positive dynamical instability which makes the systems evolve.

Think, for instance, of the impact of the book in schools. It is now part of any school routine, but it was a big issue when it was first introduced into the classroom. The book changed teaching and it is now an inseparable element of the education dynamics.
The educational system is an open system and its dynamicity, in spite of the expected resistances, is influenced by the dynamics of technological development but, it also influences the route of the technology industry.
I think the educational system in the whole world is suffering the turbulence of the new technologies, but in South America, perhaps, the rhythm of the technological integration in schools is still slow due to our serious unbalances in regional development, income distribution and in educational quality. We must face the digital divide and the gap between rich and poor learners
I intend to discuss a little bit about the positive dynamical instability, that is chaos, which new technologies brought to language learning language in South America.

Marcel: I think many listeners will be interested in hearing about the state of English and other language education in South America. Could you talk a little about some of the challenges there and how you have tried to meet those challenges?

Dr. Menezes: English is the main foreign language studied in South America. In Brazil, Spanish teaching is increasing due to legal requirements and the same is happening with Portuguese in other countries, such as Argentina, for example.
Concerning CALL, I guess that we face the same challenges found all over the world: limited technology and big classes, limited connections and limited hardware, lack of technical support, and the price of software. Although free software, such as Linux, is also found in schools, we still have to pay a lot of money to Bill Gates.
I have been testing different designs to deal with some of the challenges we face in our context. My PhD students and I have been investigating new possibilities to overcome the constraints we are supposed to face in our context. One of these attempts dealt with online autonomous groups. Braga (2007), under my supervision, found out that we can successfully teach big classes if we divide them into small groups and give them autonomy to do their tasks according to their limitations of time and technology. By doing so, we promoted distribution of control and the learning communities could make decisions which enabled them to overcome possible difficulties in accessing the internet.

Marcel: You also had an interesting quotation in one of the articles you listed in your profile (No one educates anyone else, no one educates themselves, men educate one another, mediated by the world.—Paulo Freire). Could you talk a little about this as well?

Dr. Menezes: Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator who influenced many teachers around the world. He was against traditional education which he used to describe with the banking metaphor. In his famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he says the teacher as narrator leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. This “banking education” turns students into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is and education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Freire adds that knowledge emerges only through a continuing and hopeful inquiry, in the world, with the world, and with each other.
That is what our group in Brazil has been trying to do. We believe that in asynchronous on-line courses, supported by socio-cultural methodologies, we can create an environment in which we educate each other, mediated by the computer. When I say we, I include myself, because I also have been learning with my students. I understand that the role of teachers in this millennium is to facilitate interaction and collaboration among students and allow their creativity to arouse.
As Freire’s follower, I believe in education as the practice of freedom and not as an instrument of oppression. I want CALL to help my students to reflect, act and transform the world.

Marcel: And that brings us to the end of this podcast. I would like to thank Professor Menezes for giving her time to make this podcast possible. And thanks to Jeff Wahl again and his song Loop-o-plane, available a Magnatune.com. Limited transcripts for this podcast are available through iTunes. For full transcripts, you’ll need to go to the podcast site at podomatic.com. That’s it. See you next time.

Trude Heift Interview Transcripts

Dr. Heift’s website can be found at http://www.sfu.ca/~heift/
WorldCALL 3 website: http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/

Marcel: The first thing I asked her to do was to introduce herself and talk a little about her work and research areas.

Prof. Heift: I was born and raised in Germany and after obtaining a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certification I taught for three years in California before moving to Canada where I completed a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree in linguistics. In 1998, I started a professor position in the linguistics department as SFU [Simon Fraser University], where I currently teach both German language courses as well as theoretical courses in linguistics, including courses on SLA and CALL. My main research interest lies in computer assisted language learning bridging applied and computational linguistics. I am interested in the design as well as the evaluation of intelligent language tutoring systems. These are computer environments for second language learning that make use of natural language processing and techniques of artificial intelligence. From a second language acquisition and CALL perspective, I focus on studies of human-computer interaction such as studying navigation patterns, learner strategies and responses with intelligent systems as well as corrective feedback and error analysis. From a computational point of view, I am interested in automatic analysis of learner language and learner modeling. Learner models try to gather and structure information about the learner by determining their current knowledge state and taking into account learner and task variables. Most of this work involves empirical studies with the ultimate goal of creating a language learning environment that best facilitates learning through truly individualized instruction. In this context, I am investigating what techniques different learners employ when using a language learning system. Most of my CALL software usability studies are carried out with the E-Tutor, an online language learning system for German that is used in German language courses at several North American universities. The system consists of a robust parsing system and provides error-specific learner feedback by performing a linguistic analysis of learner input. In addition, it contains an open learner model that also adjusts and modulates feedback suited to learner expertise by considering individualized help options.

Marcel: Next, I asked her to talk little generally at first about feedback for language learners and what types of feedback are most useful. In addition, I asked her to talk a little about feedback in CALL and how it is challenging.

Prof. Heift: Issues regarding the role and contribution of corrective feedback for language learning have been central to second language acquisition theory and pedagogy. Corrective feedback has received much attention in the oral classroom lately, in particular studies that investigate the effectiveness of recasts. Recasts involve a teacher’s reformulation of a student’s utterance, minus the error, sometimes also referred to as paraphrase. Some studies for instance found that recasts appear to be most effective in contexts where it is clear to the learner that the recast is a reaction to the accuracy of the form, not the content of the original utterance. More general, studies further indicate that the efficacy of corrective feedback in the oral classroom is determined by a number of factors. For example, some research shows that the success of corrective feedback is affected by its format, the type of error, and certain learner characteristics. Of the learner characteristics taken into consideration, verbal intelligence, relative proficiency within levels at school or university, and the learner’s attitudes toward correction proved to be most influential. However, despite this vast interest in studying the role of corrective feedback in the oral classroom, very little research has been conducted for the CALL environment. Due to a difference in modes of instruction, however, the studies and the outcomes will most likely vary for the two respective learning environments and thus independent research in both areas is needed. The limited research that does exist for grammar instruction in CALL, and that includes my own work, generally found that metalinguistic feedback (feedback that explains the type of an error) is more effective than traditional CALL feedback mostly associated with WRONG: TRY AGAIN. The challenging part, however, is to be able to generate this more sophisticated type of feedback. Many simple drills, for instance, are usually based on string-matching algorithms; that is, the student response is compared, letter for letter, against an answer key. Yet one obviously cannot store the infinitely many sentences required for meaningful practice for purposes of comparison and thus more sophisticated answer processing techniques have to be found.

Marcel: And now for my final question. In the outline for her talk, Dr. Heift mentions ICALL. I thought perhaps many listeners may not be so familiar with it so I asked her to explain a little about ICALL and AI and how their use makes teaching and learning different from more traditional methods and from regular CALL?

Prof. Heift: The use of parses in CALL is commonly referred to as intelligent CALL or ICALL, however, it might be more accurately described as parser-based CALL because its intelligence lies in the use of parsing, a technique that enables the computer to encode complex grammatical knowledge, such as humans use to assemble sentences, recognize errors, and make corrections. A parser produces a formal linguistic representation of natural language input by identifying the grammatical functions of the parts of a sentence. With respect to the use of parser-based CALL in teaching and learning, a number of researchers have identified the significant interactive qualities of CALL as one advantage of using the computer in the language classroom. True interaction, however, requires intelligent behavior on the part of the computer. Without intelligence, the system is merely another method of presenting information, one not necessarily preferable to a static medium like print. Instead of multiple choice questions, relatively uninformative answer keys, and gross mainstreaming of characteristic students of workbooks, parser-based CALL is aiming at interactive computer systems possessing a high degree of artificial intelligence and capable of processing natural language input. The strength of NLP, therefore, is that it allows for a sophisticated error analysis where student tasks can go beyond multiple choice questions and/or fill in the blanks and it thus provides the analytical complexity underpinning a parser-based system. However, in addition to focusing on automatic analysis of learner language to provide error-specific feedback, techniques of artificial intelligence have also been applied to student modeling. A student model is any information which a teaching program has, which is specific to the particular student being taught. The reason for maintaining such information is to help the program to decide on appropriate teaching actions with the ultimate goal to achieve an individualized learning environment. The information itself can range from a simple count of how many incorrect and correct answers have been given, to some complicated data structure which, in addition to the student’s knowledge of the subject matter, also includes learner and task variables such as, for instance, learning styles. Accordingly, a student model enables the tutoring system to not only observe, record, and analyze surface phenomena of the learning activity such as text entered by language learners, but also to reason, or at least speculate about the underlying causes of correct as well as incorrect responses. Student models are challenging in a number of ways. For instance, some of the central questions are how to capture, what kind of information, and how to maintain and implement it. Such difficulties have since been the subject of debate and research toward solving some of these thorny problems is well under way.

In our second interview, we hear from Professor Francoise Blin the organizing committee co-chair. She talks a little about her roles with EuroCALL and WorldCALL, her research with feedback in Moodle-based courses, and her first trip to Japan. Her website can be found at http://webpages.dcu.ie/~blinf/

In this our first interview, we hear from Professor Mike Levy, Chair of the WorldCALL 2008 Conference Planning Committee (CPC), on the history and organizational challenges of WorldCALL. He also gives an overview of developments in CALL and predictions of trends we can expect to hear about at WorldCALL 3 in Fukuoka Japan. The website for WorldCALL 3 can be found at http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/

Hello and welcome to the first episode. The website for WorldCALL 3 is located at http://www.j-let.org/~wcf/modules/tinyd0/