Avatar Languages Blog

The challenge

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.

Syllabus contents

The syllabus contains the following sections…

• 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.

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I have been focusing on working with phrases with my students (and also in my own Chinese learning), and in both cases I have realized that phrasebooks can offer some support with language learning.

The significance of phrases

Phrases are especially important in language learning because they increase fluency for both native speakers and language learners alike.  This is because there is a limit to the length of sentences we can create without using pre-constructed phrases as shortcuts; phrases reduce the cognitive load and so speed up our talking.  Personally, I find some peace of mind when using phrases in a foreign language, because I know that they will be grammatically correct without my needing to think about it.

Learners tend to gain new phrases through repeated use (presumably in real-life situations, but also in simulations/role-plays and any related class-work), just as native speakers do.   But how can learners find the right phrases when they need them?  Two classic solutions are the travel phrasebook and the business writing guide (book).  Both are kept to hand: in the traveler’s pocket or on the office desk; and both are organized according to themes or situations.  These reference books are very useful and with web and mobile phrasebooks appearing, they will become easier to use exactly when needed.

The need for a “personal” phrasebook

However, published phrasebooks are very general and will often not respond to the specific need of a particular learner.  When I went to the post office in China last month I found my travel phrasebook useful for considering initial requests, but preparation in lesson was what enabled me to have a more complete list of phrases for my exact situation.  I found that I needed my own Personal Phrasebook (PPB), tailored precisely to me and my needs.

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Reflecting upon my recent one-to-one Chinese lessons in southern China, I felt that a dialogic approach (essentially Dogme) worked so well because the conversations with the teacher were much more than a dialogue that just happened to result in language learning.  Rather, the class conversations had certain attributes that made them good vehicles for language learning.

Talking about Chinese soymilk

During my lessons I brought objects, photos, texts, audio and video into class to share with my teacher and discuss:

• Objects: drinks I had bought at the shop
• Texts: photos of menus or signs I had seen the previous day
• Pictures and video: photos and videos of things I had seen, done or eaten
• Audio: recordings of conversations I had had – perhaps when buying something

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Language classes account for a relatively limited amount of the student’s learning – and much (perhaps most) of the learning is done informally, out-of-class.  So, how can we as teachers change what we do in lesson to better support what the learners are doing out-of-lesson?

This blog post is a set of notes of my thoughts about out-of-class learning and how it can be supported by in-class activities.  The video shows me explaining a mind-map of these ideas, which itself is available as a photo so that it is easier to read.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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Google have just presented a preview of their forthcoming Google Wave – a communication tool that combines email, IM and collaborative work-spaces. Effectively it is a mash up of Google Docs, Google Talk and Gmail.

The above YouTube video is worth watching, even though it is over one hour long. It very nicely sets out both what the tool can do and starts to look at how it will change how we work in the future. Of course, there is always the question of whether it will catch on, but given that it is an open source, there is a good chance that this or something similar will become the norm in the forthcoming years.

What is a wave?
The following is how Google sums up Wave …

• A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

• A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

• A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

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SLanguages 2009 will take place on 8 & 9 May.  I will be giving a presentation about the Dogme ELT movement and how its approach to language teaching has a lot to offer language educators using virtual worlds.  Here is the abstract…

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Scott Thornbury, co-founder of the Dogme ELT movement along with Luke Meddings, will be talking in Second Life on Sunday 26 April at 18.00 (GMT), which is 11.00 PST.

Dogme and Second Life are a very interesting combination and have a lot to offer each other. It will be extremely interesting to listen to Scott Thornbury’s comments on virtual worlds.

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