1 / 31

Spoken English Zone

Spoken English Zone. Conversational English Online Wuping Lu School of Education Stanford University 06/07/06. Introduction. Sub-community of the second language acquisition community “Exue.” Focuses on oral English learning Audience: adult English learners in China.

urit
Download Presentation

Spoken English Zone

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Spoken English Zone Conversational English Online Wuping Lu School of Education Stanford University 06/07/06

  2. Introduction • Sub-community of the second language acquisition community “Exue.” • Focuses on oral English learning • Audience: adult English learners in China. • Learning needs: improve spoken English. • Serves the leaning needs by providing various services and tools: message board, file uploading and downloading, chatting room, blogging, social bookmarking, sub-groups, online dictionary tools, short message/email, and RSS feed subscription.

  3. Message Board • Sharing learning strategies/reflections, presenting learning materials in the message body or as attachments, and making request for learning materials/learning strategies. • Three sub-forums/aggregators: Downloading Center, Highly Recommended, English Pronunciation • Can read/write • Use collective intelligence

  4. File Uploading and Downloading • learning materials, rarely created by users themselves in a strict sense. • Attached to posts • having different access restriction decided by owners • More active users, the higher levels they can access

  5. Chatting Room • both text and voice • English only • either publicly (many to many) or privately (one to one) • More experienced members seems not willing to communicate with less experienced ones

  6. Blogging • Journal: users can write text and insert image, flash, video/audio, and links into the journal body. • Photos: user can upload and share their photos with others. • Files: user can upload and share actually any type of files with others. • Buddy List: user can add and delete their buddies • Social Bookmarking: user can book and tag the websites they might want to visit later and share with others • Favorite Websites: users share their favorite websites with others. • RSS Feeds Input: users can input RSS feeds from other websites into their own blogs • Forum Post Input: members can input their own forum posts into the blog and keep posts synchronized at both places. • Comments: the blog allows readers to make comments. Its educational use has not yet been fully explored (05/29/06)

  7. Sub-Groups • Launched recently (06/02/06) • Currently, just a few groups • Textual posting • One group called “Friends Learning Group” • More time to see how it evolves and how it can be utilized for educational purpose.

  8. Other Services • Dictionary: general dictionary (kind of mush-up between two free web applications), grammar dictionary, and idiom dictionary. • Short message/email • RSS feed subscription

  9. Ranking Mechanism • best contents on the top • Ranked by the community administrators • Active members are rewarded e-money and points depending on the amount and quality of posts and uploaded files • With e-money and points, members can access restricted and core contents.

  10. Web 2.0 Features • A read/write web platform for services • Harnessing collective intelligence • Emphasizing participation and sharing • User-generated content • Providing RSS feeds for subscription • Using mash-up technology • Keeping continuous changing.

  11. Recommendations – Community Building • Clear and Visible Purpose • A short tag line that identifies the community’s purpose: Talk to Learn, Learn to Talk. • A longer mission statement that explains what the community is all about • A distinct visual design that sets a mood and sets the group apart from others • A backstory that tells about the history of the group, and how it came to exist

  12. Recommendations – Community Building • Social scaffolding to support a range of roles • Create a visitor center • Instruct the novices • Send email letter confirming their membership and telling them something about how the community works and relevant links, but info should not be too overwhelming • Welcome the novice with gifts. • Educate novices by meeting, special message board topics, and chatting room events to try and practice • Reward the regulars • Get personal: provide a start page (e.g., eBay’s My eBay for a serious eBay user) as a reward, my buddy list, and private gathering places • Empower the leaders • Honor your elders

  13. Recommendations – Community Building • Asking for feedback • use email, message boards, chat, surveys, or even interviews to collect data for complaints about technical problems, a wish list for new features, and requests for new gathering places or topics. • During my 6 weeks’ participation, I did not see any of the above happened.

  14. Recommendations – Community Building • Leveraging Sub-Groups • the management almost provide its members no group guidelines/strategies • provide an environment and guidelines to facilitate and help purposeful groups to coalesce and flourish.

  15. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Use wiki for vocabulary, expressions, and grammar • the learners first have to know what vocabulary and sentence patterns to be used in expressing what they want to express in a specific situation or context. • the threaded posts and comments do not reach a (tentative) final product based on collective intelligence. • Wiki technology can be used to address this problem

  16. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Provide audio dictionary for pronunciation • To effectively communicate orally, learners have to pronounce correctly • Current dictionary tools do not have pronunciation function

  17. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room • Common scenarios: two members meet and start chatting, soon stop • provide supporting tools to offset the skill gap between more competent members and less competent members so that both parties can benefit from the online chatting. • The management should also provide tutoring tools to voluntary tutors to maximum the tutoring outcomes.

  18. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room - Scenario/Topic-Based Skit Resource Center • wiki-based and use collective intelligence • A scenario simulating a real-life situation in a specific social context • One scenario can have different level skits • Different versions to accommodate different number of participants

  19. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room - Tutoring Support Center • the volunteer tutor might not be pedagogically trained • a collection of user-generated lesson plans using collective intelligence • including learning objectives, content, learning activities, and assessment • ensure at least a bottom line quality of learning outcome, even if the trainer does not have pedagogical expertise specific to the language

  20. Student: Guided Conversation Space Shared visual space with learner. Includes images (i.e. menu) to prompt conversation, and drawing and whiteboard tools Video over IP – video greatly enhances ability to learn language Jane Doe • Scenario Progress • You’ve answer 12 of 30 questions. • You have used 5 of the recommended vocab words • Your trainer has made 10 corrections You Said: “Fresh salad has most desire I would say: “Fresh salad is the most desired” Integrated Vocabulary lookup The word is: abundance Abundance: ### Add to vocab Recordable methods to interact with trainer without interrupting flow of conversation Vocab To Use • Hot • Rice • Spicy Please say that again Can you type that word? Vocabulary student is trying to learn

  21. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Attract native English speakers to join by providing Chinese learning • Gaming for language acquisition: create a virtual town for realistic simulations of communicative situations • Blog as e-portfolio for assessment • Video/audio annotating for correct feedback

  22. More User-Friendly Interface • Contains false clues • There is too much information on the screen and it makes users cognitively overloaded • Added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity • Unnecessary features should be avoided • The decorative pictures should be avoided • private text chatting should be separated from public chatting

  23. Evaluate the Success of the Changes • Adopting Cothrel (2000)’s incremental value approach • The incremental value can be calculated by comparing the measures before the changes and after the changes in two aspects: participation and learning.

  24. Participation Index • Page views • Session time • Community click-through • Registered members • Repeat visits • Frequent visitors • Postings per day/week/month • Read-to-post ratio • Page additions • Page revisions • Peak number of concurrent users (in live events) • Total number of users (in live events) • Audience penetration (if the total size of the target population is known) • Conversion rate from visitors, members, to active members

  25. Learning Outcome • Most of participation measures describe what is happening in the community, but they do not tell much about what it means to the learning • The learning outcome should be measured too • Use online survey for members to self-report their learning experiences.

  26. Questions?

More Related