Balancing Teaching and Learning

-- Web-based Distance Course of College English

 

Li Mengtao, Wu Min, Shao Minyong

University of Science and Technology of China

 

 

Abstract

Utilizing the new Web technology and together with CALL and CMLL theories to offer language courses over the Internet is an innovative approach to EFL and ESL. Yet, just relying on students themselves for self-access and autonomous learning sounds practical but may not be sufficient and suitable for all students, especially for those who have the inertia of listening to the teacher’s lectures or for those whose self-learning ability may not be good enough. Our Web-based distance course of College English is to cover the whole teaching process instead of simply putting the textbook or electronic lessons on the net. Lecturing, especially experienced teacher’s lectures, can create a favorable and amicable learning environment which is familiar to students and can reinforce the focal points of the course to be embedded in students’ mind during the process of their new knowledge construction, thus bridging the gap caused by the lack of face-to-face communication between the teacher and student, and reaching a balance between lecturing teaching and exploratory learning. In this way the asynchronous lecturing and learning is underway which not only fits well into the self-paced learning style and autonomous learning schema, but also maximize the interaction between the teacher and students.

 

Keywords: CALL, CMLL, Web-based distance education, autonomous learning.

 

 

Introduction

 

In the information era, especially for the past decade, Websites are popping up like mushrooms around the world to meet the rising demands for knowledge boost. These include Websites that specialize in English language teaching and learning. Even virtual universities are set up to offer a wide range of courses that are parallel to the university courses.

 

The Web-based Distance College English program, one of the key on-line courses in University of Science and Technology of China, aims to simulate the teaching practice of College English (published by Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press). The benefits will be tremendous, for it will not only ease the tension of the shortage of English teachers after the increase of student enrolment since 1999, but also provide the general public with chances to learn the course via the Internet.

 

The procedure of the distance learning is as follows: students first have to register and login to start learning. Then the managing system of our program will trace down and monitor each of the student’s performance. (This function will not be dealt with in this paper because our university has set up a managing system for all the online distance courses.) The whole English course is composed of Intensive Reading, Listening and Speaking, Extensive Reading, On-line Discussion and On-line Test.

 

Basic principles and advantages of computer-mediated language learning (CMLL)

 

The basic principle of the web-based curriculum design is process-oriented and primarily associated with constructivism theory in CALL. “The principle has been credited to Jean Piaget, a pioneer of constructivist thought, and can be summed up by the following statement: Knowledge is actively constructed by the learner, not passively received from the environment.”(Dougiamas, 1999) Constructivists also believe that learners construct their own reality or at least interpret it based upon their perceptions of experiences, so an individual's knowledge is a function of one's prior experiences, mental structures, and beliefs that are used to interpret objects and events. So we designed our website  by utilizing the new Web technology and distance education theories to cover the whole teaching process instead of simply putting the textbook or electronic lessons on the net.

 

In the first place, the Web-based course is both synchronous and asynchronous, giving the flexibility to students who can learn at their convenient time and set their pace of learning on the Internet. They construct their new knowledge based on their previous level of English and individual style of learning. This flexibility and limitless access to the course material make it possible for both teachers and students to pay their attention to the individual differences. This effective individual learning is quite difficult to achieve in normal English classroom, especially in a large classroom of more than 40 students.

 

Secondly, the course is not of one-way communication between the teacher and student. The multimedia computer technique can not only deliver text, sound, video, and give feedback to the learner, but also combine these to provide a comprehensible language input. Students can interact with the course materials, such as questions, hints and task-based exercises as well as with teachers or other students through email and video conferencing.

 

Lastly and most important of all, our distance English course distinguishes itself by combining lecture format with students’ exploratory learning. Though the apparent role of teachers fades away behind the curtain, the students’ learning activities are still guided by the teacher’s instructions, and sometimes by the virtual teacher who knows the students’ capacity to learn, sets up the plans for students and give the prerecorded lectures to a broad range of students. The distance course curriculum as well as the learning materials is designed to suit the schedule of most students and students still have options to choose whether to take the normal English classes or to take our distance English course. The computer-mediated course is still the content-based and student-centered, yet teaching not teachers can still play an indispensable role in the whole learning procedures. So the course acquires the virtue of both student-centeredness and teaching-centeredness. In this case the distance College English course integrated with computer technology has move from the former minor role as “computer assisted language learning” (CALL) to now more prominent role of “computer-mediated language learning” (CMLL) and the whole concept of learning and teaching has changed too. The student-centeredness plus the teaching-centeredness (in some degree) form the bulk of our theoretical basis.

 

Design and evaluation of the Web-based distance course

 

Lemke (1998) distinguishes between a curricular learning paradigm which dominates much of education today, and an interactive learning paradigm of libraries and research centers. In the former, someone else decides what you need to know and when you need to know it; in the latter, determining your own learning goals and interests is the key feature of the educational process, which is also known as autonomous learning (Warschauer, 2000). Under the instructions and requirements from teachers, autonomous learners are aware of how to form their own pace of learning, prepare questions by themselves and work out the answers. They can even adjust their learning styles according to the feedback. As autonomous learners are able to take charge of their own learning through working on individual or by accomplishing the task-based activities, the interactive and effective communication between the teacher and students or between the students and the materials is thus under way.

 

Of course, our distance course as well as other Web-based language learning programs still has a long way to reach that desired effectiveness as in the face-to-face classroom teaching. According to a recent student survey, which was conducted when the course was first available on the campus Intranet, that quiet a number of students don’t care much for the Internet / Intranet English learning or they are not accustomed to the machine teaching and learning. (See Figure 1: Survey results.) Out of 43 students who had the try lessons on the Intranet and received the oral interview by their teacher, only 6 expressed their real interest in the distance learning program via the Internet, while 32 students hoped the distance learning program would be their supplemental source for English learning. There are 5 students who expressed doubt over the practicality of the Internet language learning. If given the options to choose, the majority of them (30) would prefer to have the normal traditional English class rather than the lessons on the Internet. Almost 100% of students claim that if the access to the Internet or Intranet is more costly than the traditional classroom teaching, they will definitely choose the latter.

 

Question Type

Total Number of students

Number of “Yes” students

Percentage

Note

1. Would you like to learn English course offered on the Net?

43

6

14%

 

2. Would you like to have the Internet lessons as supplementary?

43

32

73.7%

 

3. Do you doubt the practicality of the Internet lessons?

43

5

11.6%

 

4. I would choose traditional lessons if I have a choice.

43

30

69.7%

 

5. If the Internet course were more costly, I would not choose it.

43

43

100%

 

6. If I don’t have a choice, I would take the Internet course.

43

28

65.1%

 

 

Figure 1: Survey results

 

There are two points here that need elaboration. First, the students chosen for the interview are presently learning College English at university. They have been under direct teachers’ instructions since their middle school days and have grown accustomed to the traditional classroom teaching procedures. Second, they are contented with their present teacher, who has been teaching English in university for almost 20 years. Apart from the fact that the teacher is an experienced one, the teacher is already using computer-mediated means to enhance the lectures. So if students have other choice of learning on the Internet, especially the lessons are designed and compiled by experienced teachers and students are not contented with their present teachers’ performance in the traditional classrooms, more students would have chosen the option of learning English on the Internet and the survey results would be quite different.

 

The underlining significance of the survey is that most students agree that the Internet course is practical and is supplementary to the traditional English classes, especially for those who learn College English only via the Internet. The Internet course should be less costly and rich in its multimedia materials, including the detailed instructions. From the designer’s point of view, the success of the conducting the Internet lessons lies in the well-designed instructions for the distance course and should maximize the interactions between the course contents and students.

 

In the face-to-face English class, an experienced teacher of ESL would conduct the lesson in the following procedure (See Figure 2: Normal Intensive Reading learning procedure.) -- preview the lesson (e.g. vocabulary and text) by the students themselves; explain the text by the teacher on the lexical and discourse levels; and review the lesson by going over the notes and accomplishing the task-based activities and exercises by the teacher and students. This procedure fits well into the learning schema and learning style of most students in China. What’s more important is that most students are accustomed to the learning style that they have formed over a long period of time. Just relying on themselves for self-access and autonomous learning is practical but may not be sufficient and suitable for all students, especially for those who have the inertia of listening to the teacher’s lectures or for those whose self-learning ability is undesirably low for autonomous learning.

 

 

 

 

 

 


Figure 2: Normal Intensive Reading learning procedure

 

During the lecturing, the teacher can reinforce a notion into the minds of students and call students’ attention to the special usage of some key words or language functions that the students might overlook in their self-paced learning. So the key for the successful implementation of the distance College English course is how to balance the teaching and learning on the Web.

 

Though the exploratory learning is the key feature of distance learning, lecturing especially experienced teacher’s lectures can create a favorable and amicable learning environment which is familiar to students and can reinforce the focal points of the course to be embedded in students’ mind during the process of their new knowledge formation, thus bridging the gap caused by the lack of face-to-face communication between the teacher and student, and reaching a balance between lecturing teaching and exploratory learning.

 

Layout of Web-based distance Course of College English

 

As our course is textbook-based, there is no need to put all the materials on the net. In fact, students find it convenient to read books rather than to read articles on the Internet. We have designed our distance course with the following components.

 

Extensive Reading

As the National College English Syllabus (Revised Edition) specifies, students need to read articles that amount to 25,000 ~ 40,000 words per semester. And our textbooks already have that amount. So we advise students to finish all the reading materials stipulated by the curriculum. Besides, we also provide extra reading materials for capable students, including humour, news articles and stories. Notes and necessary explanations to the readings are given in order to facilitate students’ learning.

 

Listening

For this section, we mainly use the CD-ROMs. Our university, cooperated with Shanghai Foreign Education Press, has produced a set of listening CD-ROMs for autonomous learning. There are altogether eight CD-ROMs, with two for each semester. The advantages of using the CD-ROMs will not only cut down the cost of the Internet connection on the student part, but also ensure the steady and better sound and movie quality. Besides, we also provide some limited new listening materials and movie clips for students who have the easy online access.

 

Online Test

The course’s Online Test, which includes both proficiency graded tests and achievement tests, serves as the measurement for judging students’ performances and giving them proper feedback. All the items of the tests are sorted according to the difficulty levels and forms a test corpus. A computer program will randomly select the test items and gives a standard test to any one who needs it to testify their level of English. Our university manages this system and uses it as a means to check students’ progress and gives them grades accordingly.

 

Online Discussion

For this section, we use all available synchronized means, as well as asynchronized methods. The former includes video conferencing or voice talk at the fixed time, or the teacher holds talks periodically. Students just use “Netmeeting” program that is incorporated in Microsoft Windows. The asynchronized methods mainly use Email group discussion and online BBS (Bulletin Board System). Any problems or questions that occurred in students’ learning will be coped with duly by teachers who are responsible for each section.

 

Intensive Reading

The Intensive Reading is the core of our distance course. Each unit in our Intensive Reading consists of six modules: Text, Vocabulary, Presentation, Background, Review, and Exercises. The entity of a unit revolves around "Presentation", in which the learner gets immersed in the similar setting as in the real classroom.

 

1. Preview the lesson –Text and Vocabulary

The first two modules get the learner to preview the unit first, which also involves some information-gap or warm-up activities. Students can listen to and repeat the sounds of these new words and the text, which have been pre-recorded digitally on the Internet server.

 

The preview learning activities fit into the ordinary learning pattern and trigger the learning process. To preview the text, the students have to go over the questions and read the text and memorize the new words before they start learning the text in detail. The underlining phrases or words with different colours give students hints that these are key words or phrases that they should pay special attention. As to the vocabulary preview, students can test themselves on some of the new words by doing the Chinese-English or English-Chinese translation exercises that are given at the bottom of the word list webpage. If students have difficulty in understanding some sentences or paragraphs, they can view the Chinese translation of the text by clicking the hyperlink “translation”.

 

2. Present the lesson – Presentation and Background

The next two modules Background and Presentation are chaired by the experienced teacher. His/her lecture-like teaching is broadcast to the target learners as it happens in an actual classroom. The teacher’s recorded lecture of the lessons and with his/her pictures on the screen is available in segments or sections, through which the teacher explains the language points and paraphrases the difficult sentences or paragraphs to students.

 

The Presentation module appears in two windows on the screen, the upper windows shows the text together with pictures or drawings while the lower one shows examples cited. Students are in control of the whole process and they can decide whether to start, to pause or to repeat each section by choosing the given sections and by clicking the start button. As the digital sound and pictures on the Webpage are done in the “Flash format”, which supports the streaming download, students don’t have to wait long to download the selected section of the multimedia lectures.

 

As the teacher explains the text to the learner, the upper window shows the text with highlighted text or phrases while the lower window gives the examples the teacher cited. So the learner can listen to as well as see the lecture notes. If the pace of lecturing is too quick, the learner can pause and take notes before he goes on to listen to the next section. Students can choose his pace of listening to and reading the whole lecture section by section, which is totaling about 50 — 60 minutes. In this way the asynchronous lecturing and learning is underway which fits well into the self-paced learning style and autonomous learning schema. At this point the student can think and digest what he heard and can interact with the teacher’s lectures as if interacting with the teacher.

 

The Background module shows the culture references and background information that are related to the text and with possible hyperlinks to other information on the Internet. For example, Unit 3 of Book 2 deals with the well-known figure in the U.S. history – Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of American Independence. In the traditional classroom, what the teacher can do is to use text, sound, or at best some pictures to introduce the life of Jefferson. But with the online course, the student can read some introductory text together with related pictures, including Jefferson’s hometown, his Memorial Hall and statue, part of his handwritten draft. Moreover, we can direct students to many other websites about Thomas Jefferson, such as http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/index.html and http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/, on which the related materials abound, including his family, his statue, his education, his quotations and writings, and that Website also includes many links to other sites about this man. Take Unit 10, Book 1 for another example, the text Going Home is a piece of folklore that tells a moving story about a husband Vingo who was just released from prison. As he was not sure whether his wife would like to take him back or not, he wrote to his wife that if she still wanted him she would tie a yellow ribbon on an oak tree in front of the house. Then Vingo would know it and return home. This story has been adapted into a movie and has a lovely song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon”. In this section, students can not only learn the whole story by following Vingo’s journey, but also listen to the song. All these references form a good and interesting resource for reading and listening practice, thus increasing the language input to its maximum level.

 

3. Review the lesson – Review and Exercises

The last two modules Review and Exercises enable the learner to consolidate the acquired knowledge. The Review module is especially meaningful and fits well into language learning schema. Students can learn and review in detail the text and examples of important usage and structures by clicking the hyperlinked phrases and colored words on the Webpage. Once the highlighted words or phrases are clicked, a small window will pop up, in which the detailed usage of these language points is shown together with examples, including the teacher’s explanatory presentation of the lesson. Once the window is opened, whatever you click on that Webpage, the pop-up window will show the usage of the corresponding language points within the same window. Moreover, if you feel the small pop-up window blocks some of the text on the Webpage, you can drag it to any place you feel comfortable with on that Webpage.

 

The application of different colours and fonts to highlight difficult language points and textual ties serves two functions. One is that these highlighted language points stand out against its background and call students’ attention that these are the required usages that should be mastered in this lesson. Students can recall how the teacher explains them in the presentation part. If they cannot recall the teacher’s explanations, they can take the advantage of asynchronized learning and review them again in detail by clicking the corresponding parts. The other function is that they form an electronic notebook for students to review these language points periodically. As for this part, the Review module is like the ordinary online learning Webpages with small data flow rate, but it includes all the language points that the teacher covered in his presentation and some of usages are more resourceful than the teacher’s presentation. As to the students, they only have to download the text and pictures or just save the content Webpages containing the review materials.

 

The last Exercises module is especially designed to develop learner's communicative competence as well as a sense of discourse. We provide students with required exercise and extra exercises. Because the online distance course excludes the distinction of the in-class activities and the out-class exercises on the Webpages, the appropriate amount of exercises seems necessary to the consolidation of what students have learned so far. If too many exercises are given, students are buried under the heavy load of accomplishing the task, and students’ interest will suffer. Doing exercises, especially the skill practice, is by no means a pleasant experience for most students. Then if too few exercises are provided, students will not reach the goal of their language skill training. So for the distance English course, we aims at achieving the goal with minimum amount of exercises, but with equal or nearly the same effectiveness as with the traditional classroom teaching.

 

We divide the all the exercises into two categories: the required exercises and extra exercises. As students have their textbooks ready, and that set of textbooks already contain a large amount of exercises, we require students to finish some of the important ones and together with typical exercises we provide on the net. By using the required exercises, we can check whether students have finished the required exercises or not, because they have to logon to learn the course and the course manage system will track down their performances and give them a brief report. Of course extra exercises are necessary for those who need more training and who are slow in mastering the main points in the lesson.

 

A variety of exercise forms are used in our distance course. For comprehension of the text or listening activities, multiple-choice questions seem most convenient and effective. The java script programming and ASP can solve this problem easily. Apart from that, we’ve developed other exercise forms, such as sentence completion, cloze, translation (both from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English), matching pair, etc. All of them are equipped with hints and key. We consider that as fundamental, for students need to get the feedback as soon as they’ve done that part of exercises.

 

Conclusion

 

As the modern information technology is progressing rapidly, new ways to utilize the new Web technology and distance education theories will become widespread and mature. This change will ultimately lead to the changes in our teaching concepts.

 

Our Web-based Distance College English program, principled on student-centeredness with autonomous learning plus teaching-centeredness with lecturing, is to cover the whole teaching process instead of simply putting the textbook or electronic lessons on the net. On one hand, a large amount of language materials on the Website with too many hypertext links can be both an innovation as well as a dilemma, for students either have no adequate time to read and digest all the materials or the materials are so overwhelming as to drown the learner sometimes. On the other hand, too few materials for an Internet course will not be sufficient to provide students with necessary language input. What’s more, just relying on students themselves for self-access and autonomous learning sounds practical but may not be sufficient and suitable for all students, especially for those who have had the habit of listening to the teacher’s lectures ever since their middle school days or for those whose self-learning ability may not be substantially high enough. So the successful implementation of the distance College English course lies in the balance of the teaching and learning on the Web.

 

Though the exploratory learning is the key feature of distance learning, lecturing especially experienced teacher’s lectures can create a favorable and amicable learning environment which is familiar to students and can enhance their new knowledge formation, thus bridging the gap caused by the lack of face-to-face communication between the teacher and student, and reaching a balance between lecturing teaching and exploratory learning. This balance not only provides the basis for the asynchronous lecturing and learning, but also fits into the self-paced learning style and autonomous learning schema, and hence maximize the interaction between the teacher and students.

 

Of course, the program’s purpose is not to replace all the teaching procedures without teachers’ participation. In fact the program needs more teachers’ involvement to select proper language materials and write lecture script and to some extent, to prepare and make multimedia packages. The Webpages are mainly designed with Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, ASP and JavaScript. Presently, the project has formally applied for the Cross-the-Century Distance Courses sponsored and supervised by Ministry of Education, China. Looking into the future, we can be sure that virtual universities and autonomous learning with the Web-based distance courses between universities from both China and abroad will play a more and more significant role in language teaching and learning.

 

 

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