Abstracts

The last few years have seen the development of a wide range of commercial programs for use in the ESL classroom, and an increasing number of authoring packages that allow teachers to create their own CALL materials to compliment their materials. There is a wide range of both topic-based and grammar-based titles that make finding suitable CALL materials a much easier task than in the past - yet the key issues still remain: How do ESL teachers best integrate the use of these CALL materials into the curriculum and into the classroom? What turns CALL from an optional add-on component to a tightly integrated, and highly valued component of an ESL course? How do learners obtain maximum benefit from its use?

This paper looks at several key factors that contribute to making this integration of CALL into the ESL classroom successful. These range from practical issues of hardware management, computer competencies of both teacher and students, to issues of defining learning outcomes and the way CALL is implemented in the classroom. It presents a case study of the way CALL has been integrated into a large ESL programme in a tertiary institute in Auckland, New Zealand, along with findings from learner and teacher surveys that have been conducted. The paper also examines the importance of having clearly defined learning outcomes relating to the use of CALL that are explicit for both teachers and learners, and way learners can be encouraged to use CALL for self-study outside of class time.

PISER (Peer Instruction and Student Electronic Response) represents a particularly interesting application of computer-enhanced language learning to the EFL classroom. Whereas many IT applications focus either upon individual learner use or upon demonstration to a larger body, PISER takes attention off the technology and actually fosters greater individual involvement and more energetic group interaction within the classroom. PISER takes the computer's ability to provide instant feedback and/or assessment and provides information which at once lets the individual and the whole class know how they have performed.

Lectures and demonstrations foster one-way communication. Students are passive - recipients, not participants. IT may be used to make lessons more engaging, but the standard classroom environment remains effective primarily for information delivery, and does not promote active learner engagement. At the front of the class, teachers strive to sustain students' interest, while the best of the students may be struggling to maintain attention. PISER can turn this around, creating an atmosphere which naturally alternates between individual reflection, animated small group interaction and collective attention to material being presented.

In a standard lesson, neither the students nor the teacher can easily gauge how much has been comprehended, nor how well it has been understood. The standard classroom offers few opportunities for two-way communication or for clarification. The use of PISER reverses this. PISER encourages individual engagement with lesson concepts, and promotes student-to-student interaction and teacher-student dialogue.

This workshop will begin with a brief presentation on what PISER is, and how the system is used. Participants will then be given a PISER handset, and invited to join in. This 'participatory demonstration' will first focus upon exploring a range of activity types - and then move on to encourage an exchange of ideas on uses and usefulness.

Workshop

PISER represents a particularly interesting application of computer-enhanced language learning to the classroom. Whereas many computer applications focus either upon individual learner use or upon demonstration to a larger body, PISER takes attention off the technology and actually fosters greater individual involvement and more energetic group interaction within the classroom. PISER takes the computer's ability to provide instant feedback and/or assessment and provides information that at once lets the individual and the whole class know how they have performed.

PISER is not unique to ELT, but it is easily adaptable to ELT use. This proposed workshop would be attractive to both secondary and tertiary teachers. It would fit in with several of IT-Melts themes: it is a practical English language learning and teaching application, it involves computerised assessment and feedback and it allows for the incorporation of IT and multimedia in the ELT curriculum.

After years of being an exotic, peripheral element in English Language Teaching, CALL is moving into the educational mainstream. This workshop will examine web-based materials prepared to supplement an existing course.

At Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the English Language Centre offers a course called English for Academic Purposes to about 4,000 first-year students each year. Last year, we developed a website offering activities parallel to materials in the students' coursebook. My workshop will discuss the development of these materials and then offer participants 'hands-on' opportunities to explore the various features incorporated into the on-line tasks. We will conclude with a Questions and Answer session on the strengths and weaknesses of such a web-site, and an exploration of possible future directions.

So far, there is no empirical evidence of a learner completely acquiring a second language through computer-assisted language learning (CALL) alone. Many will conclude that such a CALL program is neither achievable nor desirable. However, considering such a program can help to define the directions and shortcomings of current CALL research and development. The task is to decide what methodologies, technologies and content need to be assembled to create a comprehensive CALL software program for a language relatively unknown to both the learner and the community, such as Swahili in rural Sweden.

This paper reviews both innovation in CALL and speculation in science fiction to propose research directions toward the perfect CALL program.

Integration of Computer Enhanced Language Learning (CELL) into the curriculum has long been acknowledged as a key factor in its success. However, how best to achieve this integration remains unclear. 'Blended' delivery, whereby a course is written and planned with the components interchangeable between use in the classroom and use online, is a growing and promising development in striving for 'perfect' integration. This paper will look at the experiences encountered when a face-to-face English for Academic Preparation (EAP) program, preparing non-native English speaking students to study in Australian universities, was merged with a fully rewritten course that includes full interactive online options and support.

After introducing other similar 'blended' delivery studies, this paper will present a case study of the numerous challenges involved in the major task of mixing the mode of delivery between the face to face teaching in the classroom and the online teaching in the computer classroom for a three level EAP program involving around 15 classes. Different perspectives involved in achieving the aim of integration, from administrative and logistical to educational and curricular will be reported. Issues such as training, both teacher and student, as well as those dealing with the nature of change and adjusting to online use feature significantly. By reporting on the experiences of this model of blended delivery and its introduction this paper aims to provide valuable information for future such course and will conclude with some guidelines on how best to proceed in the introduction of a 'blended' delivery course.

This paper examines the perceptual and cultural changes in teachers involved in a government initiated computer-assisted language learning program in Hong Kong and the impacts of the program on teachers. The program features a Five-Year Strategy aimed at achieving an outcome of 25% of the school curriculum being taught with the support of IT by 2002/2003.

Whether computer and IT are useful in teaching language has been a controversial issue for decades. The strategy document, however, does not address this academic issue and justifies the project with administrative and economic reasons: "The Chief Executive [of Hong Kong] pledged to make Hong Kong a leader, not a follower, in the information world" (Education and Manpower Bureau, 1998). The government expects a "paradigm shift" toward IT in education by providing funding to run training courses for teachers. The strategy document has a chapter on fostering IT culture. This chapter, however, states only the role of the government, the responsibilities of the school heads, the teachers, the students, the parents, and the role of the tertiary institutions, and the business community. The assumption seems to be that cultural change can be effected by centrally engineered managerial procedures alone. Cultural change, according to Bate (1994), is not something that can be produced through managerial manipulations. The specific purposes of this paper are: (1) to investigate teachers' perceptions on how much substantial change in English language education outcome has been effected since the launch of the strategy; and (2) to examine the impacts of the strategy on teachers.

Data in this paper are from a survey with 244 teacher respondents from primary and secondary schools and a university, and from the pre- and post-questionnaire interviews and teacher-generated metaphors about the change.

Changes in information and communication technologies have expanded dramatically the options for English language learning and teaching, and therefore have heightened the need for teachers to evaluate learning opportunities. Results of evaluation should inform the teacher’s own understanding of the quality and success of the tasks developed through IT and multimedia. At the same time, one would hope that evaluation conducted in one setting would speak more generally to the profession’s knowledge about IT and multimedia in ELT. I will explore these double goals by describing three evaluation projects conducted by teachers to investigate the effectiveness of IT-based ELT. I will highlight the teacher’s role in developing the research to address questions that were relevant to their understanding of IT for ELT and that also contributed to professional issues. I will note aspects of the evaluation process that helped teachers to develop their research projects.

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the use of web-based student-centered bulletin board (BB) discussions for collaborative learning. Findings came from a case study in which a class of English enhancement undergraduates at the University of Hong Kong was asked to participate in an online discussion forum over the semester and in class group oral presentations at the end of the course.

An electronic BB was created for 17 students to initiate web-based discussions in response to 3 assigned tasks, leading to class group oral presentations as one of the requirements of the one-semester English course. The discussion tasks selected were theme-related, which involved the students in responding to inspirational questions, reading an online article, and exploring a web site. In the absence of online instructor participation, the web-based communication was developed in the form of non-instructor engagement to encourage student-centered discussions. At the end of the course, the students utilized all contributions made to the discussion forum to give group oral presentations on the issues discussed.

The electronic postings were recorded and interpreted in relation to participation and message content by the author to document the students' online learning experience. Follow-up web-based questionnaires were used and end-of-course group presentations were observed to gain insights into the students' attitude towards the BB discussions as well as the effectiveness for collaborative learning.

The presenter will discuss the following questions:

• What types of learning experience were involved with maintaining online discussions?
• How effective is web-based peer communication as an IT-facilitated learning resource for collaboration?
• What attitudes did the students have toward web-based BB discussions? Were benefits and obstacles revealed in the experience?
• What pedagogical implications can be made to English language teachers in their use of electronic BBs?

Learner-centered web-based environments have been reported to be effective because they promote active learning and offer a setting where students can conduct learning at anytime using wired computers. Wireless communication along with the emergence of the PDA opens a new learning paradigm since it extends the current web-learning paradigm into a new dimension which emphasizes omnipresent, active and customized mobile learning. In other words, learning is not only learner-centered but also learner-customized, and can happen at anytime, anywhere, using any mobile devices.

This study presents a novel approach, based on the theory of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and constructivism, for enhancing EFL students' reading skills by integrating the wireless PDA into a web-based reading environment. In this setting, the front-end wireless PDA acts as an active media for promoting learner-centered, customized, and active learning while the back-end web environment acts as a publisher for publishing personalized reading material for users and logs users' learning behavior. In addition, the proposed approach integrates phonics and collocation tools into a seamless reading environment (Reading2U: http://163.23.9.180 ). The design philosophy is based on Chapelle's (1998, 2001) CALL design and evaluation guidelines, in providing a context-aware reading scenario. Reading2U has been evaluated by a group of sixteen Junior high school English teachers, who showed a positive attitude toward the program. Reading2U demonstrates its effectiveness for facilitating learner-centered and customized active reading comprehension through the integration of the Web and a PDA.

The Web is a resource for EFL learners and teachers. It offers genuine opportunities for learning. Levy’s (1997) study, surveying 104 teachers who implemented CALL, identifies an approach to CALL based on learners’ needs and the curriculum. Many respondents from this survey claim to set their students’ CALL activities in the context of communicative approach which they would adopt in the conventional classroom, insisting on the authentic context of exercises, problem solving, and oral participation (p. 124). This workshop focuses on the role that CALL teachers hold is still strong in assisting EFL students’ learning and the implementation of authentic materials in a communicative approach classroom in EFL contexts. It will demonstrate how language teachers can implement CALL projects in their classrooms. It offers the opportunities that teachers and students can be engaged in as they participate in a communicative approach setting by using the Web resources. A lesson plan of this project is presented in this paper. During the workshop, a WebQuest based on this lesson plan will be demonstrated. In addition, some useful links such as a WebQuest template, WebQuest design processes, and rubric templates will be provided. The audience can learn to create their own WebQuests.

The project was originally designed for EFL students in an English department. However teachers can adopt the idea and adapt the difficulty of the task to students in different levels of language proficiency. Students’ written and oral skills can be assessed via their e-projects and oral presentations. Evaluation rubrics will be demonstrated.

 

The aim of this workshop is to introduce participants to a teaching process currently being introduced and developed at two Tokyo universities which has elicited favorable response from students and faculty. This teaching process utilizes the integration of computer and web-based resources, and multimedia presentations into a content-based English language curriculum.

This workshop will begin with an overview of the aims, current use of multimedia, computer and web-based resources being utilized, and the goal of instilling critical thinking skills in the students. Following the introductory overview of the aims, usage and critical-thinking skill development, participants will participate in a demonstration of a sample lesson given to the students of Oral Communication classes. Participants will then select a lesson from a sampling of the lessons currently being taught and then experience the multimedia presentation of the selected lesson before engaging in a discussion of the presented material. Following the discussion of the presented material, time will be devoted to discussion of the teaching process to explore its strengths and weaknesses, and explore alternative settings (secondary education, business/corporate settings, etc.). Finally, participant feedback will be solicited with a survey of participant response to the presentation.
 

In many areas of the developing world, books are too expensive for widespread practical use in either formal education or private study. With the rise of the Internet, however, particularly as wireless service becomes better and cheaper, access to the world’s text supply is multiplying almost beyond imagination. Still, most of this text is and will continue to be written in English and, without an increase in English literacy, the increase in text availability could make little practical difference to social or economic development. Unlike the texts themselves, literacy training is not suited to Internet delivery. Or is it? I have developed a set of online tools that allow any reader with an Internet connection to transform any text of interest into a self-teaching text linked to speech, dictionary, concordance, and self-test resources. In my presentation, I will demonstrate the functioning of these tools and give evidence of their practical utility and effectiveness.

This paper will present and discuss results of a small-scale survey on how associate degree students at a Hong Kong university perceive IT2 in a business communication simulation. The presenters make the assumption that business communication in English for second language learners falls within the category of ESP, which itself is a subset of ESL. IT², on the other hand, is a new term coined by the presenters and means “Integrating Teaching with Information Technology”. The term is meant to convey the necessity of taking into account what the scholarly pedagogical literature on approach, method, and technique and on models of learning can tell us when designing and carrying out language learning simulations which employ IT. The simulation was designed with the assumption that a cognitive construction model of language learning, and the implications which that model carries for language learning and teaching, were most appropriate. The paper will provide a synopsis of this model and contrast it with other models. The business communication simulation required students to develop a website for a fictional company and to assign themselves functions within that company. WebCT and MS Front Page were adopted to facilitate this task. The fictional company and the employees communicated with other fictional companies and their employees through a series of business letters. Email was used as a postal delivery system within the simulation. The intention was to improve on business communication simulations in which students are assigned a company or company roles by giving students ownership of their own ‘virtual companies’ and some control over their positions in the company. The paper also will provide a section on how data was collected and analyzed.

Although CALL is a discipline still in search of academic identity, its potential in assimilating, linking to, and working with other academic fields is clearly evident. This attribute must not be underestimated in an age where the walls between disciplines fall and scholars call for the need to fight the "narcissism of minor differences", as Marjorie Garber, Professor of English at Harvard, once put it. This presentation argues that the nature of CALL reflection allows us to view it as a platform or instrument for building bridges and creating links between academic disciplines, research areas, and the different stakeholders in learning and teaching: learners and teachers, academics and technicians. Much has recently been said about computer technology as a factor creating divides and underscoring differences between the genders, those who can see and those who cannot, between the rich and the poor. In contrast, in the present paper, a series of community building projects will be analysed to demonstrate how CALL initiatives can function as mechanisms cementing human enterprise in an academic setting and as catalysts for interdisciplinary teaching and research. Projects utilising Virtual Reality, for example, can help implement a synthesis between the linguistic, literature, and cultural studies components of a language course. They can also function as an arena of constructionist learning for a community of foreign language, ESL, CALL, and computer science students and their teachers.

This session will focus on the theory and practice of using "Edutainment" as both an instructional strategy and even a new paradigm in today's English teaching and learning. From Sesame Street, MTV, to video games, today's students are being exposed to various media that we could not imagine before. How should today's English teachers deal with these X generation students?

In this workshop, theoretical frameworks such as task-based learning, social constructivism and Csikszentmihalyi's flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) will be introduced and their implications will be discussed. Participants will be introduced to a variety of Edutainment web-sites and software, and we will discuss how English teachers might make use of Edutainment inside and outside of the classrooms.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life. New York: Basic Books.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn to make media-rich MP3i files to create picture dictionaries and other language learning applications enhanced with audio and rich multimedia for learners of English as a foreign language or learners of English for specific purposes.

The MP3i file format allows the creation of MP3 files enhanced with illustrations, animation, web links, and words that are synced Karaoke-style with the sound and illustrations on the display. Users can also record and play back their own voices. MP3i files are created using MP3i creator software and can be played on any computer, PDA, handheld, or cellular telephone that has the necessary decoder software loaded on it. Participants will find out how to create their own MP3 files easily using their own sound files, picture files, and text files. An MP3i can be played back on any computer or handheld device (such as a PDA or a cell phone).

In the first part of this session, participants will view a number of MP3i files created specifically for language learning. The participants will discuss the pedagogical advantages of using MP3i files for language learning. They will also become familiar with the MP3i playback interface.

In the second, hands-on, part of the session, the presenter will give a step-by-step demonstration of how to use the easy-to-use, object-oriented MP3i encoder interface. Finally, participants will be able to use sample sound and multimedia files to create their own engaging, media-rich language learning resources for teaching English as a foreign language and English for specific purposes.

The MP3i technology is the perfect way for teachers to create language learning applications such as picture dictionaries, listening comprehension activities for language learning, phonics practice exercises, and so on. The simple object-oriented programming interface is also a perfect tool for having students create their own enhanced MP3 files as class projects. Students can use pictures they download from the web or import their own illustrations from scanners or digital cameras.

Participants will leave with copies of the encoder software, complete documentation and step-by-step instructions, sample MP3is they can use in their classes, and skills they can use to create MP3is of their own.

The widespread use of computers at the university level has encouraged the incorporation of new and exciting technologies into language teaching, learning and use. Along with these exciting new opportunities arise challenges for teaching professionals. The emergence and evolution of easily-accessible, user-friendly translation software (TS) on the Internet poses one such growing challenge for writing teachers.
The focus of this presentation will be to examine the various issues surrounding student use of translation software by a particular group of university students, and will include the following:

• A brief overview of some of the more popular websites that provide instantaneous text translation functions in many languages.
• The results of a survey will be presented in which 400 freshmen at a Science department of a private university report on their use patterns, attitudes and opinions about the use of TS for their school writing.
• The results of another short study regarding teacher recognitions will be revealed. In this study, teachers were presented with both student and computer translations of the same texts (from Japanese to English), and were asked to identify the computer generated texts. Although most teachers predicted that they could identify TS written texts, the results of this study indicated otherwise.
• Last, since TS appears here to stay, we briefly explore what legitimate role, if any, this tool should play in the language classroom. Several central questions about this issue will be given to the audience for discussion and consideration. Finally, we propose some activities for students which are designed to raise their awareness to the pitfalls of blind TS use.

Creating webpages is a useful and engaging activity in computer-enhanced classes for EFL students. Students build competence in using computers while developing skills in reading and writing English. These benefits are maximized when students produce the html source code with a text editor rather than with a graphical interface (WYSIWYG) editor, because the processes of creating, debugging, and editing the source require repetitive yet meaningful close reading of the text and attention to orthography in order to correct errors and make changes in page content and appearance.

However, source code required for more advanced features of webpage design makes hand-coding impractical except for experts. Moreover, a balanced approach to teaching writing must make room for more extensive and freer language production. If this is to happen in the context of webpage production, the convenience of a WYSIWYG editor is welcome. However, along with the convenience of writing text content comes the similar ease of manipulating page appearance, layout, typography, graphics, and color. While guidance in these aspects of webpage production is needed even in hand-coding, the invitation by WYSIWYG editors to experiment with design effects may side-track writing goals and may produce pages in which text content is subordinated or unreadable.

This presentation includes results of a survey of Japanese EFL college student preferences in webpage design before and after sensitization to issues in webpage usability and text legibility. Examples of student webpages demonstrating these preferences are discussed. Findings suggest that many students are predisposed to design effects that interfere with usability and that these preferences tend to be persistent and to some extent intractable, posing a challenge for the teacher who wishes to take advantage of webpage creation as an activity for teaching EFL writing and reading.

Japanese college students have limited access to PCs at school and home, but always carry state-of-the-art mobile phones equipped with large screens and Internet connections. This paper presents three projects designed to exploit the ubiquity and power of Japanese mobile phones.

The first project, Learning on the Move, emailed daily English language lessons to students' mobile phones. Previous research on learning suggested that daily study would be more effective than the typical Japanese once-a-week class, and we hoped that by frequently pushing study tasks at students we could encourage such efficient daily study. Our experiments demonstrated that students enjoyed studying by mobile phone email, and learned better than control groups using lessons delivered via PC email, mobile phone web, and paper.

Our second project investigates the use of mobile video phones in ELT. We prepared a web of materials for studying English idioms, comprised of computer animations showing each idiom's literal meaning, live action video showing idiomatic meanings, explanatory first-language text, and a final quiz. We are currently testing students' reactions to these materials delivered on mobile phones.

Our final project, EduCALL, uses students' mobile web phones to take polls and check student comprehension in large lecture classes. Traditionally, instructors check comprehension by asking students to respond to questions with raised hands, but this misleads since students often raise their hands whenever their friends do. Other instructors check comprehension with paper quizzes, but these give delayed information, since instructors only have time to score large-class quizzes after class. Our system lets students answer quizzes in class on their mobile web phones, and automatically collates and displays the results, giving students and instructors immediate feedback about comprehension, even in large lecture classes.

This presentation will address two issues in the use of media in CALL: the need for sound pedagogy in the design of CALL programs, both on-line and stand-alone; and the importance of developing learners' learning strategies, particularly on the metalinguistic and metacognitive side, to assist them in maximising their use of self-access or on-line CALL programs.
From a pedagogical perspective in the field of CALL, teacher-authors are faced with great heterogeneity among their learners, and in the teaching contexts in which they will find themselves at any one point in time, and during their careers. Within these contexts of variable platforms, environments and learners, teachers must implement the best possible programs, while operating under curriculum, institutional, financial, time, technical, and skill constraints. Teachers using CALL or planning to use some form of on-line provision of language learning materials, therefore need to be able to find, evaluate, and use whatever authoring tools and programs are available. In order to be able to do this, however, they require an understanding of effective language pedagogy in addition to skills in learning to use the programs, and integrating these into their teaching. To illustrate some of the issues here, I will present the results from a semester-long study of two different cohorts of teachers from various L1 backgrounds who teach several different foreign languages, including EFL, as they learn technical skills and techniques for using technology in their teaching.

As we move towards offering an increasing range and variety of on-line and self-access language learning materials, it is important to remember and consider the needs of learners in actually utilising these materials. In particular, learners' awareness of their own learning styles and strategies and how appropriately they can apply them are critical to their success in using CALL materials for language learning. Examples from 2 cohorts of introductory second language learners using both web-based and lab-based will be presented to illustrate the importance of analysing learners' needs and providing them with increased awareness of how most appropriately to use the styles and strategies they have available to them.

This ongoing study compares a learner activity mediated by three different tools: chat, audio conferencing, and face-to-face speech. It aims to compare how these tools and participants' perceptions of the tools affect a learner activity. The comparison is not an attempt to find out which tool is better but to understand similarities and differences of how these tools are used within a specific context. The study analyses the learner activity from an activity theoretical (Engeström, 1987) and discourse analysis perspective.

Participants are undergraduate students undergoing an English enhancement course at the University of Hong Kong. The learner activity is designed in integration with the course syllabus. Participants were divided into groups and introduced to the different tools at the beginning of the study. The groups selected a tool to be used to carry out any learner activity throughout the study. The study is conducted in the Multimedia Language Centre (MMLC) which provides facilities for the use of the different mediation tools.

Findings from the study show that there are differences in length of turns and turn order; kind of topics, and off-topics; orientation and compliances towards suggestions; and use of subject pronouns. These differences should be taken into account in teaching and learning within a specific context. The differences also highlight the need to consider the nature of tools and participants' perceptions of the tools, in teaching and learning.

This paper presents the outcomes of a search for a task design rationale for the multimedia language centre (MMLC) through piloting tasks developed for an English enhancement programme for tertiary students. During the inquiry process, the presenters attempted to address two commonly raised questions: firstly the question of how the features of the MMLC can be exploited to develop communication skills and promote interactions in English; and secondly the question of what it is that the MMLC can support that the conventional classroom cannot.

The two 12-week courses in the programme were run entirely in an MMLC environment. A variety of speaking and writing tasks were co-developed by the presenters guided by current ideas about communicative language teaching and by knowledge about the potential benefits of the technology featured in the MMLC. The tasks were piloted and reviewed following action research cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. Based on the results of the piloting, the presenters argue that certain task types demonstrate exploitation of the MMLC facilities as well as dependency on them. They conclude that a task design rationale is instrumental to maximizing the usefulness of the MMLC and end their paper with a proposed rationale.

The target audience of this paper include both secondary and tertiary teachers who are interested in using MMLCs.

English as a Foreign Language has played a significant role, in a number of ways, in the development of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Levy (1997 :3) comments that, "Arguably, within the field of computers in Education, especially within humanities computing, it is teachers in the area of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and foreign languages more generally that have been in the vanguard." However, Levy arrived at these findings from a study, which was conducted over twelve years ago amongst specialists, in 1991 and CALL has, of course, moved on since then, notably with significant developments in multi-media and the Internet.

This paper begins by proposing a general framework, applicable in a range of contexts, for investigating the pedagogical applications of computers in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. It then reports on a study, which examines the impact that computers software programmes are having in the classroom delivery of EFL courses at British Universities. It documents the findings of a national survey based on questionnaires, which are quantitatively analyzed. These seek to establish three kinds of information: what kinds of courses are run in Higher Education Institutions; which kinds of computer applications are being used with which courses; the attitudes of those responsible towards the current use of computers on these courses.

This workshop aims to demonstrate how to actively involve learners in the virtual classroom ultimately improving their speaking and writing skills (productive) as well as reading and listening (receptive) while making them more autonomous. Participants will have the opportunity to participate in a live virtual classroom session with voice recording.

While encouraging learners to use virtual classes and computer recording capabilities, communicative competence is promoted and developed. The major advantage of a virtual class over the traditional classroom is that it eases learning and communication anxiety. Using virtual class and voice recording strips learners of their fear and enables them to discuss a topic more effectively, express themselves through written forms more easily, and to voice their opinions via sentences and paragraphs which in an actual discussion they might never dare to pronounce.

The technical features of virtual classes are real-time interaction, instant feedback, access to previous discussion, access to other sources and information, availability of instructor and peer input, interacting with one person without interrupting the others by means of sending personal messages, being able to print the transcript of the discussion, off-line entry of comments and input by the participants and finally optional teacher monitoring. Thus, the role of a teacher becomes that of a facilitator rather than that of the traditional "teacher" and the traditional classroom concept is replaced by a novel community environment which is a model of affective teaching and learning.

One of the most pressing needs in the teaching of English in Hong Kong is the improvement of learners' speaking skills. Students often have a poor grasp of how sounds in English are made, and as a result these sounds are produced poorly and unintelligibly.

With advances in technology, the use of multimedia resources such as animations, audio files, and on-line videos in pronunciation teaching has become increasingly popular. Teachers can make use of a range of commercial software and various websites to enhance their teaching of a wide range of pronunciation areas.

A closer examination of the current multimedia resources, however, reveals that the pronunciation needs of Chinese speakers of English are not catered for. These available resources are designed for learners of no particular language background. Very often, teachers (especially those who are unfamiliar with the pronunciation difficulties of Chinese speakers) as well as students (especially those who are left to explore the resources themselves) fail to make effective use of the multimedia learning materials to target and work on their pronunciation weaknesses.

The workshop comprises a critical evaluation of some commercial software and an introduction to the authors' on-going project entitled 'Effective English Pronunciation for Chinese Speakers'. The project aims to create a CD-ROM which can be used by the learners independently, or with the help of a teacher, to learn how to articulate the English speech sounds accurately through animated graphics and videos. Speech organs and their functions are also introduced to raise learners' awareness of their role in speech production. The participants can also work on a series of exercises customized for Chinese learners of English and to practise the sound in question, as well as to record, play back, and compare their pronunciations with the 'model'.

This talk will discuss design principles the author has used as a basis for a series of online ‘language enhancement’ courses. I will demonstrate the integration of a range of language teaching and learning pedagogies and technologies into what endeavors to be an immersive online language-learning environment. I will suggest possible and necessary components for an online ELT programme that can provide learners with useful tools and opportunities, as well as necessary instruction, for language acquisition and production.

As far as time permits, I will discuss specific issues involved with developing and managing online courses, such as ways:

• to promote the acquisition of both accuracy and fluency (i.e. aspects of language that are unknown or avoided);
• to establish culturally relevant contexts and themes and to integrate supporting lexico-grammatical elements into an online environment;
• to support independent learning, multiple language proficiencies, learning styles, ages etc.;
• to implement iterative stages of acquisition, review, practise and production;
• to evaluate methodologies and materials as well as to assess students’ progress;
• to support students and tutors in the use of online materials and technology;
• to manage resources (i.e. students, tutors and materials); and
• to balance economic cost and pedagogical value;

I hope also briefly to illustrate how a course management platform might:

• help learners apply linguistic knowledge, skills and strategies to social and professional contexts;
• promote inductive as well as deductive learning strategies (e.g. risk taking, problem solving and discovery learning as well as explicit rule-based learning), and affective as well as cognitive involvement with the language;
• help learners acquire social, cultural and pragmatic knowledge; and
• provide learners with useful resources for ‘lifelong learning’.

The internet is a powerful means of communication which has become an abundant and ever growing resource for English language teachers and learners. In recent years, using the internet in language classrooms has gained popularity as more teachers and learners are embracing it. This practice is expected to experience an unprecedented growth as the internet holds potential as a tool for developing language as well as critical thinking skills.

This paper presents the findings of research that examines the effects of INTELL environment on the development of ESL learners' critical thinking skills. The research was conducted for one semester (14 weeks) at one of higher learning institutions in Malaysia and it involved 77 ESL learners of English. These learners were put in three different language-learning settings: full internet environment (28 learners), partial internet environment (23 learners) and non internet environment (26 learners) and each group had six hours of English language learning per week.

This paper will explain the condition in each setting and the methodology used in gathering the data. The findings of the research will be reported and their importance to English language teachers and language practitioners who are interested in incorporating IT in English language classrooms will be explained.

Many teachers produce computer-based materials for their students, including Internet materials. As students may use these materials outside the classroom, teachers have difficulty discovering any problems using them. This paper describes a research project that used the technique of 'Discount Usability Testing' advocated by Nielsen (1994, pp. 245-272), to improve the usability of an English language teaching Internet site.

The research questions addressed in this paper are whether changes made to the site during the usability study resulted in participants:

1. improving their success rate in completing common tasks on the site
2. being able to complete these tasks faster
3. saying that the site was easier to use.

Firstly, site users were questionnaired about how they use the site, and from the resulting data ten tasks were developed. Ten participants, including students and teachers, and native speakers of English and Chinese, attempted these tasks. They were observed, and data collected on usability problems, task completion and duration. Nineteen changes were then made to the site to address usability problems. More tests were conducted with the same tasks and two groups of participants, a first group of five who had taken the tests before and a second group of eight who had not. The results were compared to assess whether the site had improved.

Despite some problems relating to reliability, the results indicated improvements in task success rate and reductions in task completion time. There was general agreement that the site had become easier to use. Thus, according to these criteria, and with these limitations, 'Discount Usability Testing' was an effective methodology for improving the usability of the site.

In the session, the methodology will be described and discussed, and the site and tasks demonstrated. Questions will be answered at the end.

Nielsen, J. (1994). Guerilla HCI: Using discount usability engineering to penetrate the intimidation barrier. In Bias, R.G. & Mayhew, D. (Eds.) Cost-justifying usability. Boston: Academic Press.

Computers, the internet and the world-wide web are accepted features of most secondary schools, many homes and above all most businesses. They are also having an increasing impact on the way we seek, communicate about and display information. As economies are increasingly becoming knowledge driven, having a work-force skilled in information literacies is more and more important in our high-tech world. The internet is a key source of information these days and having the necessary skills to access, evaluate and use information effectively is increasingly important for today's children.

Through a series of practical examples, this presentation shows how the internet can be used successfully in typical secondary language classrooms to develop three important information literacy skills: information gathering and evaluation; communication about information; and information display. The examples will at the same time show how to practise important language skills: reading and listening; speaking and writing - within an integrated framework. The presented examples illustrate the way that information is collected and quality assured, how we communicate with others about the work we are doing, and the way that we can use the internet to display the knowledge that we have created to others. Using a task-based framework, the presentation will demonstrate how the information literacies that are so important in our modern high-tech world can be developed while at the same time providing meaningful and motivating language practice for the secondary school language learner.

Senior secondary students in Hong Kong have a limited exposure to listening to authentic communication, speak very little English every day and have a very sketchy awareness of current issues affecting society. Also, their approach to learning English is characterised by poor metacognitive strategies - they rarely think about the learning process, there is little planning or monitoring of the learning task and lack awareness of how well they have performed a task.

This presentation looks at how some of these shortcomings were addressed through lessons in a school multi-media learning centre. Web-based materials were incorporated to blend in with the facilities available in the school's multimedia lab and lessons had to be focused on practice for examinations to keep students interested in the activities. The aim was to enhance aural and oral skills of self-monitoring, problem identification and self-evaluation while being engaged in actively collaborating and constructing knowledge, solving problems, and being responsible for their own learning.

Use of streaming audio/video on an important issue and reinforcing the themes with a series of cartoons provided the students the opportunity to engage in critical group discussion. The discussions were timed and limited by parameters in which students were required to take a stand. Each group was responsible for recording their discussion on the Digital Voice Recorder. Their active participation seemed to facilitate productive interaction and fostered skills of group discussion. The self-evaluation after the discussion was an important learning experience. Also, students' reflections on the discussions and comments on each other's performance, helped build their abilities in critical judgement. There was active collaboration and students were in charge throughout. The lessons brought- a remarkable attitudinal change and awareness of students' own oral production; enhanced appreciation of skills relating to checking, verifying or correcting one's aural comprehension, and checking the outcomes of own language production.

Computer Assisted language learning (CALL) is no longer an innovative experiment for language teaching and learning and, as indicated by a large amount of research, it is here to stay. In many educational institutions, CALL has become a central resource, and has resulted in the investment of large amounts of teachers' time (both in the area of professional development and material design/integration) and institutional funds. This begs the following questions. How well are we doing? What are student perceptions of the value and relevance of CALL, especially those from non-Western cultures? Are these perceptions shifting? How can student feedback on CALL help us be more versatile and innovative in the delivery of our courses, and in the fostering of individual language learning and strategies?

These questions will be addressed with supporting evidence from appropriate literature, and by data from observations of, and questionnaires completed by elementary and pre-intermediate students studying in a tertiary environment before and after taking part in weekly CALL workshops at UNITEC (New Zealand). Their evaluation raises some interesting issues, including the fact that CALL means different things to different people. If student evaluation is seen as a valid measure of how well CALL meets its goals, then we need to consider the attitudes of the students who use it. In addition, we need to reflect on how we can enhance the effectiveness of and access to CALL with reference to theory, methodology, technology, curriculum and professional development. In this paper therefore, the challenges to be faced and possible ways forward for CALL are considered.

English communication skills and interview performance are important factors for Hong Kong employers when hiring graduates. However, there is an acute shortage of teaching/learning material to develop interview skills that is appropriate and motivating for Hong Kong tertiary students.

To meet these needs, a two-stage project was set up. The initial stage was the production of a narrative-based video entitled Through Other Eyes (TOE), following two students through a series of interviews. The video, which has been successfully used in all the universities in Hong Kong for many years (largely as course material) was designed to provoke reflection and
discussion.

The second stage was the production of a web-enhanced CD-ROM package, designed to meet the needs of self-access users, which has recently been distributed to all the universities in Hong Kong. This includes the existing video material, but goes much further in terms of both content and interactivity. The aim has been to create a package that goes beyond programmed
learning by:

• promoting self-evaluation and avoiding the idea that there is a 'right answer' (while recognising users' need for feedback)
• involving users in talking about themselves and their own situations
• involving 'branching', so that users can see the result of their choices
• providing access to authentic discourse and real-world information
• including extensive video interviews with Human Resource Managers
• helping users find the language they need to express themselves in interview situations
• providing users with web-based information and communication support

The aim of the workshop is to introduce interested secondary and tertiary teachers to the package, and to discuss the design decisions that were taken. In the workshop, we will report on user feedback received and provide examples of several of the features mentioned
above. Suggested areas of the package will then be highlighted, and participants will be given 20 minutes to try out features/sections that interest them and discuss the package in small groups.

The ICT Exploitation Team was created within the British Council in September 2001 with the aim of improving the exploitation of ICT services and products in teaching centres.

In this presentation, I outline how the team has tried to achieve its aim among teachers at the British Council. From this experience, I seek to draw learning points with general relevance (i.e. beyond the British Council context) about encouraging organisational development in the area of ICT.

The main activities of team members are to:

• carry out consultancies at each centre and agree an ICT action plan with local stakeholders;
• deliver regional training workshops for selected teachers who return to their centres to give cascade training to colleagues;
• create a network of ICT co-ordinators to share information and ideas;
• offer general support and advice (e.g. through factsheets and example lesson plans) via the organisation's global intranet.

The experience of the team indicates that:

• providing hardware and software is not enough to ensure effective use of ICT;
• appropriately pitched training for teachers is vital - to engage their interest and give them confidence to experiment and innovate;
• to encourage the use of technology in classrooms, systems need to be reliable, technical support easily available, and materials pedagogically sound;
• integrating ICT into lessons and syllabuses affects how lessons are organised and what content is covered;
• having different configurations of computers in classrooms affects the style of teaching and the type of learning that happens there.

Using ICT has a far-reaching impact on the processes of teaching and learning. Institutions need to be able to support this effectively.

 

The Kigali Institute of Science, Technology, and Management (KIST), established in 1997 and funded by a number of international donor agencies, is the only institute of higher learning for technology in Rwanda. The official languages of the country are French and Kinyarwanda. As per the government's bilingual (French & English) policy all Francophone students (90%) learn English and Anglophone students (10%) learn French at the Institute. After the 1994 genocide in which over one million people, including academics, were killed the higher learning institutions in Rwanda have employed expatriate academicians from English-speaking countries such as India, Kenya and Tanzania. As the medium of instruction is mainly in English, there is a strong need for students to learn English. The constant exposure to lectures and instructions in English has helped students improve their listening and speaking skills to a great extent, but not their writing skills. The Web-based English Language Learning Project was started with the objective of improving students' writing skills.

In this paper, I will discuss the language proficiency of the participants before the project was started, during the course of the project and at the end of the project; how the WELL project promoted learner-centred learning; how the learners generated their own syllabus; the various sub-skills of writing students were taught and learnt by themselves; the joy of being in the virtual world and the virtual world as the source of motivation for students; the role of teacher as a facilitator; the learners' participation in online discussion forums; and, what the learners could achieve at the end of the project.

Online learning opportunities are growing out of all proportion to access to computer labs and time in a busy curriculum. Demands are being made from all kinds of directions. Teachers need to be really choosy about the resources they access with their students. We need to consider that the choices of online activities are almost endless and need to be harnessed to promote engagement in learning by students.

The Virtual ILC is a range of English language learning resources for students and teachers accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week via the internet. These can be integrated into any English language teaching program or used by students for individual study. It has been produced by teachers at AMES Victoria (Adult Multicultural Education Services) for teaching English. It is designed for use by adult learners and middle to high secondary learners.

The Virtual ILC contains Realweb which has over 600 tasks linked to websites selected for their relevance to student needs and learning goals. Easynews provides listening activities at all learning levels. They are based on weekly news items prepared by SBS Radio. Checkout has stand alone resources for a wide range of interests and learning abilities.

In this session we will show the features of the Virtual ILC and discuss ways of integrating its resources into teaching programs.

Up to now, most Internet-based ESL/EFL lessons have been of three types:

• Treasure hunts, in which students surf the web to retrieve the answers to simple, discreet, factual questions (e.g., What street is the White House on; How many divisions are there in the Smithsonian Institution, etc.)
• ESL/EFL websites, where students take a variety of not-very-well coordinated grammar, reading and possibly listening quizzes and exercises (which can usually be found in books)
• Simple information-retrieval worksheets similar to treasure hunts, except that the work is done at a single "authentic" web site.

My internet-based EFL lessons are different in that each one is a mini-project designed to take up two to three class periods, and involves a variety of interactive tasks. In these lessons, students are given paper worksheets. Using the latter, they are required to go to a particular "authentic" (i.e., not an ESL/EFL site) web site and perform tasks that include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Retrieving information
• Writing grammatical questions, statements and short essays based on the information found
• Selecting and "ordering" merchandise from such sites as www.jcpenney.com,
• Configuring and "ordering" computer hardware from such sites at www.dell.com
• Booking flights, hotels and rental cars, and adding up the total vacation costs from such sites as www.travelweb.com
• Reading web pages and penetrating links carefully in order to complete PET-like reading tasks on the worksheets

Students put English strictly to practical use in the brave new E-commerce world emphasized in these projects. I will present several of these lessons, demonstrating how various tasks work, and discuss how students react to the lessons and various types of tasks mentioned above. Questions will be welcome. Participants will finally have the opportunity to complete a portion of a lesson.

In many institutions effective integration of ICT is blocked by a lack of provision for training. In the typical situation a department head will have a new program installed on the network and simply expect the teachers to use it - with predictable results. Most language departments don't allocate any budget for ICT training and time is always in short supply, and it is for these reasons rather than lack of interest from the teachers that ICT implementation so often fails. In this session we will consider strategies for maximising the resources available, starting with an examination of activities to establish a rationale for the use of ICT in English language teaching. We will look at how a software presentation plus worksheet session can give teachers a good working knowledge of a new program within the time normally set aside for a department meeting and will explore further teacher development resources, both paper-based and electronic. We will then look at how a department can establish a rotation system to ensure that only a reasonable training burden is placed on any one teacher over the course of a year. Finally we will consider how teachers can go one step further and adapt off-the-shelf products to meet the exact needs of their students.

By the end of the session, teachers will be able to answer these questions:

• How can I and my colleagues familiarise ourselves with the programs we have in the department with the minimum of additional work?
• Where can we find practical help in integrating ICT into our teaching?
• How can off-the-shelf programs be adapted quickly and easily to meet my students' exact needs?
• How can ICT help in measuring my students' progress?

There is very little software available to help teachers prepare their students for IELTS and Hong Kong 'A' Level examinations. This session focuses on the Clarity Language Consultants' STUDY SKILLS Success program and how teachers can integrate the program into their examination preparation courses.

We will look particularly at the Listening Unit in which students build awareness of pre-listening and listening strategies; and at the Speaking Unit where students are made aware of how to assess their own weaknesses and are given extensive speaking practice. In each, we will consider how the downloadable worksheets on the STUDY SKILLS Success website at ( www.IELTSpractice.com ) can be used as classwork and homework activities to prepare students for going "live" both on the program, and, ultimately, in the examination.

References:
www.Clarity.com.hk
www.IELTSpractice.com  (the integrated STUDY SKILLS Success website for students)
www.ClaritySupport.com  (for teacher support)

Traditional and present EFL classes in most, if not all, Asian countries are still focused on basic English skills, aiming to prepare the young citizens for the increasingly real needs for communication in English. Concepts about critical literacy are still new in the Asian schooling systems and may even be seen as irrelevant in EFL curricula by many teachers. The hardcore critical literacy ideologies have been practiced in the U.S. in four dimensions: disrupting the common place; interrogating multiple viewpoints; focusing on sociopolitical issues; and taking action and promoting social justice (Lewison, et. al, 2002). "From an instructional perspective, critical literacy is also about redesign and taking new social action but these later components need to be built on an understanding of the systems of power that are in play on language speakers and learners. (Jeremy Harste, personal communication, Nov. 6, 2002.)

This workshop will allow the participants to gain insights into why critical literacy MUST be included in EFL curricula in the present era, when the world has become a networked learning environment in which English is being used both as a tool of power and a tool for power. The participants will also gain practical ideas about how hardcore critical literacy can be applied in EFL classroom with the help of CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning) through their participating in a selection of useful EFL activities.
 

Lewison, M., Flint, A.S. & Van Sluys, K. (2002). Taking on Critical Literacy: The journey of the newcomers and the novices. Language Arts, 79, (5), 382-392.

Does on-line glossing increase or decrease the efficiency of vocabulary acquisition and retention among adult L2 readers? On-line glosses (hypertext links from words to definitions containing L1 translations and other data) occupy a key position in computer-assisted reading. Recent studies indicate that they make authentic materials more comprehensible (Gettys et. al., 2001) and faster to read (Hong, 1997) for learners with limited linguistic abilities. Rapid access to definitions boosts comprehension by freeing the reader's attention for top-down processes (Gettys et. al., 2001). How might this impact acquisition and retention of new words that appear repeatedly within the text? Better understanding of word contexts should speed vocabulary building. On the other hand, vocabulary building could be inhibited in two ways:

• elimination of strategies such as writing meanings and pronunciations alongside unknown words that benefit bottom-up processes;
• increased time frequency of unknown words because of faster reading.

This study compares on-line glossed and traditional paper texts for vocabulary efficiency, the average time and number of exposures necessary for acquisition and retention. Two readings are taken from a calculus textbook used for engineering majors. Thirty undergraduate engineers are divided into two groups: group 1, which reads one selection in glossed format and the other in paper format; and group 2, which reads the selections in reverse format. Using an adaptation of the experimental method presented in (Rott, 1999), the author reveals a fundamental tradeoff involved in choice of text format: with on-line glossing, retention requires more word exposures, but given a sufficient number of exposures, less time.

References:

Gettys, S., Imhof, L., and Kautz, J., (2001). Computer-Assisted Reading: The Effect of Glossing Format on Comprehension and Vocabulary Retention, Foreign Language Annals, Vol. 34, No. 2, pgs. 91-106.

Hong, W. (1997). Multimedia Computer-Assisted Reading in Business Chinese, Foreign Language Annals, Vol. 30, No. 3, pgs. 335-344.

Rott, S. (1999). The Effect of Exposure Frequency on Intermediate Language Learners' Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition and Retention through Reading, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Vol. 21, pgs. 589-619.

 

Many Asian students are simply not used to writing on a computer or researching using the Internet. In order to go someway towards remedying this problem I recently devised and taught an English academic writing course that involves Japanese Freshman and Sophomore students working with self-study materials and using class time to check progress with their teacher in one-on-one conferences in computer labs. The idea was to allow students to work at a pace that is comfortable for them and to give the teacher time to focus on the needs of individuals. The course allows teachers and students to work together one-on-one in front of a computer and this type of teacher-student negotiated intervention in the writing process has been perceived to be effective by both teachers and students.

My workshop will begin by detailing the reasoning behind setting up such a course, and by presenting some student feedback and teacher reflection. We will then simulate writing conferences and reflect on how having the conference in front of a computer would alter the process. The concept of a blended learning space is relevant here as we are all attempting to preserve the best pedagogical techniques of the past with the new possibilities opened up by technology. The dynamics of the writing class in which students feed of each other's creativity, and profit from giving and receiving advice need not be discarded just because it is not a traditional classroom course held in a traditional chalk and talk classroom.

I will then show some of the instructional readings and worksheets, and will explain how I intend to put the materials onto a user delivery system so as to make the course more user-friendly and interactive. Workshop participants will be asked to reflect on how they would adapt the instructional materials to fit their own teaching contexts.

Once requiring programming expertise and so often excluding ESL/EFL teachers, CALL/CELL is now within grasp for the laymen. As the web still holds great promise, teachers often consider producing web-based learning materials to supplement their teaching. But the reality seems to be that there is still a steep learning curve when it comes to putting materials on the web. Many have tried but shied away.

This workshop aims at giving participants, primarily secondary teachers, a new perspective, and a new way of considering how to incorporate the web in their teaching of a specific English skill, namely listening. But instead of just referring students to useful websites with pre-designed listening activities for ESL/EFL learners, which does not give one much sense of achievement, teachers will explore ways to adapt the web in customized materials for their own students, and get a sense of having authored something. Listening materials abound on the web. It is just a matter of knowing when, where and how to tap the vast resources available, and of learning how to give it a personal touch at the same time.

This workshop will demonstrate how simple to use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the building blocks of all web pages, can be employed to solve the learning curve problem, and why authoring tools are not strictly necessary for beginners, who may in fact be better off without them. In particular, it will look at ways of creating web-based learning materials without having to worry about the technical complications of starting and maintaining a website, or the need to learn a new software. Participants will get some hands-on experience on creating web-based learning materials for listening practice, which can all be saved on a 3.5" floppy disk to take away, ready for use in the classroom.