WorldCALL 3

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.

[Music]

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.