Abstract
(English)
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Introduction
It was decided early on that Eurocentres should participate in the TELOS project as an Application Site, as defined in the terms of reference of the project. This means that we should not be expected to develop novel IT applications, but to pilot ('demonstrate') the applications produced by other participants (designated 'Development Sites'). In fact this function entailed a great deal of development work, as we were required to create original content material for the chosen applications in order to be able to demonstrate these in our institutional setting.
Eurocentres participation in the TELOS project comprised two strands, based respectively on two different applications offered by other participants.
Strand 1: LINK dialogues
The objective of this strand was to develop interactive audio materials using the LINK Dialogue authoring system and to pilot these in Eurocentre schools.
A report on the evaluation of the LINK dialogues was submitted as a contribution to the final documentation of the TELOS Project. This report is reproduced in its entirety as an appendix to the present document. The remainder of this section is intended as brief summary only.
LINK Dialogue is a multimedia authoring system developed and published by the LINK (Institut für Linguistik und Interkulturelle Kommunikation) company of Germany. Among other facilities, the program provides a user friendly way of constructing language learning activities based on pre-recorded dialogues, with optional graphic images.
It was envisaged that forty short dialogues would be devised and scripted in English, and the same number in French. The dialogues were to be based on functional and situational objectives (such as 'Invitations', 'At the Bank') and would constitute a syllabus of such objectives ranging from Level 1 (Beginner) to Level 5.
The dialogues were scripted and recorded by teachers at Eurocentres London Lee Green (for English) and Eurocentres Amboise (for French). The audio recordings were digitised at Eurocentres London Victoria and sent back to the respective schools, where they were incorporated into the LINK authoring shell, again by teachers.
The finished dialogues were piloted with students at the originating schools. They were evaluated by informal observation and by means of a questionnaire designed to elicit students'reactions.
The outcomes of these activities were positive, both with regard to the experience of developing the project materials and to the responses given by students to the finished product.
Strand 2: P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. exercises based on Internet materials
P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. is the name of an authoring program developed by the Belgian company DeWitt. Its main facility consists in enabling a teacher to take pre-loaded electronic texts and convert these into interactive gap-filing exercises.
In this respect the program is not particularly original - there are plenty of text based authoring programs on the market which produce gap-filling exercises. However, P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. incorporates features which make it possible to produce exercises of a particular type - removing every eighth word, say, or all prepositions, extremely rapidly.
For this reason it was decided to investigate the potential of the program as a means of creating language exercises based on texts downloaded from the Internet. One of the attractions of using the Internet in language learning is the availability of highly topical authentic texts. The concomitant disadvantage is that such texts tend to have a short 'shelf life'. As they are chosen because they are very up to date, or very relevant tot he interests of a particular group of students, they are likely to be unusable within a few weeks, or with a different group of students. This means that any exploitation of such texts needs to be done with maximum economy of effort, as the preparation time involved cannot be compensated for by repeat uses or widespread publication. P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. offered, on the faced of it, a way of converting downloaded text into gap-filling exercises in minutes: in fact, in less that one minute per text, excluding the time taken to select and download the text in the first place.
We accordingly planned a series of project based lessons, at Eurocentres Victoria in which students would 'surf' the World Wide Web in order to research a particular topic. As a follow up activity to each research session the teacher would present an on-screen gap-filling exercise derived from a text downloaded in the course of the project. In this way the P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. exercise would be integrated thematically with the preceding activity, and the effort required to produce it would be so small (as the text would have been downloaded anyway) that - in theory - we could afford to produce such exercises for one-off use.
In practice this endeavour was beset by a series of problems. Firstly, the authoring component of P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. proved to be quite difficult to use. Although the process of generating exercises was indeed very rapid, for an expert user, the acquisition of the required expertise represented a fairly steep learning curve. Within the context of the project, given the high technical competence of the teacher concerned, this did not present a serious problem, but to 'multiply' the practice among less technically minded colleagues would clearly require a non-trivial training effort.
Secondly, and more seriously, the program was designed to operate on stand-alone DOS based computers. Making the downloaded exercises available to students on our Windows based network required additional, time-consuming work, some of which could only be done by a network manager, in respect of each batch of new exercises.
These combined effect of these factors was to cancel out the very advantages - speed and ease of use - that we had hoped for from the program. During the time that we were using it De Witt were developing a Windows version of P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. which would very probably been much easier to integrate into our system, both technically and operationally, than the DOS version. However, they subsequently abandoned this endeavour and decided instead to develop from scratch a successor program to P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E.. This program was not ready for use within the life-time of the project.
The outcome of this strand of the project was not entirely negative. The few exercises that were produced were well received by students. They responded well to working with materials which they knew to be fresh, authentic and acquired via this most modern of media. Moreover, the experience was useful in that it showed us that a system capable of exploiting Internet texts on a one-off basis would have to be very easy to use and very rapid in operation. It would also need to be combined with fairly sophisticated ways of distributing newly created learning materials across a network. Unfortunately, P.A.R.A.D.I.S.E. did not meet these requirements.
Conclusions
Eurocentres benefited considerably from participation in the TELOS project. The most important outcomes were
· Production of a substantial body of original multimedia material in the form of LINK dialogue activities for English and French. There is still surprisingly little published available in the way of multimedia audio material for language learning (and for French even less than for English), so the dialogues constitute a welcome addition to our schools' resources. They are al the more valuable because they are linked to the Eurocentres Scale of Language Proficiency.
These are now available for use in all Eurocentres schools, and have been offered for trial to other project participants.
· Research data concerning the evaluation by students of our dialogues, and of built-in features of the LINK authoring system. The latter is potentially useful to the developers of LINK.
· Valuable insights in to the reception of multimedia learning resources in general by students, particularly in relation to the facility to record one's own voice.
· For several Eurocentres teachers, first-hand experience of aspects of multimedia production: planning, scripting, sound recording, post production, authoring.
· An impetus to develop, in a systematic way, our approach to using the Internet in language teaching and learning.
· The opportunity to compare experiences with other project participants.
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