When I first read through the Hubbard article the first section to give me pause was when he discussed the dominance of vocabulary instruction in CALL. He states that it wasn't so much state of the art teaching but instead that programmers found it easy to put them in computer programs. Here I was thinking that there was some kind of educational pedagogy behind what was included in language learning computer programs just to find out that some of it was added for face value with little thought to best learning practices. He does give credence to the fact that knowing vocabulary is inherently beneficial though. Levy puts more emphasis on vocabulary, noting the sheer size of the task of understanding vocabulary. I have always encouraged expanding vocabulary but in incremental steps. There is no need to know all the words if you struggle putting a single sentence together.
During my last teaching job I became familiar with Rosetta Stone. My students used it for the first hour of class. While there were many good things about Rosetta Stone there were some frustrating aspects as well. My students really liked the self paced aspect and the ability to go back and do a lesson again. They liked the different aspects of the learning process (speaking, listening, writing and reading). Many of them were really good at one or two of those but were deficient at the others. It gave them a chance to work on the things they felt they needed. Some of the down sides were that many times the student would speak words of phrases and the software would not accept it as correct. I would be there listening and found what they said was acceptable and understandable but the program would not pass them. Other times the passed lessons would not save so the students would have to do them again. That was really frustrating for them. Even so they liked using the computers and Rosetta Stone. It was a change of pace for them and gave them a chance to feel success learning a new language.
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Rosetta Stone is one of the most popular commercialized software but it has a couple of glitches like automated sound recognition you mentioned. Some software provide a type of quantified feedback like “80% matched” (still, I am not sure what the percentage is supposed to tell us about), but I wonder if Rosetta Stone has such assessment feature for evaluation students’ pronunciation. Jenny, how did you monitor your students’ progress in your lab class for using Rosetta Stone?
ReplyDeleteHi Jenny,
ReplyDeleteGreat to hear that you used Rosetta Stone in your class. Some language teachers have been concerned that language learning software may some day take over their job, but using them to supplement students' learning in class may be the way to go.
I'd be curious to hear your response to Jaeseok's question.
-Misato
For RS it was pass or fail with pronunciation. It was frustrating to my students at times because they just couldn't seem to get it right enough for the program to accept it. When the said the word for me I thought it was very well spoken and would be understood by the general public. In this case I would just say the word for the student to get past that section of RS. Now, the program does have a monitoring system for the administrator(teacher) to keep track of where their students are and how they are progressing. This was helpful to make sure students were doing the lessons in order, how long they were taking to complete the lessons and their scores but it didn't tell you where they struggled or if they didn't really understand a concept. That is where the human element comes in. My students knew I was there ready to help them in those rough patches or to explain a concept in a different way. Those human qualities cannot be replaced by a computer program.
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