Teacher’s Role in Blended Learning.doc

Teachers Role in Blended Learning-Combination of Communicative Teaching & CALL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSIt took me three years of preparation to get admitted to the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade (SIFT) as a postgraduate student. Thanks to the fruitful instruction of professors and sincere encouragement of classmates，my three-year study at the SIFT has proved to be a most rewarding effort. Upon finishing this thesis, I would like to tender my gratitude to Professor Chen Jie, my supervisor, for her enthusiastic support, personal guide, expert advice and for the precious time she spared out of her full schedule for the revision of my thesis. My gratitude also goes to Professor Xu Yaqin, my business negotiation teacher, whose lively classroom teaching design initiated my interest in communicative language teaching approach. I will always remember Professor Luo Guoliang for his illuminating lectures and loving care for students , Professor Lu Naisheng for his humor and wisdom, Professor Zhu Peifeng, her expertise and unfailing endeavor in helping us to learn more. Also, I would like to thank Mr. Lance Knows, Mr Alfonso Lara, Dr Lisa Feng and Elisa Liu from Dyned International for their valuable help in helping collecting materials for this thesis and Professor Caimingjiong and Professor ZhouYanping for their encouragement and support in the course of my thesis writing. Last but not least, to my dearest parents, and my beloved Fiance, Mr Liuxianghua, whose true love is a constant source of encouragement and solace to me. CONTENTSChapter One Introduction5Chapter Two Computer and Language Teaching72.1 History and Development of CALL72.2 Computers Role in Language Teaching92.2.1 Computer as Tutor92.2.2 Computer as Tool102.3 Types of CALL Programs112.3.1 Drill and Practice Programs112.3.2 Tutorials122.3.3Simulations122.3.4 Games122.3.5Tool Programs13Chapter Three Blended Learning143.1 What is Blended Learning143.2 Technological Methods of Blended Learning153.2.1Whats E-Learning?153.2.2 Specific Methods for Language-Learning-163.2.3 Non-language-learning-specific methods183.2.4 Summary21Chapter Four Teachers Role in Blended Learning234.1 Teachers Role in Communicative Language Teaching234.1.1 Teacher as a Resource244.1.2 Teacher as a Controller244.1.3 Teacher as an Organizer254.1.4 Teacher as a Prompter264.1.5 Teacher as an Assessor264.2 Complementary Role of CALL in Communicative Classroom Teaching274.3 Case Study294.3.1 Program Background:294.3.2 Pre-course Preparation304.3.3 Course Design:334.3.4 Test and Feedback37Chapter Five Courseware Selection435.1 Function Requirement in Multimedia CALL435.2 Situation Base VS Concept Base45Chapter Six Conclusion47Bibliography49Chapter One Introduction This thesisteachers role in Blended learningresulted from both the authors experience with computer assisted language Learning (CALL) and her dissatisfaction with traditional classroom teaching, which is currently seeking breakthrough with the aid of information hi-tech. To meet the demands of IT reform , the Ministry of Education declared on the college English education reform news conference, held last Dec 31,that a pilot project on the CALL system in colleges and Universities was put on agenda. Based on the success of the pilot project, the CALL system will serve as the platform of college English education and college undergraduates will get as much as 3050% of their English credits from it. And along with the growth of economic development, this reform is reaching down to fundamental English teaching in middle and primary schools education. Take Shanghai for example, at the end of May this year, MOE Shanghai launched an “ Information Technology Project 20042007”, building an information highway for schools administration, teachers training, curriculum integration, and campus-home study. This just raised the curtain for an overwhelming and painful reform to Chinas English education framework. Both theoretical research and practice have inclined the conclusion that the introduction of technology has made a positive impact on students acquisition of a foreign/ second language. It is almost an inevitable trend to build more and more multimedia-language labs, just thinking of numerous advantages computers reveal in practice, say, source provision, material presentation, communicative activity language test，etc. There seems no reason to preserve room for language teachers any longer. However, compared with the vast amount of money and time spent on it, educational gains from technology seem far from satisfactory. The voice of opponents and skeptics is gaining more and more notice. While some take it as a new paradigm for teaching, others find little or no difference between the two. (Clark 1985). Especially, for Chinese students and teachers, the low-efficiency of CALL results reveals the fact that both sides are getting lost by information technology. Our teachers fall into the pessimistic idea that they are either to be replaced by computers someday somehow or to turn into old fogies who resist any change within themselves, holding fast to the land where they have always had full control.However, in such a dynamic society as ours today, your cheese is being stolen long before you aware. You have to move on before it is too late. So the problems confronting our language teachers in this information age include: What does CALL really mean to language teaching? It is a tool or replacement? To make it a tool, how shall the teachers react to bring out the best results?After coming to the conclusion that CALL is a tool and not a replacement, researches have been focusing more on the interaction between CALL and traditional teaching. This is often referred to as hybrid learning or blended learning. But if blended learning is simply interpreted as CALL course plus classroom teaching, and teachers dont know what kind of role they are going to play, the so called blended approach will turn out to be a sandwich approach, like chalk and cheese. -CALL is not well integrated with classroom teaching. Based on her two years experience with blended learning approach, the author aims to present case study for combining communicative teaching approach with CALL as blended learning class delivery design in order to illustrate the changing role of teachers in blended learning, and also to lay the ground for academic discussion, in the hope of yielding more valuable and constructive fruits. Besides, the author will compare some courseware designed on different perspectives in order to offer some reference for teachers and schools to select proper courseware in compliance with their own requirement.Chapter Two Computer and Language Teaching Not long after its birth, the computer began to be used in language teaching. Computers have given learners freedom to work at their own pace and level, and to receive immediate and personalized feedback. In terms of group dynamics, computers enable learners to pool their knowledge in more effective ways and enhance peer correction and language repair work. For these reasons, computer assisted/aided language learning (CALL) is witnessed as an innovation which opened the door for language teaching and changed the role of teachers.(Hoven 1999). 2.1 History and Development of CALLComputers have been used for language teaching ever since the 1960s. In the United States, the application of computer technique began at Stanford University (Illinois), and at Dartmouth. In Europe, early work on computers as an aid to the teaching of foreign languages (mainly in Britain) was dominated by Alford, and the scientific language project at the University of Essex (Ypsilandis, 1999). According to Warschauer & Healey (1998), this 40-year period can be divided into three main stages: behaviorist CALL, communicative CALL, and integrative CALL. Each stage corresponds to a certain level of technology and certain pedagogical theories. In the 1960s and 1970s the first form of computer-assisted language learning was only repetitive language drills, the so-called drill-and-practice method. It was based on the behaviorist learning model and as such the computer was viewed as little more than a mechanical tutor that never got tired. Behaviorist CALL was first designed and implemented in the era of the mainframe and the best-known tutorial system, PLATO, ran on its own special hardware. It was mainly used for extensive drills, explicit grammar instruction, and translation test (Ahmad, 1985). Communicative CALL emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction to the behaviorist approach to language learning. Proponents of communicative CALL rejected behaviorist approaches at both the theoretical and pedagogical levels. They stressed that CALL should focus more on using forms rather than on the forms themselves. Grammar should be taught implicitly and students should be encouraged to generate original utterances instead of manipulated forms. (Jones & Fortescue, 1987) This form of computer-based instruction corresponded to cognitive theories which recognized that learning was a creative process of discovery, expression, and development. The mainframe was replaced by personal computers that allowed greater possibilities for individual work. Popular CALL software in this era included text reconstruction programs and simulations. The last stage of computer-assisted language learning is integrative CALL. Communicative CALL was criticized for using the computer in a specific and disconnected fashion and for using the computer to make a greater contribution to marginal rather than central elements of language learning (Kenning & Kenning 1990). Teachers have moved away from a cognitive view of communicative language teaching to a social-cognitive view that emphasizes real language use in a meaningful, authentic context. Integrative CALL seeks both to integrate various skills of language learning (listening, speaking, writing, and reading) and to integrate technology more fully into language teaching (Warschauer & Healey, 1998). To this end the multimedia-networked computer provides a range of informational communicative and publishing tools that are potentially available to every student. The Internet and the rise of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in particular have reshaped the uses of computers for language learning. The recent shift to global information-based economy means that students will need to learn how to deal with a large amount of information and how to communicate across languages and cultures. At the same time, the role of the teachers has changed as well. Teachers are not the only source of information any more, but act as facilitators so that students can actively interpret and organize the information they are given, fitting it into prior knowledge. Students have become active participants in learning and are encouraged to be explorers and creators of language rather than passive recipients of it. Integrative CALL stresses these issues and additionally lets learners of a language communicate inexpensively with other learners or native speakers. Therefore, it integrates information processing, communication, use of authentic language, and learner autonomy into an organic whole, which is of major importance in current language learning theories. At its budding, CALL meant scarcely more than a desk-top making immature data-base application, for the computer itself was of “dinosaur” size and interface-unfriendly. The real prime time for CALL came only after the Internet technology came into being. With various tools and resources provided by All-mighty Internet , such as WWW (World Wide Web), e-mail, newsgroup, search Engine, real-time communication, etc, fundamental changes have were initiated in language learning, which also helped to establish the dividing-line between CALL and traditional methodology positioning CALL in modern language learning, both practically and theoretically. Generally speaking, there are two main dimensions in CALL research and manipulation. One is PC-based CALL, which emphasizes on the technology or projects based on individual computer, for example, the language learning instructive software run on PCs or PC-based language test while the other is of net-based type, which covers the various fields ranging from language material retrieving through Internet to on-line language learning projects. However, the boundaries between these two categories are actually blurry and sometimes interwoven.2.2 Computers Role in Language TeachingEarly in the 80s of last century, the famous “Tutor-Tutee-Tool” theory was advanced by Taylor (1980), a prestigious computer scientist in the United States. According to his theory, there are all together three modes where computers are used in education. In the first mode, the computer is seen as the tutor in the learning process. That is, computers are supposed to replace teachers completely or partially with programmed teaching activities. The second one is “Tutee-type”, where students, instead, are supposed to act as instructor and to instruct the computer to “learn to do something”, for example, programming with computers. Therefore, this mode is also called “Computer Program Design”. And the last one is “Tool” mode, where computers are only taken as a “tool” to assist or aid teachers to realize various activities or project in teaching. The following discussion would adhere to the “Tutor-Tutee-Tool” paradigm. However, with the leap-and-bounce development of software technology, more and more education-specific software are produced and have become available to students and teachers. Considering the dissatisfying outcome of operations in some schools, the “Tutee” mode was gradually abandoned by both researchers and teachers. 2.2.1 Computer as TutorA good example of how computers may be comprehended in this type of (programmed) tutor instruction could be seen in relation to Widas widely used CHOICEMASTER (earlier 1982, and latest, 1997, 1.9b version). This is a multi-choice program in which the user gets immediate feedback not only by selecting the right answer but also by wrongly choosing any of the distracters. The feedback provided by the machine is not simply of a yes/no type (as in other early tutor programs) but could also include explanations, corrections or hints as to why the attempted selection was wrong. In this way, the learner is hypothetically led to the correct answer. Lots of instructive language-learning software is developed under the similar guidelines. More and more software nowadays has included Artificial Intelligence (AI) in practice such as interactive simulation. In Dynamic English, developed by Dyned International, the program leads the student to different parts of the program according to his/her responses. 2.2.2 Computer as ToolThe role of the computer as a tool is the one which receives “widespread acceptance and use” by language teachers in the sense that “the computer is an example of a tool used to argument human capabilities” and the one which provides limitless possibilities for language learning. Computer tools can assist teachers and learners at any stage/phrase of the learning process: presentation, learning, and practice including language use. The testing stage is not considered here as most tests are of achievement nature and therefore lie within the framework of the computer as tutor. At the presentation and learning phase, using computer can present new material with text, sound, video and hypertext facilities, referring to enormous data resource (internet, compact disk , and CD-ROM encyclopedias)，and offering high-quality interactive feedback on vocabulary, grammar, language awareness, cultural issue, etc. This type of tool could assist the teacher at the presentation stage to present new material in more motivating ways and the learner to go through the material at his/her own pace and path and thus come to class with previous knowledge on the topic and situation to be dealt with by the teacher. At the practice phase the computer as tool can be fully tapped for repetitive practice as it never get exhausted as a machine. And moreover, computer can offer random or shuffle system which ensure individual study on ones own pace and practice efficiency. 2.3 Types of CALL Programs Writers about CALL usually group CALL programs into four categories: the drill and practice type of program, tutorials, simulations, and games. Although these classifications may have sufficed when computers were first used in language learning, they no longer cover the wider range of formats made possible by improved technology and increased experience. To the original four types of CALL programs, we will add two others: contextualized activities and tool programs. (Robert Ariew and Judith G.Frommer)2.3.1 Drill and Practice ProgramsDrill and practice programs consist of mechanical manipulations of words or sentences, using the same types of exercises as one uses in class, such as transformation and substitution drills; or in textbooks, such as multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. These exercises, usually limited to single sentences eliciting one-word answers or substitutions, can be based on verb conjugation, on a programmer point, or on vocabulary. The value of drill and practice programs depends on the accuracy and relevance with which vocabulary and structures are used and on the quality of the error analysis in the program. (Robert Ariew and Judith G.Frommer)Conte