Integrating technology into the humanities classroom: Language learning

Presentation at the Center for Integrated Studies in the Arts and Humanities brownbag, February 15, 2007

First of all, thanks for inviting me to the brownbag session. I’m pleased that you think the experiences of language teaching are relevant to this discussion of teaching the humanities. Language is often seen as the problem child in academia, because it's expensive to teach language, and the relatively low number of majors makes it difficult to justify the labor budgets. In addition, the shortcomings of language teaching are sometimes painfully obvious. Karl Conrad Diller once said that the history of language teaching is largely a history of failure, because the vast majority of learners fail to reach even rudimentary levels of fluency. Language might not be unique among academic subjects in this respect, but the level of success that results from taking a language is more obvious than that of other subjects. To demonstrate, let's see if you can complete the phrase that I hear all the time from people when I tell them that I'm in languages: “I took four years of (fill in the language of choice here), but .....” (I can't speak a word / I forgot it all / I couldn't communicate with anyone when I went abroad).

I'm going to talk this afternoon about our experiences in helping instructors to integrate technology into the their language classes. I am aware that I'm probably the only person in the room who cares about language teaching, but Joy and Kitty and I thought that there are some things that we're doing at the Language Learning Center that you might find interesting and useful. I'm going to focus on big-picture issues and talk about learning in general, so that we can keep the discussion relevant to your own teaching. In addition, I know from my own experience in talking with people about language learning that many people have opinions and questions about language learning in general. Feel free to interrupt me at any time with questions and comments. I may not listen to you or agree with you, but feel free to chime in anyway.

A common concern for language teachers is understanding their students' progress. There are some big questions. Did they learn what we wanted them to learn? What did they learn? Are they aware of what they have learned? I think these questions are relevant to any content area, and they're especially important in language classes.

The classroom as it functions today in higher education is a really bad environment for language learning. There are estimates of the number of instructional hours that are required to achieve proficiency in languages. I did the math, and given the number of hours that students would get at MSU under ideal conditions, in four years they would get 600 hours of instruction, which is less than the time needed to reach proficiency in the “easy” languages like Spanish, German, French, Swahili, Hatian Creole, and Norwegian. It's one quarter of the time required for languages like Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Russian, and the other languages that the government has labeled “critical” for national security. 2400 hours is the number quoted as the requirement to reach speaking proficiency in those languages. At the rate at which we teach languages in college, it would take students 16 years to reach speaking proficiency.

Learning a language is more than memorizing a list of vocabulary words and grammar rules. Fundamentally, language is a system for representing meaning. I've met people who can spout out a long list of grammar rules, but who can't express themselves at all. That to me is evidence that there is a difference between knowing a language and merely knowing ABOUT a language. I'm sure that a similar situation holds true for all the humanities. We want the students not just to read and to “understand” the content of the courses that we teach, we want them to be able to apply the content, to synthesize it into new content.

The main challenge for classroom language teaching is providing opportunities for output. There's a pretty well-established body of research that shows that students need to speak in order to learn a language. Speaking forces language learners to focus on the rules of the language, and it leads to feedback and interaction, which refines their language proficiency. A good language teacher will have students speaking as much as possible.

Steve Rachman made a very valuable point at his talk last week that we shouldn't try to reproduce the classroom environment with our technology solutions. I agree with that to a large extent, and would add that technology can also provide the kind of environment that we might want to create in the classroom, but can't. That statement is based on classroom research that showed who did what in the classroom. Depressingly, teachers talk most of the time, which doesn't give students much time to talk. This is an area that technology can address and hopefully meet a need.

For the past three years or so, I've been developing technology tools that can integrate into existing curricular frameworks and fill in gaps that are created by the modern classroom structure. Generally, the tools are born from discussions with language teachers, where I ask questions like “what bugs you about teaching your language?” or, “what do you miss about the place you taught before you came to MSU?” Not surprisingly, a lot of the conversations centered on speaking.

A technical limitation prevented us from doing much about this for a while. We started moving to web-based materials before it was possible to allow audio capture through the web. We were sort of stuck there for about five years until a new software program called the Flash Media Server was released in late 2003. This software provides an infrastructure that allows seamless two-way streaming of media. That means that learners can click a button, record themselves, and the audio file is saved onto the server instantly.

Let me show you one implementation of this technology.

[Audio Portfolios]

Let me share the ways in which we use this tool. The basic use is to assign speaking homework to students. Since we can’t give students enough speaking time in class, the program can be used to extend the class meeting time into online activities. That’s what I meant by augmenting the class.

There is another area that we’re exploring in technology for the languages, and this one might be more relevant to other humanities classes. Last year was arguable the Year of YouTube. The online video sharing service was a cultural phenomenon, permeating many aspects of our lives, up to and including the midterm congressional elections. Not surprisingly, students are heavy users of YouTube. I feel that its importance stems from the participatory nature of the program. The program is useless without the content that is in there, and the users of the program provide the content.

Marshall McCluhan may have been right, that content is secondary to the medium that expresses it. If so, then it’s true that content in isolation might not have the educational value that we might want it to. YouTube can be used as an educational tool, but it its educational value isn’t realized as it is. Luckily, we can create tools to exploit the content and create innovative ways of expression.

For each individual clip that it hosts, YouTube provides the HTML code that embeds the video clip in the web page. You can copy that HTML code, and paste it into your blog or web page. We developed another tools that combines media clips from services like YouTube with your own text, and an interactive exercise. Combined, the separate elements become a new web program, sort of a multimedia interactive web page.

Language teaching needs technology to make serious language acquisition possible. This need was recognized decades ago. We’ve had language labs since forever. Over the years, we’ve kept up with advances in technology to make the best possible use of it, in pursuit of the goal of increased language learning. Our specific approaches might still be unique to language teaching, but the facilities that we use are now largely the same across the humanities. We are using a lot of the same tools that other content areas are using. As new applications and ideas emerge, we’ll keep our eyes open for how we can tap into the innovations to help our language learners.