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Setting up a High-Tech Language School?
Bakerybob writes "My wife and I are currently setting up a small Japanese language school, and I am in charge of all of the technical aspects, with a small but not tiny budget. What would Slashdot recommend as technologies we could use to improve the student experience (and hopefully to interest more students in the school!)? We have the easy bases (free Wifi access for students, a stunningly poorly designed homepage, and a few cheap computers lying around for them to play on between classes) covered, but I'm sure there are a lot of better ideas out there. Has anyone used Moogle? What about online lessons via webcam? Give it your best shot, revolutionary thinkers!"
Has anyone used Moogle?
Don't you mean Moodle, the online educational tool similar to Blackboard or WebCT? Moodle can be a great tool to assist the classroom experience; we're testing it out in my department and will hopefully deploy it throughout our private prep school for the next academic year.
Besides computers(hardware) you need to be looking into software as well to help students learn the language/s with the help of current technology. I have been trying to emulate, "state of the art" lab over @ Rice University, Houston, TX. Link : http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lrc/index_flash.html
I worked for the largest language school in the world for 5 years, during which we rolled out a series of e-learning applications. I can tell you the following things:
1) Technology should be used to supplement langauge lessons - never teach them. Distance learning can be done via webcam if absolutely necessary, and you can take advantage of existing technologies for that. Look into Placeware or more likely WebEx.
2) You can license existing e-learning platforms from companies like Auralog, they sell on a sliding scale.
3) Students love to be able to see schedules and homework assignments online. Computer software applications also make great supplements for at-home practice. Also consider setting up a community bulletin board for students to communicate with eachother in their non-native tongue.
I know none of this is revolutionary thinking - but it is sage advice for teaching language with technology. My company tried to teach through technology alone and it failed - the lesson learned was even eLearning needed to be a supplement - not the basis for learning.
Best Luck!
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
I spent a year at Waseda, and I studied Japanese for 4 years at a university prior to my year abroad. One thing is vital: watch movies in class. You should have students study text for only a year or two, but from there, go straight to media. By watching drama, you get to watch, listen, and read simultaneously (because they display captions on the screen). For Japanese, culture is just a part of the language as the vocabulary and grammar. So, when the students have grasped the fundamentals of Japanese, throw them in front of the screen. It's the closest they can get to being in Japan without going...and it will give them a glimpse of what they're in for if they go. This is important because westerners have NO idea what it's like to live alongside the Japanese. None. --My third-year professor would type out the scripts and we would go over about 20-second intervals of the film at a time. Great class. And let's not turn this into a Japan-bashing post everyone. I mean, hey, I'd love to leash out a little myself, but this isn't the place. This guy obviously wants to improve western relations with Japan. I say more power to him. http://www.forum.japantoday.com There you go. Bash away on their forum.
Buy DVDs, lots of cartoon DVDs and lend them out to the students.
DVDs because the multiple languages and subtitles are a great way to learn a new language. Cartoons because animation has simpler phrases.
I think I can speak at least somewhat authoritatively on this topic since it's at least part of my area of thesis research.
Bottom line: You are wrong when you assert that computers can be programmed to replace competent language instructors. But, the grandparent of this post is also wrong when they claim that they are not good for classroom instruction.
It takes some knowledge about what makes for effective foreign language learning. What it boils down to is interaction. The traditional school of thought used to be that foreign languages would be learned by studying the grammar of the language first, understanding the grammatical transformations that go on from L1 to L2. Then, drop in the appropriate vocabulary, and boom. You're bilingual! Problem is that this made people very good at translation but barely passable in communication. After this, another trend of thought was that students would learn the language with a shitload of input. Just keep hammering them with endless streams of data, and eventually the innate learning algorithms of the brain would kick in and bilingual ability would magically appear. Hence the number of hours one has to pull at language labs. Most students sleep at these labs. There are a zillion and one approaches that claim to be superior but are, more often than not, a theory for a dissertation. In alot of these cases, the "superiority" claim comes from the nature of the evaluation criteria. Like I said previously, those taugh tin the old school "learn the grammar then the vocab" school of thought were really good translators, but horrible at communication. Both of the methods above are illustrations of transmissive learning. The idea that students are just empty cannisters waiting to be filled with facts and figures and somehow, they will magically think and solve problems.
Fast forward to today. Educators have found that the most effective methods for learning are those that allow students to be actively involved in the problem domain. Allowed to explore and discover structure and make observations on their own with little guide posts to keep them on topic, students gain a more thorough understanding of the underlying principles.
The same is true for foreign language learning. Some of the best results come from students who are allowed and encouraged to vocally produce their own sentences (NOT simply read, write, or translate) in dialogues with other students or people fluent in the target language. Given feedback during the conversation, either implicitly or explicitly, students are allowed to explore and learn from mistakes while engaging in an activity that was, on the whole, more enjoyable than lecture or "drill-and-kill" exercises. This makes sense in light of research on language acquisition in infants which shows that social interaction is crucial for proper development of language skills. It is also anecdotally observed by all learners of a foreign language that one doesn't really learn the language to the point of communicative competency until one actually goes to a country and interacts with people in the language. (Where else will you learn that when you say "gan4", instead of "gan1" in Mandarin that it means "fuck" instead of "bottoms up?" Trust me, when I say "gan1" these days, my pitch is nice and level!)
This sort of activity isn't really encouraged in most foreign language learning classes. Especially at the high school level. In some universities it is, but for the most part it isn't. Most universities have the model of classroom time/lab time with tapes. One of the problems is student teacher ratio. When one is teaching 30 students, it's difficult to have proper dialogues with them... most resort to having students repeat phrases or reading scripted dialogue.
Another problem is that students might feel shy about speaking the language. No one likes to make mistakes, and among peers, this can be a particularly acute fear.
This is where computers can fit in. Dialogue systems (in the researc
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