Technology-mediated Language Teaching

Technology-mediated Language Teaching
(First published in The Island/Friday 26th November 2010)
Any teaching-learning situation involves a dynamic interrelationship between three components: the learner, the subject, and the teacher. The role of the teacher in this relationship is to initiate and maintain effective learner engagement with the subject. Pedagogy is about how this can be done efficiently. A handy tool that modern teachers can use in their teaching is found in the form of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
Incidentally, the word ‘pedagogy’ has an interesting etymology: According to the Chambers Dictionary, it derives from ‘pedagogue’, (‘teacher’), which itself entered the English language partly through French and Latin from the Greek ‘paidagogos’ (‘a slave who led a boy to school’). Considering the ‘slaving’ (working hard, usually for someone else) that conscientious teaching involves today, ‘pedagogy’ is an appropriate term for a teacher’s strategic role in the instruction process. The technology tool has the potential to ease a teacher’s burden considerably. But, how does this apply to an English language teaching situation?
Each English teacher, whether a novice or an expert, confronts a unique set of pupils in a unique setting (place, time and circumstances), and faces the unavoidable challenge of determining their own classroom practice to suit the pupils. A novice teacher may be required to rely on their own (perhaps totally uninformed) devices or, luckily, on guidance where it is available, while an expert practitioner usually draws on personal knowledge and experience in doing this.
A teacher’s classroom practice consists of the specific teaching and learning activities that are designed. Individual decisions about these are based on the teacher’s ideas, beliefs, or assumptions about the nature of language, and the psychology of language learning on the one hand, and on the other, on their knowledge of English, and their understanding of the pupils’ learning styles. In other words, a teacher’s understanding of how learners learn English in terms of a particular pedagogic ideology will determine their decisions about the overall classroom procedure to be adopted.
According to available information, already about 84% of the households in Sri Lanka enjoy the electricity facility; computer literacy is at 30%, and is fast spreading; English and IT are being promoted as related subjects. (The level of computer literacy that is required in the English language classroom is not high, and is limited.) In this context, using ICT would prove a popular strategy for enhancing language teaching and learning. This shouldn’t be interpreted as a proposal to provide a few computers for each class, and hand over all the teaching to them while the teachers sit back and idle. ICT will only be a tool. It will be used sometimes for part of a lesson with one group of students, while the others are engaged with other activities. ICT use in the class can also be expected to train the pupils to do self-access work with a computer at home.
Today, ICT is in common use, particularly in administration and business spheres. There is no important office, shop, bank, hospital, factory, or firm that doesn’t use it. Not using ICT where the routine work involves communicating and computing would be deemed primitive. School children would love innovations that put them in contact with modern technology which is now a normal feature everywhere else. English language learners do not enjoy being left behind in this general movement towards technological modernity. Young people will quickly embrace ICT integration into English language instruction because it is trendy, in addition to being attractive in other ways.
If ICT use can be ‘normalized’ in our schools (in the sense that the computer becomes as normal a feature in every classroom as the black- or whiteboard has been to date), then it will prove to be an effective leveller between urban and rural schools. The need to attend expensive urban centres for educational support will be greatly reduced for rural students, because they will be able to access the necessary sources of information online. We already have a number of government and private sector-sponsored online education programmes. Technology-based education in Sri Lanka has a promising future. (Ref. my column for 27th August and 3rd September 2010)
In terms of pedagogy, the two most important advantages of technology-based English language instruction will be: 1) it will be highly motivational, and 2) it will create a highly productive context for effective language learning. Of these, the second advantage may be elaborated thus: ICT provides multimodal interaction, that is, communicative activities involving all the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing; it will allow differentiated instruction, which is a strategy in which students of mixed ability levels are helped to proceed at their own rates while learning the same concepts; ICT also encourages autonomous learning. The first advantage, the valuable motivational factor, is due to the novelty and the variety that modern technology constantly brings into the language learning experience.
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) first appeared in the early 1980’s. CALL programmes required learners to respond to cues on the computer screen, and involved tasks such as matching sentence halves, filling in gapped texts, and doing multiple-choice activities. CALL materials of the present day are more sophisticated than these. Access to ICT has enabled both teachers and students to go beyond the use of computer programmes to the use of the Internet and web-based resources. In view of this, the term Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) was coined in the 1990’s. In an attempt to reflect the growing possibilities offered by the Internet and ICT, other terms have been suggested to replace CALL and TELL such as Web-enhanced Language Learning (WELL), Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL). Since the use of the computer remains relevant to all of these, experts in the field still prefer to stick to the original term, namely, CALL.
Teachers can use CALL materials prepared by the authorities, or those that they compile by themselves in an institution. The Internet offers a wide variety of CALL materials. These can be used to supplement a course that is already being delivered. The language teaching professionals who develop such materials subscribe to a particular philosophy. For example, assumptions about the three components of a teaching-learning situation mentioned at the beginning of this essay are implicit in most CALL materials. One assumption is that, in order to become independent learners, students need teachers to guide them in choosing what to learn and how to learn it, and the specific language (that is, the style of English: formal, informal, etc.) that they should focus on. An assumption relating to the subject (English) is that the English language represents a variety of styles that serve different purposes. For instance, the language needed to ask someone you know for a favour differs in grammar and vocabulary from that needed to request a similar favour from a stranger or a social superior. Teachers guide pupils not only by selecting appropriate materials, but by structuring the activities for learning, and for monitoring their progress; teacher guidance helps the learners to continue learning English and to expand their knowledge of the language.
It is now generally accepted that second language learners learn a language by specific stages, as Tony Erben et al (Teaching English Language Learners through Technology. Routledge, 2009) point out. Teachers can’t force it on them all at once. Learners will acquire new language structures only when they are cognitively and psychologically ready to do so. For example, learners listen and respond non-verbally to simple commands, and become able to say short formulaic structures such as “yes”, “no”, “Good morning”, “Thank you”, and develop a receptive vocabulary of a few hundred words, before they begin to manage one or two-word answers or short utterances. These two phases of language acquisition represent the first two of four such stages that Krashen and Terrel (1983) described (viz. preproduction, and early production stages; the other two are the speech emergence stage, and the intermediate fluency stage). Incidentally, according to Tony Erben and his co-authors, in spite of there being various other taxonomies (ways of classifying and naming) to categorize stages of language development, many education systems in the US adopt the four-tier model proposed by Krashen and Terrel that I have just mentioned. Later researchers (e.g. Pienemann, 1989, 2007) have confirmed that there is an immutable language acquisition order.
A teacher cannot alter this natural process. But they can definitely quicken the pace of language development. The multimodal resources made available through ICT are an ideal way for activating the natural phases of second language acquisition. Technology enables the teacher to create an ‘acquisition-rich classroom’ via interactive pedagogic activities. The authors of the above-mentioned book summarize ‘useful research generalizations’ provided by Ellis (2005) among others into five principles for generating such an acquisition-rich language learning environment.
The first of these is that the English language learners should be provided with many opportunities to read, to write, to listen to and to discuss oral and written English texts expressed in a variety of ways. This involves not only the ability to listen to a spoken text or read a written text, and learn what is there to learn, but also the ability to communicate the information acquired to another person (who wants to learn it ). Academic literacy is today defined as the ability to use speaking, listening, reading, writing, and critical thinking to learn what they want to learn, and to communicate or demonstrate that learning to others who need it.
The second principle is that the learners need to focus their attention on patterns of English language structure. To become efficient communicators, they must learn the language structures that help them express themselves clearly, and the rules that govern the appropriateness of language for a particular context. The assumption that there is a natural order or sequence of language acquisition implies that grammatical structures emerge in the communicative utterances of the learners in a fixed, regular order. The teacher’s responsibility is to create a language-rich environment which induces them to use grammar relevant to the acquisition stage they have reached.
The third principle says that the language learners need to be given classroom time to use their English productively. This is based on the assumption that the interaction that takes place when second language learners, engaged in talk with their colleagues, ‘negotiate’ for meaning. That is, conversation is not usually a straightforward matter of exchanging ready-made pieces of information between the interlocutors; the messages get clarified, or even modified, the meaning more defined through questioning, agreeing with what is said but with reservations, or totally disagreeing, or asking for clarifications, and so on; this is supported by other forms of feedback including non-verbal clues such as facial expressions revealing incomprehension, confusion, or disagreement, etc; thus meaning is newly created in the course of a ‘negotiating’ process. Interaction through such negotiation for meaning is assumed to facilitate language learning. In the domain of second language acquisition (SLA) theory, this is known as the interaction hypothesis, which has been primarily developed by M. Long (1996, 2006). The availability of input of the right quality and quantity, together with provision for output (i.e. opportunities for using the second language) advances language development.
According to the fourth principle, students need to be given the opportunities to spot their errors, and to correct them. Teachers should encourage learners to reflect on their language, on ‘correct’ forms of language. This must happen at least in the English classroom. For most of the time that children spend at school, they engage in activities which focus on their understanding of subject matter; rarely do they have an opportunity to notice the contribution language makes towards communicating the content of the lessons clearly without misrepresenting it. Wrong grammar is a problem where there is a need for clarity and precision of presentation. It is only when students are aware of this, and make a conscious effort to discover their errors, and correct them that they can become efficient communicators. Teachers should help them in this. Ideally, every teacher must be a language teacher.
The fifth and final principle in our list is based on all that preceded. It advises the teacher to design activities that maximize interaction among the learners in English. Students’ active involvement in linguistic communication in the class is the main factor that ensures successful language learning.
The five principles delineated above provide parameters for a curriculum that addresses the language acquisition needs of the learners. Sensitivity to the four stages of language development should be an essential feature of such a curriculum.
Of course, technology can be used in English teaching within the classroom without having to constantly go online. For example, teachers and learners can work offline with pre-downloaded instruction materials, or with such materials photocopied, which would be safer in places where there are frequent power and connectivity breakdown problems.