Practical ways for the teacher to create
CALL Materials/Activities
For my thoughts on ways teachers can
use computers to help with their teaching more generally, where the students
are not necessarily themselves directly using the computer, see here.
These days (unlike in the '80s) it is not so
easy/common for teachers to dabble in writing CALL material. Then it was more
common for teachers to author their own material into BBC and DOS packages like
Vocab and Storyboard, or to even try writing their own little BASIC programs.
Nowadays you need a fair amount of technical
knowledge, or the time to learn to use a specialist authoring package, to
create your own CD materials, putting together sound, graphic and text files.
And to get the best effects on the WWW you have to be into Java and frames....
And that of course is on top of the time needed for the pedagogical side of
choosing the language to put in, and the task, and the answers (if relevant)
etc. to suit the class.
LG478 does not go much into the creation side, since we don’t have the sophisticated authoring programs, or the expertise or time to teach them. Anyway, they become rapidly out of date and there is no point spending a lot of time mastering a package you might never use. You can read about some authoring packages and their use in
Levy 1997 p88-95, 104-108, 156f; Jones and Fortescue ch 6.
Stewart
Arneil and Martin Holmes 1999 ‘Juggling hot potatoes: decisions and compromises in creating authoring
tools for the Web’ ReCALL journal online 11,2.
S.-A.
Kitts and K.Whittlestone 1998 ‘CALScribe: a multimedia template
ideal for CALL development’ ReCALL journal online 10,2.
S. Tippett
and B. Cook 1998 ‘Authoring tools: a comparative study’ ReCALL journal online 10,2.
J.-J.
Hochart 1998 ‘Improving listening and speaking skills in English through the
use of authoring systems’
ReCALL journal online 11,2.
BUT here are a few things that are close to
creation, if not the full thing. Easy and fairly quick to do. Cheap and
cheerful authoring or use of computers in teaching activities. They are
illustrated for English but most apply to any language as the target.
Authoring a Task in a Wordprocessing Program
Assembling Dedicated WWW Links
Assembling Teaching Material on a Webpage
Authoring a Simple Reading Task just using Links on a Webpage
Authoring using a Web Authoring Package
Editing an Existing Exercise from the Web
Setting up Email etc. to keep in touch and manage
Authoring a CALL Task in a
Wordprocessing Program
There are several tasks that a teacher can
easily just wordprocess and give the students in a file to work on in some way
on the wordprocessor (e.g. in Word). The teacher uses a suitable text for the
class. Texts could be
·
cut and pasted from WWW
or a corpus like BNC,
·
scanned from a
coursebook from a unit a few weeks back, or written parallel with a text
used before,
·
a student composition
(maybe with errors in), or a teacher-made composite of several student
compositions, and so forth.
The ways a teacher can alter the text
include:
A text with the
paragraphs in jumbled order to be reorganised with use of cut and paste
A text with errors
in, to be corrected
The start of a
text, or of each paragraph of a story, with space to complete the story
A text with words
missed out to be filled in
A text with
inflections like -s missed off the words to be filled in
A text with no
punctuation, which has to be supplied
See a collection
of such suggestions
at various levels.
You can also see an example of such a text created by a past student
Text can be long or short. It can even be
disconnected sentences if preferred. Students can work independently or in
groups, etc. This is of course in addition to the possible use of WP as part of
a ‘process writing’ regime of teaching composition writing, used to encourage
redrafting, revision etc. and provide the motivation of nice printed output.
Requires only WP expertise, and no need for
Internet access.
Authoring
with old software originally made for the BBC computer
The old WIDA favourites, originating in BBC format,
available to us in DOS forms (and purchasable now in Windows versions) allow
easy authoring of staple multiple choice, matching and open choice exercises
with pedagogically sound options available to supply useful feedback and so on
to the user (within the limitations of such word and sentence level discrete
point tasks). Matchmaster, Choicemaster, Gapmaster, Vocab, Storyboard etc.
Typically the teacher has to run the Teacher rather than Student version of the
program, and type in words and/or sentences or text suitable to their learners,
and the program then uses these in the task it is dedicated to.
A way of updating these well-worn formats is
to derive the items that you put in from corpora. I.e. instead of sitting and
thinking up sentences to be used in the items, or copying ones from the
coursebook, you access a corpus of native speaker English like BNC for them and select, according to the current
level and needs of your students. E. Wilson 1997 ‘The automatic generation of CALL exercises from general
corpora’ in ed Wichmann et al Teaching and Language Corpora (Longman)
discusses this, e.g. for an exercise/test of choosing the right participle form
startled or startling etc.
Assembling Dedicated WWW Links
The WWW contains lots of CALL material, both
intended as such and not. But the problem with the WWW for students learning
English is to rapidly find a suitable CALL task or exercise. In fact
that is the problem with using the WWW in general. One can waste ages trying to
find the information one wants. It cannot really be left to most students to be
able to find what is suitable for their level and other needs at some
particular point in their learning of L2.
There are of course dedicated EFL sites like
those looked at in our other document which assemble loads of material and links to
material for EFL. However, these usually contain too much material unsorted for
type or level to be easy for the learner to use directly, especially if they
are not advanced learners at a level to understand all the English of the WWW
itself.
The most basic thing a teacher can usefully
do is to collate links suitable for a whole set of classes/courses. See for
example the ones the Modern Language teachers at Essex have collected. Often such collections are
for self-study rather than integrated in the class activities, and not very
specific to particular groups of their students.
However, the teacher can help even more by
searching and identifying suitable tasks/resources for a specific class, at a
specific stage of learning, maybe for specific weeks of a course, and putting
links to them on his/her personal webpage, or a class webpage, with suitable
guidance and instructions. The students can then access that page and go
straight to what they need. Admittedly this is little more than an extension of
evaluating material, but very useful.
It requires little expertise to create a simple webpage with links to WWW sites. This can be done easily with the facilities in Word, with little more knowledge than someone used to wordprocessing already has. Essentially you wordprocess the framework text. Insert the links by highlighting the word destined to be clickable and using Insert...Hyperlink. You get a dialog box where you can enter the internet address of the page you want to link to (or indeed you can link to other wordprocessed files of your own). Choose to save the document as HTML. At University of Essex you get the page to appear on the WWW by saving it with the name 'index' in a directory/folder called myweb which should appear on your m drive. If you can't find such a directory, instructions on how to create it are at http://www2.essex.ac.uk/wag/guides/restricted/privatewww/installation.html
Anything that you put in the folder 'myweb'
in the file called 'index.htm' appears on your personal website on WWW at
address http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~name/ (where instead of 'name' you put
your email username). As you create your own further webpages you can add them
in that directory and link them all to the basic index file.
See also this link for a good 'How to make a
webpage' start
guide.
Assembling your own Teaching Material on a Webpage
Beyond assembling links to WWW sites on your
own or a class webpage, you can assemble and explain and connect your own
materials in a simple way. Example:
Use a scanner to
scan suitable material from books, magazines etc., including pictures, for
students to access and read. Once scanned you can put the files on your
website. You could add whatever instructions, explanation, questions,
pedagogical points you want.
However, you won't readily be able to get
fancy things like hidden choices or answers, or calculation of scores etc. see
below.
It needs a little expertise to use a scanner,
but in Word it is easy to create links from a text to your own other files or
pictures (Highlight and use Insert… Picture or Insert…Hyperlink).
Slightly more ambitious material can be made
with what follows.
Authoring a Simple Reading Task just using Links on a
Webpage
If you have typed in, or scanned in, a
suitable passage for a class to read, you can easily build in all kinds of
pedagogically useful adjuncts, as links. I.e. you pick words in the text and
make it link to another file, or part of a file, in which there could be all
kinds of types of supporting and additional information. The student is free to
exploit this or not as they read. For example:
Things to think
about before reading the text (schema activation activity)
Pre-teaching of
vocab... if desired
Support while
reading the text - vocab help (in TL or NL), paraphrase of difficult sentences,
etc. or a link to an online dictionary on WWW
Prompts to develop
reading strategies - on word guessing, on predicting, etc...
Comprehension
questions to check understanding at that point - e.g. ask what a particular
pronoun refers to
Post-reading
activity suggestions
Post-reading test
of new vocab
Texts on connected
themes to read in addition.
There is a rather poor example of this at
this WWW site; a rather better one in an old DOS hypertext program
done by me (EFLDEMO).
Authoring using a Web Authoring Package
The above activities do no more than
allow the user/learner to click on links to get further information. However,
many simple types of exercise require students to be able to enter words on
screen, or make choices by clicking 'buttons', putting ticks in boxes, and so
on, and ideally would also give feedback and calculate scores. These can be
authored using packages which allow you to enter the language elements
yourself, and do for you all the work of making the webpage with these
features from it. You then export this exercise as an HTML webpage to your
myweb directory and create a link to it from your index page.
One package which has a suite
of modules to make such exercises is called Hot Potatoes (or Hotpot) and comes
from University of Victoria
. The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you
to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence,
crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot
Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for non-profit educational
users who make their pages available on the web. Other users must pay for a
licence. Check out the Hot Potatoes licencing terms and pricing on the Half-Baked Software Website.
It has modules for the following (covering
much of the ground of the DOS authoring packages like
Matchmaster, Gapmaster and Choicemaster):
JBC:
multiple-choice or true-false exercises/tests
JQuiz: open choice
exercises/tests
JCloze: gap-fill
text exercises
JCross: crosswords
JMix: jumbled-sentence
and jumbled word exercises
JMatch: matching
and ordering exercises
You can see an example of a single multiple
choice item created this way with JBC here. The limitation, of course, is that you have to
accept the general format the authoring package supplies, though you can
choose language content to suit any level or special interest of learner.
Another very useful facility, which you use
online, is The Compleat Lexical Tutor which allows you
to make text (or single sentence) cloze exercises. You choose your text, which
could be typed by you in Word, or on some website, or scanned from somewhere.
You cut and paste your text into the space provided in the Compleat Lexical
Tutor. The program then can be asked to check the vocab in the text to see
which words are in particular frequency bands. You can then ask for it to make
a cloze version of the text by gapping, say, all the very frequent words, or
all the very infrequent words, and so on. You can finally save your exercise as
a webpage onto your own computer so that you can link to it and use it when you
want.
Editing an Existing
Exercise from the Web
The basic 'language' in which material you
see on WWW is written is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). If you are
creating a webpage in Word you can see the HTML version of what you are writing
by clicking View... HTML Source. And then to revert to normal click View...Exit
HTML Source. You will see that what you compose is represented in HTML just as
plain text, with no underlining, font size, paragraphing etc. shown as you
normally see it in Word. In other words it is not WYSIWYG like Word. Instead,
all the effects are shown by markers in < > brackets which don't appear in
WWW or in the normal way you see text in Word, but serve to create the effect
you want.
Increasingly the snazziest webpages with EFL
exercises and so forth one sees on WWW are created with facilities 'beyond'
HTML (like Javascript), but you can find useful ones in HTML which you can copy
and change to the words, text etc. which you require quite easily. You may be
able to edit directly in Word (normal view), but I find usually you have to go
to the HTML version and alter that. This is not too difficult if you leave all
the things within < > the same, and just change the text in between. Note
that the < > markers often come in pairs, before and after some wording.
E.g. a paragraph has <P> before it and </P> at the end. There is
also usually a mass of HTML codes at the start and end of the text.
So one way to create your own exercises is to
find one which does the right task, and is all in HTML, copy it into Word and
change the language to what suits your class this week. Keep going back to the
normal view of the text in Word so you can see the effect of your changes, and
keep copies as you go in case you alter something which creates an effect you
don't want.
You click File... Save As... on the top menu
of the window, and save a copy of the exercise on your m drive space for you to
call on in Word later to edit. You should be able to change everything: title,
text, answers etc. to suit a specific imagined class. Then it can go on your
own webpage for them.
Requires care to alter the HTML version of a
document without upsetting the markers. But not too hard for someone used to
wordprocessing.
Good sources for help on making your own
webpages: see this collection
of links to sites explaining HTML.
Setting
up email etc. to keep in touch and manage.
You can keep in touch with students and
support teaching in all sorts of ways with email. E.g.
·
Remind them of deadlines
for doing work
·
Give feedback on queries
·
Provide hints and
prompts on what to do out of class
·
Tell them about changes
of room and time
·
Announce changes to your
webpage
·
Etc.
This of course can be provided to all the
members of a class, or separately to individuals, as needed. In the former
case, within any mailer you can usually put together the email addresses of a group
of people under one new class label (called an ‘alias’). Then you just enter
that collective label as the address when you send emails to the group, with no
need to enter the address of every member separately. This supplements what you
might put on a webpage, with the difference that email forces information onto
the receiver in a way a webpage does not.
More elaborate versions of this are possible.
For instance there is software that allows you to set up something like a
discussion list or chatroom just for a specific group of people, e.g. a class.
Students and teacher become exclusive members and can log in and read what each
other have to say, hints they want to share, share documents, submit
assignments etc. See Internet Classroom Assistant
for an easy way to do this.
This might not seem like ‘creation’ of a CALL
activity at all, since no material is authored by the teacher. However, the
teacher does play a key role in setting up the facility and managing it. Indeed
whether or not it serves a useful purpose and aids learning may depend on the
messages, tasks and documents that the teacher issues.
All this is of course most useful for
distance courses, where it is of course a step or two away from
video-conferencing, though it also is helpful for nondistance situations.
Ultimately, the computer can offer a medium for computerising the whole
classroom, so that a class of students at several different locations can be
taught by a teacher at a location distant from all of them. This is done with
the aid of sound and video links over the internet and a virtual blackboard on
screen for all to contribute to. See for example E. Matthews 1998
‘Language learning using multimedia conferencing: the ReLaTe project’ ReCALL
Journal online 10,2. Distance learning in general relies heavily on computers.
See e.g. Matthew Fox 1998 ‘Breaking down the distance barriers: perceptions
and practice in technology-mediated distance language acquisition’ ReCALL
journal online 10,1; Robin Goodfellow and Marie-Noëlle Lamy 1998 ‘Learning to
learn a language – at home and on the Web’ ReCALL journal online
10,1. Prof Lavington of Computer
Science had a pilot project running a few years ago with a few students at
Things you Can't do
As yet hard to do by the above means are
creating simulations, or materials making heavy use of video, audio, a lot of
graphics etc. Specialist authoring programs like Toolbook allow this, but they
require some time, dedication and perseverance to master and use. Also you
cannot make your own 'ideal' version of a task like multiple choice or a game
you like but which is not available in a web authoring package (e.g. Tree of
Knowledge).
PJS rev Jan 03