ESL Radio: Innovations in the application of ICT to the learner-centred curriculum

STEPHEN  L OCK

This paper outlines and discusses some of the issues and pedagogical implications of a project that called upon ESL learners and teachers to work together towards a multimedia publication on the Internet. The publication was in the form of an audio-on-demand, online radio station, which can now be experienced at www.eslradio.net. New powerful and user-friendly tools for website creation, and the ever-increasing sophistication of affordable audio/ visual recording equipment, means that ESL learner and teacher projects in a learner-centred, negotiated curriculum can now take on a perspective never before possible.

Introduction

Computer technology can be a great time-waster or a tool that creates new and exciting possibilities. It can shape us or we can shape it (Kramsch, A’Ness & Lam 2000: 83). If we wish to do the shaping we must look for ways technology can enhance current theory, rather than being led simply by what it is possible to do. Bickerton argues that ‘... methods inspired by constructivist cognitive principles, and the move from learning to acquisition, have produced a looser, more open view of the application of multimedia materials to language learning’ (1999: 62).

This paper focuses on a project in which an attempt was made to enhance language learning possibilities by exploiting the power of the Internet’s potential as a publishing medium, in the collaborative production of a multimedia web site that is itself a language learning tool. In any serious multimedia project, a great deal of time, of necessity, goes into planning and production of content. It is this kind of purposeful and ‘real world’ activity that I have observed to hold great promise for ‘negotiation of meaning’ among groups of learners.

Theoretical Basis of the Project

Throughout the CALL literature, the focus seems to have been on the way computers can be used by individual learners. There doesn’t seem to have been much emphasis given to how computer technology can be integrated with non-computer based activities by groups of learners under the direction of a language teacher (Levy 1999: 86).

The use of computers and the Internet were a vital element of the ESL Radio project. However much of the work by learners in preparing material for the project required little or no use of computers, and consisted mostly of planning by groups of learners. It is this communicative small-group planning, requiring the negotiation of meanings that many studies suggest encourages learners to come to an inductive understanding of grammatical rules and principles (Nunan 1995:151, McCarthy and Carter 1995: 214).

The production of a radio program involves many elements:

1. Brainstorming ideas
2. Research
3. Documentation
4. Scripting
5. Rehearsal
6. Setting and meeting deadlines
7. Report writing etc.

Each of these elements in a language-learning environment can become a communicative task for a group of learners. Nunan describes a communicative task as ‘a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing and interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form’ (Kumaravadivelu, 1993: 71).

For this focus to be maintained over time however, the tasks must be highly involving and motivational. For this to be the case the project goals and activities need to be the result of negotiation between learners, or learners and the teacher (Levy 1999: 86), and they need to have what Skehan calls a ‘real world’ relationship (Widdowson 1998: 328). The ‘real world’ relationship in this case is the publication itself in the form of an online radio station.

One of the advantages of this approach is that it breaks away from an over-reliance on textbooks. Both the teacher and the learners engage in the process of creating their own teaching and learning opportunities. Richards argues that textbooks tend to trivialize the role of the teacher. This then leads to de-skilling as teaching skills atrophy and teachers become more and more reliant on managing learners through materials (1993: 7-9, also Johnson 1989: 12). Littlejohn and Windeatt offer an example of a typical textbook activity, which involves, ‘reading texts in detail, attending to items of vocabulary, rules of grammar and punctuation, and writing isolated sentences.’ Activities of this type, they assert, ‘require reproduction of already presented linguistic facts with little in the way of personal creativity, expression or interpretation’ (1989: 163).

Outline of the project

Because the idea was to give as many tasks to the learners as possible, in order to maximise their involvement and hence learning opportunities, the first consideration in a plan of action was to define my role in the project. As well as being the multimedia programmer and general technician (expertise gained through many years of research and experimentation in this area, including sound production and engineering), I saw my role as a coordinator, editor and facilitator of learning. That is, as White encapsulates, to ‘elicit, clarify, encourage, summarize and to keep the group on target’ (1988: 146).
Sequential order of project elements

The next step was to identify all of the elements of the project and devise a logical order in which to undertake them:

1. Objective
2. Equipment
3. Audio program parameters
4. Preparation for recording (lesson plans, learner guidelines etc.)
5. Recording and editing
6. Listening Activies/ CALL content design
7. Web site interface design
8. Evaluation

Objective

The objective of the ESL Radio project was to involve learners and teachers in the creation a website that would be an entertaining, interactive CALL resource for ESL learners. Levy suggests a number of useful heuristics for the design of CALL resources (1999: 100) and these became constant reference points throughout the project:

1. Know your audience
2. Clarify the project goals and design space
3. Know the strengths & limitations of existing CALL materials
4. Review possible ways of approaching complex, multi-faceted design problems e.g. levels of conceptualization
5. Choose your theory base
6. Link theoretical elements directly with specific design features
7. Test, re-test and evaluate with users

Equipment

quality because the final audio used on the web site had to be greatly reduced in quality (and hence file size), to stream reliability over the Internet. The audio equipment chosen was: Tascam DA-P1 portable digital tape recorder and two AKG C 1000 S condenser microphones.

As regards software, a digital audio editing program to edit the recordings, as well as several web authoring and multimedia tools to design the interface, were chosen. There are a plethora of such programs, and deciding which to use was not easy. In fact the look and feel of the project changed several times during its development, as some tools were abandoned and others took prominence. The software chosen was: Steinberg Wavelab and Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks.

Radio program parameters

It was decided that some guidance was needed for both teachers and learners in the kind of radio program that would maximise language learning opportunities. This included both the learning opportunities of learners involved in production and the learning opportunities for learners utilizing the resulting ESL Radio website. It was important that the kind of programs chosen would be interesting for ESL learners, as well as giving opportunities for learning in all of the macro-skills. The project began with the following parameters:

1. ESL in Action: A documentary program about ESL courses or programs, from a teachers’ or learners’ perspective, or both
2. Music from around the world: learners present music from their own countries
3. ESL Playhouse: A chance for learners (or teachers) to be creative. Plays, poems, stories etc. The published program is a learner performance of a play specially written for ESL Radio
4. Face to Face: Interview program
5. Monologue: A teacher or native speaker speaking on a topic of interest to ESL learners
6. In Melbourne Today: An opportunity for learners to investigate and interact with their local environment outside of the classroom. Particularly aimed at institution excursions
7. Oz Music: A chance for ESL learners to learn more about Australian culture through an area of interest to most learners (music)

Preparation for recording

Preparing for the production of each of the different radio programs could have become a project in itself. However, the aim of the project, as a whole, was to provide an opportunity for whatever commitment teachers and learners wished to make. Some teachers put in more effort than others did on lesson planning, and some learners were more motivated than others were in the group planning sessions scheduled in class time. Several groups of learners, it should be noted, decided of their own accord to regularly meet outside of class time to continue working on their productions.

Recording and editing

Once the preparation was completed and the programs rehearsed, the recording became a relatively simple matter. The editing however, required some thought and artistic judgment. In this project, there was not time to involve learners in this stage, but if the project were to be repeated or replicated, editing as a group-work activity, could become an additional ‘real world’ language learning opportunity, or even another project in itself.

Listening Activities/ CALL content design

It could be argued that the design of language learning activities is best left to experienced teachers. However I believe that there is a good pedagogical reason to involve learners in the creation of learning materials for other learners. As the Roman dictum states, ‘Docendo discimus’ - we learn by teaching. Assinder claims to have had ‘great success’ in involving learners in the teaching process using video based materials: it ‘led to increased motivation and greatly improved accuracy’ (Nunan 1995: 145). Again, learners in this project were not involved due to time constraints, however I have successfully engaged learners in the production of learning materials (e.g. the creation of multiple choice questions), in a previous project that involved groups of learners recording an interview with their teachers. This project was titled ‘Turning the Tables’ and can be seen and heard online at http:// muelc.monint.monash.edu.au/Interviews.

Web site interface design

The aim of this project was to make the user interface:

1. Simple and intuitive to use
2. Fast downloading over slower connections
3. Attractive
4. Easy to update
5. Easy to modify

It was no simple matter to accommodate all of these criteria as some of them, (by today’s standards anyway) are almost mutually exclusive. The design was achieved solely using Macromedia Flash 5 (there is no HTML, DHTML, XML etc.) and while it could be argued that it meets the first three criteria above, Flash is notoriously difficult to program and any updates or modifications are time consuming, as was the initial programming itself. It is a ‘trade off’ that I hope will diminish as software becomes more sophisticated and user friendly over time. In fact the new MX version of Flash (not used in this project), now offers reusable templates to speed up production.

Evaluation

Rea-Dickinson observes that ‘it is now commonplace for most project evaluations to make use of a rich methodological set ranging from tests and questionnaires to observation and self-report’ (1994: 83). I will confine this evaluation to my own observations and learner and teacher feedback.

An important observation I and other teachers involved, made during this project was how much it enhanced feelings of solidarity and the sense of communal striving in the classroom. Marshall in a project involving learners in attempting to cure her of saying ‘okay’ all the time, observed the same phenomenon, ‘it gave us a feeling of solidarity. We were working together to achieve a classroom goal’ (1998: 33). This kind of solidarity, and itsimpact on motivation and involvement, can make a very positive contribution to the learning environment.

Most of the learners involved reported that they had learned a great deal about organization, cooperation, collaboration and meeting deadlines. It is almost as an afterthought that they realized that they had also improved their ability to communicate in a foreign language along the way. Another by-product of the positive experience of successfully communicating ideas and opinions to achieve a common and tangible goal was a noticeably increased level of self-confidence, which in turn led to increased motivation (Norton Pierce 1995: 11).

This kind of project work, where learners are expected to ‘learn the language by using it’, as opposed to ‘learn now, use later’ (Kumaravadivelu, 1993: 76-79), was initially quite an alien idea for some of the learners. However, once the project was underway many learners came to realise the value of such an approach. One learner wrote, ‘At first I thought the program was very difficult but now I think the program can help me [with] many parts of English such as listening and speaking’.

In the ‘Music from Around the World’ program, learners were asked to introduce a piece of music from their own countries. They were put into homogeneous L1 groups to discuss what made their particular country’s music distinctive from other countries. Many learners initially protested that they didn’t have any music from their own countries with them, however after some group discussions and then some Internet research they were motivated to procure examples, either borrowing tapes and CDs from other learners in other classes or even having recordings sent from home. All of the learners involved reported that they had enjoyed the exercise greatly. A common comment was that it had had a positive effect on their self-esteem by re-affirming their cultural identity, which many felt had been lost to some degree by their experience as a language learner in a foreign country.

A similar opportunity for affirmation of cultural identity can be found in the ESL Playhouse program ‘Food for Thought’ where learners were required to translate into their L1 the part of the play where they speak to their mother on the phone. Burke points out that learners often find writing in English a frustrating experience and having the opportunity to write in their own language demonstrates their competence as writers to their teachers and their peers, which apart from being a cultural affirmation, can also increase self-confidence and motivation to write in English (1990: 51). This program also gave learners the opportunity to work on prosodic features of language such as pronunciation, inflection and intonation. Many learners reported positively to me that, because the play was to be recorded and published, they worked on this aspect of language and took it more seriously than they would in other classroom situations, like pair-work role-play for example.

Another benefit reported by learners in all of the programs, was the opportunity to hear themselves speaking in a contextualised and ‘real-life’ situation. Learners are often able to record their voices through language lab work or with computers, however much of this kind of work is simply the mechanical reproduction of stock phrases or sentences with the focus being mainly on form as opposed to the communication required when producing a radio program.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have reported on a project that asks language learners to produce finished materials for a web-based language learning resource.

Is this Computer Assisted Language Learning? Not in a traditional sense - if we can use the word ‘tradition’ in relation to a field that is only 40 years old. There is still a perception among many teachers and learners that CALL means individual learners hunched over computers accessing commercially produced CD ROMs. Bickerton suggests that this kind of CALL is a ‘placebo for language education’ (1999: 67). He argues that while CD ROMs may have value for other disciplines where a step-by-step approach to clear-cut-tasks is called for, they have questionable value for language acquisition (1999: 67, 73).

Montessori told the story of a child at the beach, filling a small bucket with stones. The nanny, anxious to go home, began to help fill the bucket, whereupon the child began to cry. The lesson was clear to Montessori, ‘Let them fill their own buckets’ (Faneslow 1997: 171) ‘Ironically’, says Faneslow, ‘for some, by the time graduate school comes around and professional preparation begins, help in filling buckets is still sought and expected. Aided by program managers only too willing to fill buckets for them.’

I believe that this project is a CALL project, if we accept as necessary, a new definition of CALL. As Levy hopefully speculates, language learning will become computer integrated not merely computer assisted (1999: 137). We as teachers will be doing a disservice to our learners if we use new technology to repeat the mistakes of the past by assuming that we

can ‘fill their buckets’ for them by inventing and reifying pre-packaged, over-priced, over-sold, ‘pseudo’ solutions that offer only receptive, systematic instruction from a machine, at the expense of creativity, spontaneity and most importantly, human communication.

Acknowledgement

I am very grateful to the management and teaching staff of Monash University English Language Centre for their continuing encouragement and support for innovation and experimentation in the area of Computer Assisted Language Learning.

References

Bickerton, D. (1999). ‘Authoring and the academic linguist: the challenge of multimedia CALL’. In Cameron, K. (ed.) CALL Media Design & Applications: Swets & Zeitlinger b.v., Lisse.

Burke, D. (1990). ‘Students from non-English speaking background and writing across the curriculum’. Workshop 6 in ESL in the Mainstream Teacher Development Course: Adelaide, Newton Curriculum Centre

Fanselow, J. F. (1997). On Becoming a Language Educator: Personal Essays on Professional Development. Casanave, C. P. and Schechter, S. R. (eds.) Mahwah, NJ: LawrenceErlbaum Associates.

Johnson, R. K. (1989). The Second Language Curriculum. Johnson, R. K. (ed.). Cambridge: CUP

Kramsch, C., A’Ness, F. and Lam, W. S. E. (2000). ‘Authenticity and authorship in the computer-mediated acquisition of L2 literacy’. Language Learning & Technology 4 (2), 78-104.

Kumaravadivelu, B. (1993). Tasks in a Pedagogical Context. Crookes, G. and Gass, S. M. (eds.). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Levy, M. (1999). ‘Design processes in CALL: integrating theory, research and evaluation’. In Cameron, K. (ed.) CALL Media Design & Applications: Swets & Zeitlinger b.v., Lisse.

Littlejohn, A. and Windeatt, S. (1989). ‘Beyond language learning: perspectives on materials design’. In Johnson, R. (ed.). The Second Language Curriculum. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Marshall, K. A. (1998). Teaching in Action: Case Studies from Second Language Classrooms. Alexandria, VA: TESOL Inc.

McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (1995). Spoken grammar: what is it and how can we teach it? ELT Journal, 49 (3): 207-217.

Norton Pierce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29 (1): 9 - 31.

Nunan, D. (1995). Closing the gap between learning and instruction. TESOL Quarterly, 29 (1): 133-158.

Rea-Dickinson, P. (1994). Evaluation and English language teaching. Language Teaching, 27 (2): 71-91.

Richards, J. C. (1993). Beyond the textbook: the role of commercial materials in language teaching. RELC Journal, 24, (1): 1-14.

White, R. (1998). The ELT Curriculum. Oxford: Blackwell.

Widdowson, H. G. (1998). Skills, abilities and contexts of reality. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 18: 323-3