The Language Teacher
July 2002
Combining Multimedia and Classroom Activities
Lance Knowles
Dyned
The relationship between multimedia, e-learning, and traditional, classroom-based language education continues to evolve. Teachers and administrators, in many cases not familiar with technology, are faced with a rapidly changing teaching environment for which their previous training has not prepared them. Setting realistic expectations and selecting the most suitable multimedia courses to meet those expectations is certainly a major challenge. As an illustration of the problems teachers frequently encounter when trying to decide which program to use, let's examine three often-asked questions:
- How many hours does it take for a student to make measurable progress?
- How many hours does it take for a student to complete a multimedia course?
- Is multimedia effective?
In fact, these questions are anything but straightforward. The questions themselves often say more about the inexperience and unrealistic expectations of those asking them than anything else, unless of course there is an expectation that the answers won't be simple.
Before addressing them, it's important to know what assumptions about language learning are at the core of a program. In our case, for example, we assume that language learning involves skill acquisition. As such, it involves many variables. To one of our business partners in India, when asked by them to make predictions about language learning success in a proposed 60-hour intensive course, we made the point that the manufacturing of machine parts (which is their core business) is much simpler to predict and quantify than running a language training program and predicting individual student outcomes, especially for short courses.
For expectations and results to be realistic, it was essential to point out that the business model for a language-training program must be different from the business model they are used to because the end-products (people with increased English language skills) are fundamentally different than machine parts. Machine parts have definite, easily measured dimensions, whereas differences among learners, their teachers, and the environment outside the classroom are vast. The predicted outcome for an individual student will therefore have wide variability. Experienced teachers know this. They see it in their students term after term. Business people, however, are often uncomfortable with this variability and seek ways to remove it, for example, by trying to minimize the classroom and teacher components. Hence their frustration with education: It continues to defy their wishes for simplicity and quick solutions.
Human beings, of course, are anything but simple. Look at the differences in how students learn to play a musical instrument. One student will take a month to learn an etude. Another student will finish it in a week. It's the same piece, but it takes a different amount of time to finish. And once the piece is finished, good students will continue to review it until they can play it with ease. Such is the nature of skill acquisition.
What we can say is that the acquisition of a skill requires practice and that an appropriate learning path will make that practice more effective. The frequency and quality of the practice is crucial, as well as individual aptitude and motivation, which can be greatly enhanced by the group dynamics of a class and the coaching of a caring, thoughtful teacher.
Another key element is the design of the training program itself, and whether there is a developmental sequence in the program that works in concert with how the brain acquires the skill. A well-designed program should consider, for example, which elements of the language are primarily rule-based, which elements involve memorization, and the nature of short-term memory and learning styles, which vary from student to student.
The answer to Question 1, therefore, is: "It depends."
The total number of hours required to make the desired gain in language proficiency varies from student to student. In addition, a group of students who study once or twice a week for an hour or two will require many more hours to attain the same degree of proficiency gain as a group of similar students who study for four or five hours a week in appropriately spaced intervals. Frequency of study and quality of study are significant variables in reducing the total study time required to move from one level to another.
In general, however, a period of at least one hundred hours of study seems to be the minimum time required to show appreciable, measurable gains in most measures of language proficiency. For students at a higher language level, the time requirements are even greater as experience in total immersion programs has shown. Even a two-hundred hour course, four to six hours per day, may show only minimal gains in proficiency for some intermediate level students often because of the nature of proficiency tests and the statistical errors inherent within. If this is true, what sense does it make to use "proficiency" tests such as the TOEIC to evaluate individual student progress in a fifty-hour course?
For a large enough sample, proficiency test results may show average gains that can be useful for course administrators since individual errors will largely cancel out, but individual results invariably suffer from the conflict between the amount of real gain and the error in the test itself. What is not in doubt is that a student who makes substantial progress (as seen by teachers and in class performance) in a short program may show little or no gain in their test score. So-called "proficiency test" results, therefore, need to be handled in a responsible manner.
In most programs, the most appropriate tests will be those that measure how well the material within the program has been learned. Success with a series of these "achievement" or "mastery" tests may or may not translate into proficiency gains over a long period of time. This will depend on how well the syllabus has been designed and implemented, and whether the goal has been to build proficiency or something else, such as to pass an entrance examination.
As for Question 2--"How many hours does it take for a student to complete a multimedia course?"--many of the same factors apply as for Question 1. In addition, we must also consider what other materials or activities (classroom or other) are used in conjunction with the course being assessed. For example, two courses used in parallel may result in considerable timesavings and efficiency because each course may contribute valuable elements to the other. For example, unless the teaching sequences are exactly the same, students may benefit because each course introduces and reviews key points in the syllabus at slightly different times, and therefore cuts down on the amount of time required for these kinds of activities if each course were used alone. In this way, 1 + 1 = 3.
To cite an example of two courses that work well together, consider the classic story-based course, The Lost Secret. Used in parallel with a conceptually based course like New Dynamic English, students benefit by both the variety and contrast in the materials themselves and the fact that the syllabus in each course complements the other. The key verb structures, for example, follow an almost identical path, though in different contexts, which adds both interest and exposure time.
So again, the answer to Question 2 is: "It depends." A well-designed course may take anywhere from 60 to 100 hours to complete--not the clear answer a salesperson would want to put in an advertisement. On this point, the language teaching profession must decide whether it prefers to have simple, on-the-box answers or honest answers that require some degree of experience and judgement to appreciate the complexities we face in language education.
The third question is an especially interesting one since if we were to rephrase it as "Are textbooks effective?" it becomes clear just how absurd the question is. Just as some textbooks are well designed and effective, others are a jumble of phrases, idioms and poorly designed dialogs that give students very little except frustration. We cannot, therefore, lump all textbooks into the same category. Differences matter.
Despite this, there are articles and studies that explore the broad category of multimedia effectiveness. Though many of them conclude in favor of multimedia courses, including some of the courses I have designed, the design of and small numbers involved in the studies mean that the results have potentially large errors which can easily mislead or even result in wrong conclusions. To require such questionable data when evaluating a set of materials, therefore, may not be any more effective than looking at the material, and having well qualified, experienced instructors judge whether or not they think it makes sense. The real test doesn't come until the teachers begin to use the program and are provided with the training and support necessary to ensure that the program can work the way it was designed. This takes time--something that nobody wants to hear.
In the training programs that I have run, we look at the variables mentioned above, such as frequency of study; learning paths; practice techniques; sequencing the four skills; and defining the distinctive roles of the teacher, classroom, and multimedia. We show how a particular strength of multimedia is its ability to provide effective practice in listening and controlled speaking practice, and we demonstrate a variety of interactive tasks that can be done on a frequent basis. Sample classroom activities from around the world demonstrate how the classroom can provide students with the opportunity to transfer the language models of a course into their own particular set of needs and circumstances. Extension and personalization activities, for example, are best done in the classroom, as are oral presentations, role-plays, and the receiving of human feedback.
From our experience, it is clear that the role of the teacher and classroom remains fundamental to language learning, at least for the vast majority of language learners. It is therefore a mistake to consider e-learning and multimedia to be in opposition to the teacher and classroom. Rather, a blended approach, where multimedia and classroom activities support each other, is emerging as the preferred choice, where each enhances the other. In this regard, teacher training is both essential and a prerequisite to the successful combining of multimedia and classroom activities.
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