A student recently expressed that he wanted greater structure for his Spanish lessons and also wanted to have a clearer sense of what he would be learning when. He said that he wanted a textbook and practice exercises. I am reluctant to head too far down the coursebook path for various reasons such as the likely greater focus on grammatical forms than on communicative competencies, the lack of individualization (and therefore relevance to students’ lives) and the limited amount of textbook-like resources for Spanish that are available online.
The solution
To address the student’s concerns, I have developed a kind of syllabus that gives greater structure to the classes and yet is naturally student focused. This syllabus is based around situations that the student may well find himself in and themes that he is interested in. There is a tendency for certain communicative skills to be foregrounded according to the situation, but neither specific linguistic skills nor grammatical forms are the driving force behind this syllabus. Instead, there is considerable flexibility with how the student and teacher jointly interpret the activities proposed by the syllabus.
Subjects for discussion: My World activities are suggested topics of conversation that focus on the students’ own lives. There are also suggestions of how to ensure that these in-class conversations are pedagogically fruitful.
Situations for role-play: Practical Simulation activities are unscripted role-plays that allow students to prepare for everyday scenarios that they anticipate encountering in the near future.
Teacher’s guide to help teachers use the syllabus. The guide includes support on preparing lessons and on how to teach using the syllabus.
The student guide helps students understand what their role could and perhaps should be in the learning process.
Several people in the Dogme Yahoo discussion forum have attempted to give greater shape to the idea of Dogme teaching using web 2.0 technologies (“Dogme 2.0”). Graham Stanley has suggested formulating “vows” for Dogme 2.0 similar to the original Dogme model. Here are my thoughts on what some guiding principles for Dogme 2.0 could include.
Methodological Guidelines
In “Dogme: Dancing in the dark?” Scott Thornbury sets out the original guidelines (“vows”) for Dogme. The below guidelines for Dogme 2.0 draw on these Dogme principles to suggest an approach appropriate to a web 2.0 world. As such they focus on the areas where 2.0 technologies are changing our relationship to knowledge and therefore our approaches to learning.
Enabling conversation: technology can enable dialogue, broadening the range of participants, or deepening the conversation by involving others.
Content co-creation: materials stimulate conversation, but the content for the lesson is driven, indeed created, by the students themselves. Collaborative tools (such as wikis) can encourage students to work together to create the lesson’s content.
Locality: mobile devices can help students relate to their current location, through photographing, filming, audio recording or writing descriptions relating to where they are. A Dogme use of mobile devices helps students to better relate to their immediate surroundings, or to places that are important to them.
Connections: strengthening communication with others (near or far) to facilitate connectivist learning that involves not just individuals but also broader networks or communities.
Relevance: the internet is used to ensure greater relevance of the subject matter for the learner. Students are able to find more specific information and connect with networks that are more suited to their interests.
Voice: online publishing (be it text, audio, images or video) allows learners to be heard and included in specific and yet global discussions.
Identity: students have space to express themselves and in so doing to focus on different aspects of their identity (perhaps in Second Life or by participating in different online networks or communities). Students develop language skills that are relevant to them as individuals, through exploring their identity and relationship with the world.
To give some background to these suggestions, I discuss below some related concepts with respect to Dogme.
At SLanguages 2009 I gave a presentation on Dogme language teaching and its relevance to virtual world language education. Here is the presentation as text…
I have been using virtual worlds such as Second Life for approximately two years and during this time I have done some interesting and engaging activities with students. However, I have also being looking for methodologies to draw upon to ensure that these activities are pedagogically sound and beneficial to the students’ learning. More recently I have taken a closer look at Dogme ELT as a pedagogy to guide these virtual world activities and Dogme has stood out as an approach that has much to offer virtual world language learning because of its focus on real life communication as the basis for developing language competencies.
One of our students, Pierre Moussy, has been using the 3d virtual world, Second Life, to gain conversation practice. His presentation below was given at the SLanguages conference (for language education in virtual worlds); you can listen to Pierre’s presentation and follow his PowerPoint. Pierre’s talk is especially interesting because it gives us some insights into how languages learners actually use second life to talk with others in a foreign language. It also shows us how they benefit from such experiences and how language teachers can better guide their students so that they gain the most from virtual worlds.
The event took place at Dennis’ villa on EduNation – so thank you Dennis for hosting the meeting. And thank you to all for attending and making it such a interesting conversation.
I think you can only hear 3 voices (most participated via text-chat within Second Life) and they are of Dennis Newson, Scott Thornbury and me.
Talking with Graham Stanley last month and seeing Pierre Moussy’s G2 Android smartphone in action got me thinking more seriously about mobile learning for languages. Some of the G2 phone’s features make use of augmented reality, which seems to fundamentally change (indeed improve!) the possibilities of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL).
This blog post is an attempt to sketch out some initial thoughts on how Augmented Reality Language Learning (ARLL) could be used in a student centered way. Both Task-Based Learning (TBL) and Dogme approaches seem to offer guidance, as do the experiences with Virtual World Language Learning (VWLL). The focus here is very much on mobile access to geo-tagged Wikipedia (Wikitude) and location-based social networking (Google Latitude and BrightKite).
Avatar Languages has yet to develop ARLL lessons, so this blog post merely looks at what may well be possible.
What is Augmented Reality? AR is the combination of real-world and computer-generated data so that computer generated objects are blended into real time projection of real life activities.
Wikitude – An Immersive Wikipedia Wikitude is a program that overlays information in Wikipedia about physical places onto the camera screen of a mobile phone.
Wikitude places markers and summaries on the screen exactly where you can see the relevant building or location. These markers also link to the relevant Wikipedia article, which then opens up in the phone’s internet browser (via a 3G connection).
I intended to write this blog as a follow up to the one on students writing for Wikipedia – and I checked back to see when it was written – almost exactly a year ago. Since then quite a few articles have been written by our students for Wikipedia. And now we are looking at other wiki sites, such as Wikitravel…
Language learners often travel and so they have plenty of travel experiences to write about. Even those students who aren’t travelling much can write about where they live or another place they know well.
Virtual worlds such as Second Life can be easily added to classroom-based or online language lessons. Virtual worlds offer a 3D immersive experience to be included as an optional extra.
The previous blog post on Dogme 2.0 sketches out how the web is becoming increasingly a normal part of our lives as well as an enormous source of both language learning content and opportunities to interact with others as part of the learning process.However, it is really the questions of relevance, meaning and motivation that are the key links between Dogme ELT and web 2.0.
If we see learning as a process of constructing meaning, and therefore one where relevance is key to enabling the learner to both find and create meaning, then the actual medium (be it online or offline) is not necessarily so significant.What seems more pertinent is the ability to create excitement and engagement such that language learning opportunities surface in class.
The web 2.0 is clearly changing how we work, communicate and learn.So, if the textbook is to keep up with these developments, what should it look like?
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