MWALLT
 
   Midwest Association for Language Learning & Technology  
      Illinois - Indiana - Iowa - Kansas - Michigan - Minnesota - Missouri      
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Illinois - Indiana - Iowa - Kansas - Michigan - Minnesota - Missouri
    Nebraska - North Dakota - Ohio - South Dakota - Wisconsin
MidWest Association for Language Learning Technology
 
 
 

Midwest Association for Language Learning and Technology

November 15, 2014, Illinois Wesleyan University

Conference Session Descriptions


Traditional, Hybrid, and Online Teaching in Modern and Classical Languages:
Exploring Differences, Creating Communities

Abstracts of Papers to be Delivered
Arranged in Order of Presentation

 

How to Prepare Teachers to Teach Online?
Marlene Johnshoy, Alyssa Ruesch and Frances Matos-Schultz
Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota

As more teachers are being asked to teach online, we are also gathering more information about what new online teachers need to know about teaching online. But what parts of that body of information is the most important for them to know? What is the best way to inform teachers of this information? We'll show you a couple of versions of what we've done, and the responses to it, but we'd also like your input.


From the Diary of a Language Program Director: The Program Challenges and Successes in Using Technology in Blended, Hybrid, Online Courses and Looking Forward to the Flipped Classroom
Casilde Isabelli
University of Nevada, Reno

The race to integrate technology in the foreign language classroom started in the new millennium. Since then, research has shown how to incorporate technology into the foreign language curriculum, the different types of technologically enhanced classrooms (traditional, blended, hybrid, and online) and how to develop them, and student outcomes for the different proficiencies (among other things). However, a gap in literature exists detailing possible instructional challenges that a language instructors might encounter when transitioning their program from a traditional classroom format to a technologically enhanced program and offering solutions to facilitate that transition.

The journey for using technology in its different forms and at differing degrees in a foreign language program has been, for me, a learning curve. In addition to making reference to research, I will be drawing on my own experience and trials as an instructor of a first-year hybrid and online course in Spanish at a large public institution. To a greater degree, I will draw on my experiences as Director of the Spanish Language Program in the challenges faced in developing courses housed entirely in the Blackboard Learning System and incorporating in that course management platform McGraw-Hill's Spanish Connect, a web-based application that offers various types of grammar, vocabulary, reading, speaking, listening, and writing activities. Furthermore, I will discuss challenges and present solutions encountered with encouraging colleagues to use this enhanced program and how I used empirical data to ease the fears of such a program being “unsuccessful”.

I will conclude with a discussion on how these enhanced classrooms have led to the new interest of converting some of our classrooms to flipped classrooms using these same approaches and how we plan on moving forward.


Service Learning and Reflection Sessions: The Use of Technology to Connect the Classroom with the Service
Clara Burgo
Loyola University Chicago

Service learning courses are designed to increase civic engagement and social justice in students and to connect the classroom with the community by creating an environment of mutual interest, cooperation, and dedication between the students and community members. This is the true meaning of Intercambio, a reciprocal arrangement between campus and the community. It allows the students the unique opportunity of enhancing their knowledge about the Spanish-speaking world through community service since it acts as a living text. Once a week students attend a specific Latino community center site in addition to their Spanish Intermediate Courses where their members are tutored in English and American traditions, while the students are mentored in spoken Spanish and Spanish culture. This arrangement is intended to be a mutually beneficial relationship. Students spend 25 hours per quarter working with one of several organizations in Chicago Latino communities with a predominantly Spanish-speaking constituency: through advocacy and education, these sites serve new immigrants from Mexico and Central America who are integrating into their new cultural environments. The community service experience plays a key role in learning and practicing Spanish, informing class discussions, enriching writing, and adding to Spanish cultural competency. In this study, it is shown how students assessed their service learning experience through Reflexiones sessions by mentors visiting the class periodically and weekly online discussion boards. Results showed students not only found improvement in their oral skills but also they got to know the community by seeing their members as peers in this exchange tutoring service.

The First Ten Weeks: My Partial Flip Integrating Video Content into First Year French
Carol Goss
Valparaiso University

As of this fall, I’m a fresh adopter of the flipped model, introducing new content to my beginning French students through low-tech, 3-minute videos. I’ll share my early successes (and failures) of the first ten weeks of the semester in implementing a “partial flip” using a handful of user-friendly tools. My toolbox includes a Sharpie, an iPod, YouTube and Flipgrid, an inexpensive platform which teachers use to create question prompts that students respond to with recorded videos. In this session I will highlight the ways this partial flip has caused me to reimagine the content cycle of my course. I will also explore in detail Flipgrid as a means to reinforce new content with daily speaking practice while also building community online, from within the traditional classroom. Lastly, I will introduce eduCanon, a free tool that teachers use to design guided video-based lessons, further enhancing materials created for flipped learning.


Flipped Tutoring: Using Technology to Increase Proficiency in a Peer-to-Peer Language Program
Claire Moisan
Grinnell College

This presentation will describe the transformation of a self-instructional/peer tutoring language program from one based on a traditional classroom model to a highly structured blended system focused on proficiency.

Since 1983, Grinnell College’s Alternate Language Study Option has provided students the opportunity to earn two credits studying a language not offered by an established department or program –usually a less commonly taught language. A major component of the program is peer tutoring, with native speaking international students leading oral practice sessions. Traditional classroom methods have not worked particularly well and have achieved uneven results at best. The three largest problems have been: a lack of student accountability, inconsistent and unclear learning objectives across the multiple languages offered by the program, and an ineffective use of class time, with tutors often speaking more English than the target language and often focusing more on grammar than on proficiency.

By flipping the program, student learners are now required to do all of their work on the LMS; they have frequent checks-ins with self-graded quizzes and online oral practice, and they are also required to upload evidence of having achieved ACTFL proficiency goals every week in lingufolio. The technological transformations thus reaffirm and reinforce the idea that these students are enrolled in a “self-instructional” language program; they help to make students more responsible for their own learning. Meanwhile, non-technological innovations in preparing student tutors –honing careful lesson plans aligned to proficiency standards and implementing games for learning– has fostered a greater sense of purpose on the tutors’ part. Involved from the first in designing and creating the online modules, student tutors are now much more knowledgeable about proficiency goals, and about how to design a course (online and off) to achieve those goals. In short, both tutees and tutors are more invested in the teaching and learning community, thanks to the blended model and strengthened organization and expectations.

After overviewing the transformation from traditional to blended language learning and tutoring, this presentation will focus specifically on several easy to use language learning tools, including Speak Everywhere, Linguafolio, and Rich Internet Applications for language learning, all of which should be of interest to attendants who want to learn about “effective technology use with limited time and on a limited budget.

 

Incorporating Online Resources in Integrated Performance Assessment
Claudia Fernández
Knox College

Within the framework of Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) introduced by ACTFL in 1997 it is required the use of authentic texts (i.e., oral, printed or video) to assess the interpretative mode of communication of the L2 students. Galloway (1998) defines authentic texts as the ones "produced by members of a language and culture group for members of the same language and culture group" (p. 133). In light of this, it is not surprising to see that the Internet has become a wealthy source of such documents to be used as authentic texts in IPA. In this presentation, I will provide the rationale and design features of the IPA and how texts found online can be incorporated to assess interpretative tasks. I will also present several examples of interpersonal and presentational tasks that derive from the online materials used for the interpretative tasks. Finally, I will show examples of rubrics to evaluate and grade the performance of students in the three modes of communication.

Galloway, V. (1998). Constructing cultural realities: “Facts” and frameworks of association. In J. Harper, M. Lively, & M. Williams (Eds.), The coming of age of the profession (pp. 129-140). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.


Workshop: Student and Instructor Perspectives on a Hybrid, First-Year Language Course
Stacey Johnson and Berta Carrasco
Hope College

The presenters, two instructors with different pedagogical orientations, conducted classroom-based research on their own hybrid first-year Spanish course. The session will begin with interactive examples of hybrid activities from the course. Then, the presenters will discuss the results of the study including a step-by-step analysis of how to preserve pedagogy and content while also making good use of digital tools and online opportunities. They will explore the inner workings of a hybrid class, present the perspectives of the instructors and students that participated in the study, show learning outcomes, and share immediately practical teaching tools.

 

Impact of Online Learning on Academic and Professional Writing
Carmen López-Ferrero
Pompeu Fabra University

The aim of the presentation is to evaluate the results of an online tool that could assist under and postgraduate university students to write academic and professional texts; this kind of system is practically nonexistent in the present, especially in Spanish. Our work is based on previous descriptions, which identify the most problematic phenomena in academic and professional writing at university level. We aim to develop a tool for automatic detection and correction of some of those problematic issues at different linguistic levels such as discourse, grammar and vocabulary. In contrast with other more psychopedagogical orientations, we take a discourse, pragmatic and sociocultural perspective. This framework allows us to conduct a descriptive basic research on linguistic and learning phenomenon, as well as the pedagogical applications to improve the textual competence in Spanish as a mother tongue and as a foreign language.

 

Literature and Technology: The Use of Online Short Stories in the Classroom
Guada Cabedo-Timmons
Western Illinois University

In this paper, I plan to show a brief introduction to an online short stories program: the “Proyecto Sherezade”; evaluating the positives and negatives aspects of this program, to provide how appropriate and effective this technological teaching method could be to the appreciation of literature, by college students.

“Proyecto Sherezade” is an Internet-based project publicly available to all: readers, writers, teachers, and students, founded in 1996 by a group of Spanish language and literature academics in Canada and the United States.

This teaching approach is a valuable pedagogical tool that teaches Literature with Technology to today’s college students. Students relate better to what they perceive to be current and relevant to them with the use of technology, and they can learn and appreciate literature in a more interactive way.
The program uses only living writers so, after reading the short stories, students interview the authors by e-mail, write critiques of their texts, and present the results in class. These activities provide an excellent introduction to the canonical masterpieces, and encourage students and professors to become writers too.

 

Teach-Tech-Talk: Engaging Diverse Learners to Achieve Proficiency in the Target Language
Haydee Taylor-Arnold
Ladue Horton Watkins High School

Our Millenial students are curious, active, and technologically savvy. How can we keep up with their uniqueness? This session will discuss a variety of teaching strategies that assist in building students’ communicative competence and critical thinking by using engaging, culturally enriched resources and technology (use of apps such as Edmodo, Voicethread, Socrative, Quizlet, Vocaroo, Powtoon). Participants will learn effective ways to implement the ACTFL National Standards to boost students’ proficiency and fluency in the target language.


Borges’ “The Library of Babel” and the Universes of the Virtual
Anibal M Sánchez
University of Illinois, Springfield

In my presentation I want to explore the existence of some relationships between the work of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and the concepts of virtual reality and the Internet.

Borges’ idea of the universe as a library (that is, as something written), or the idea of an infinite book which contains all the possible and concrete books (“The Book of Sand”), makes us think, inevitably, about the Internet, with its myriads of possibilities and its labyrinthine (and sometimes dangerous) paths. At the same time, the notion of “augmented reality” brings to our minds the relation between knowledge and object that takes place in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” another famous short story by Borges.

Borges’ ideas can be traced down, many times, to texts belonging to the oldest traditions (The Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, et cetera).

When I brought to my classes these ideas about Borges and the Internet and the virtual reality, the outcome was very positive. The main consequence was that I could show to the students that the study of Latin-American Literature does not imply to talk about old, outdated or pre-technological ideas. They were able to see a continuum from Borges’ short stories towards our techno-electronic world.

 

Blended Language Learning: Past, Present, and Future
Maja Grgurovic
University of Illinois at Chicago

Blended learning is defined as a combination of face-to-face and online instruction in a planned, pedagogically valuable manner (Picciano, 2009). It is seen as a transformational force in education (Dziuban et al., 2014) and a predominant model of instruction in the future Watson (2008).

This presentation will address the development of blended language learning from 2000 to 2014 based on the analysis of a number of blended learning research studies. It will present findings from each of the stages of the blended learning development and discuss how they have informed both research and practice. Future developments in the field will be also outlined.

References:
Dziuban, C., Hartman, J. & Mehaffy, G. L. (2014). Blending it all together. In A.G. Picciano, C. D. Dziuban and Graham, C. R. (Eds.). Blended learning: Research perspective, Volume 2. (pp. 325-337). Routledge, New York: NY.

Picciano, A. G. (2009). Blending with purpose: The multimodal model. Journal of asynchronous learning networks, 13 (1), 7-18.

Watson, J. (2008). Blended learning: The convergence of online and face-to-face education. Vienna, VA: North American Council for Online Learning.

 

 

MWALLT is a regional affiliate of IALLT (International Association for Language Learning Technology), established in 1965, a professional organization dedicated to promoting effective uses of media centers for language teaching, learning, and research.

 
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