As the final project in our Technology in Foreign Language course I need to come up with a research study that can be implemented in our classrooms and that can help explaining the advantages of using a specific kind of technology in the development of one or several skills.
I have always been interested in the first approach to a foreign language, that is...with zero or close to zero knowledge, and particularly in how students learn how to break that first fear barrier to speak with errors and to sound ridiculous or illogical. Like many other FL teachers I also believe that it is very important to integrate the cultural context into the learning process as a way to remember the power of being able to understand and interact with other realities around the world. So the first idea I had was to teach the students how to make a better use of the new technologies for this purpose in a podcast forum. Podcasts are very portable and very easy to create using accessible resources other than the Language Lab. In fact, most of the podcasts out there are spoken directly into the home PC using a built-in or external microphone. The idea is to give the students the opportunity, from the very beginning, to explore their capacity to speak a foreign language and express their own ideas about a general topic, outside of the classroom environment. I still don’t know exactly how I could incorporate this experiment into the daily class plan and that’s why it is still a work in progress.
Using a very simple online forum platform, instead of written messages, the students would create oral anonymous comments around a topic of their current interest such as life at school, or social events or even interaction with foreign cultures. The general idea is that the students listen to their own progress in pronunciation and use of vocabulary and grammar by comparing their podcasts. In theory this project could also demonstrate how technology could have a positive effect on the students as they socialize online in a more relaxed environment than the classroom. My idea is that all students would be required to upload a message (using ftp, for example) to the debate forum of no more than 60 seconds every 2-3 days or every week. The message could be saved as an mp3 or wav file under a knick name or alias with the date. As the semester progresses their voices are going to be more and more familiar to each other and eventually the nicknames will become useless, but their oral skills may have improve considerably.
Of course many of the students will look for ways to be able to speak without pronunciation or grammatical errors, and they would probably even read their comments from a convenient source but, would they have tried to do so if there was no other opportunity to speak the target language along the week? I think that the benefits from this could be great. Also, there can be other activities incorporated to the forum such as polls to find out how the students feel about creating podcasts and links to other websites or other media that could enhance the cultural aspect of the debates.
As of today I have two questions that I intend to answer with this research:
1) Is the podcast technology a better (faster, more relaxed, natural) way to impulse the oral production in students at beginner level in FL education?
2) How does an online oral forum contributes to enhance teaching of cultural aspects in FL education?
What do you think? Any comments?
2 comments:
It seems like a lot of us are looking into how to use podcasts better in the classroom. (I am thinking of doing my project on whether requiring podcasts will cause better in class oral performance.) I like your idea of allowing the students to leave anonymous comments to a discussion board. I wonder if this will lower the students' affective filters, so they will be more willing to participate and take risks because they know there is no way that you can give them a grade based on correctness. My only suggestion for you is that you re-word your first question so it does not assume a positive effect from podcasts. (You never know the podcasts could negatively affect the students. Although I doubt it ;))
Hey!
Like Liz, I too am focusing on podcasts. My question sounds similar to yours through the use of podcasts and the emphasis on speaking skills. While your question is more posed towards actually increasing oral communication, mine is specifically about focusing on effects on the accent. If you find your research becomes to general and you don't know how to narrow it down, maybe you could pick one specific speaking skill. I think both should be really interesting!
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