High-tech help for teaching foreign languages

By Donna Harrington-Lueker

Twelfth-grade Spanish students at New York's East Syracuse-Minoa High School visited a museum devoted to the work of Mexican painter Diego Rivera this fall. A few states away, in Deerfield, Ill., upper-level French students at Deerfield High School used their language skills to help a young French journalist find a new apartment in Paris. And in Glastonbury, Conn., students studying Russian sent daily e-mail messages to their counterparts in the former Soviet Union.

With access to the Internet, laser discs, and increasingly sophisticated interactive multimedia programs, more and more students like those in Deerfield, Glastonbury, and East Syracuse are trilling their R's, practicing glottal stops, or mastering the subjunctive at the computer keyboard rather than in the traditional language lab or classroom. Going beyond individualized drill-and-practice in verb tenses and vocabulary building, they're using technology that simulates the culture and environment of the language they're studying, whether it's the French of Francophone West Africa, the Spanish of Central America, or the Russian spoken in Moscow. And they're doing so without having to leave their hometowns--no small accomplishment in a field where exposure to native speakers and different cultures is so clearly linked to mastery. In fact, authenticity is one of the main reasons for embracing technology in the foreign language classroom, say many foreign language teachers who have added HTML to the list of languages they master.

Teachers of everything from French and Spanish to Japanese and Korean cite another reason for using computer technology as well: It provides them with cheap and easy access to vast amounts of complex, content-rich material in the languages they teach--materials that otherwise would remain a world away.

"It's been proven that language learners need a rich, interesting, relevant environment," says Clara Yu, vice president of foreign languages at Middlebury College in Vermont and an advocate of using technology to boost foreign language fluency. "They need culturally enriched materials--art, culture, literature, sights, sounds--plus formal instruction in vocabulary and syntax. Technology--multisensory, multimedia technology--enables us to approximate the very rich environment that's needed."

Homegrown solutions

Textbook publishers have responded with audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and videotapes that supplement lessons in their textbook series, and educational software publishers have developed language tutorials, many using interactive CD-ROM technology. But for many foreign language teachers, the search for the next best thing to being in Paris, Rome, or Seoul remains a homegrown enterprise.

When curriculum specialists in Montgomery County, Md., couldn't find teaching materials on the countries that comprise Francophone West Africa, for example, the district applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop its own CD-ROM. "There are more French speakers in Africa than there are in Europe," notes project coordinator Elizabeth Paska. "Yet French classes don't deal with . . . countries like Senegal, Cìte d'Ivoire, Mali, Togo, and Burkina Faso."

Drawing on the expertise of native speakers, former Peace Corps volunteers, African scholars, and staff members of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in nearby Washington, D.C., Montgomery County developed a CD-ROM that contains video and audio clips, original photographs and artwork, a glossary of specialized terms, and narration in French--all of which students can access with the click of a mouse. Accompanying lesson plans delve into art, culture, and daily life.

"We've been able to put in one place something that would take teachers days in the library to find," says Paska.

The Oral Language Archive at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh hopes to provide a similarly rich resource for foreign language teachers. Currently being field-tested at the college level, the archive consists of a digital and audio database of everyday conversations in French and Spanish that can be downloaded from a central server to an individual computer desktop. Specifically, teachers who have access to the archive use browser software to search the database for dialogues on specific topics or for conversations that illustrate a specific grammatical point. Once they've found the conversations they need, they can download the dialogues, transfer them into HyperStudio or another authoring program, and present the material to their classes.

That ability to isolate and retrieve material and to tailor-make lessons involving a variety of native speakers wouldn't be possible without current digital and audio technology, says archive director Christopher Jones. "If you're a foreign language teacher, you want access to . . . very rich content," he says. "Our aim now is to make the resource as rich as possible."

Jones hopes to use the archive, which is currently available on local area networks in several colleges and universities, with public school districts in the Pittsburgh area.

Practically in Paris

Other teachers are taking advantage of the superior sound and video quality of laser-disc technology and of the cognitive "scaffolding" built into increasing numbers of the multimedia programs for foreign language study. At Deerfield High School, for example, French teacher LouAnn Erikson uses A la rencontre de Philippe (Meeting Philippe), one of several interactive multimedia programs developed at MIT's Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

Erikson uses the program with her upper-level students, both as a reward and as a challenge. She divides her class into pairs and has students work through the interactive program at workstations in the school's computer lab. The program features Philippe, a young French journalist who asks students to help him find a new apartment and to patch things up with his girlfriend.

That simple story line becomes an interactive language workshop. The French used in the program is fast-paced, colloquial, and punctuated with gestures and shrugs, Erikson says--the kind of French students would encounter if they visited or lived in Paris, where the video for the program was filmed. And Philippe's real-world plight engages kids so much, Erikson says, that they're motivated to understand what's being said and find a solution to Philippe's problems. The students' involvement is key: "It's not enough to just sit there and view cultural information," says Erikson. "That's just too passive."

To help Philippe, students click on various items in the video--a newspaper, for example, or a telephone--which link to information such as maps, messages, or newspaper advertisements. As they work through the program, students can take notes on a notepad, stop the video whenever they want, repeat segments, pull up a glossary to check the meanings of words, and check a written transcript of a specific scene. Such conceptual aids let students immerse themselves in the language and at the same time cope with complex texts and conversations that are a challenge for them to understand.

Philippe is open-ended as well: At various points in the story, students can make choices that lead them literally in different directions--to French bakeries, to meetings in different parts of the city, to apartments they've identified in newspaper ads and located on a map of Paris--and to different solutions to Philippe's problem. "It's like really being there," says Erikson.

Un muséo virtual

Still another way to immerse students in a foreign language and culture is to use the vast foreign language resources on the Internet. The latest issues of major foreign language magazines and newspapers such as Diario ABC Electrónico and Der Spiegel are there, says Brad Pearl, a Spanish teacher at Hendrick Middle School in Plano, Texas--as are radio broadcasts, foreign train schedules, lists of rock concerts, and archives of materials on any number of writers and artists. Schools with access to Minitel, a videotext service from France Telecom, the French national telephone service, can also cruise the aisles of French grocery stores, find out what movies are playing n Paris, or check out their horoscopes, just as Parisians with access to the service would.

Stevi Suib Wilson, a Spanish teacher at East Syracuse-Minoa High School, knows just how time-consuming--and important--immersing students in authentic materials can be. "We're in upstate New York," says Wilson, who has taught Spanish for 10 years. "There is no Spanish up here, not even a Spanish cable [television] station."

Like other teachers, Wilson combats that isolation with the Internet. Currently, Internet access is available on only one computer in the school, making it impractical for foreign language classes to go online. To get around that bottleneck, Wilson wrote and received a grant for a foreign language department intranet with its own dedicated server. That network of computers isn't connected to the Internet either, but Wilson uses WebWhacker, an offline web browser and retriever, to log on and download entire web sites from her home computer. She then transfers the sites, many of which, she says, fit on a single disk, to the server for students to use during class activities. "I have the whole Diego Rivera Muséo Virtual," says Wilson, "and tons of sites on Cervantes."

Among the activities she's developed are a scavenger hunt on Cervantes and a writing project based on recent issues of Spanish-language newspapers. As part of another project, Wilson took her students to the computer lab at the regional educational services agency and had them search the World Wide Web for cultural information on various countries. Many students were able to download information about contemporary music groups, and one girl found information about the steps to a Peruvian dance. To present her findings to other class members, Wilson says, the girl "put the dance steps on long pieces of paper and had students 'dance' across them."

Toward a new pedagogy

For all the experimentation, teachers are quick to identify problems incorporating technology into their classrooms. Many, for example, report that their schools don't have Internet access, often because school officials fear that students will encounter inappropriate, controversial, or pornographic material. Many say, too, that that fear is heightened in foreign language classes, where students end up searching sites where different cultural mores might apply. MOOs--text-based Telnet sites, similar to chat rooms--can also be worrisome, some teachers believe.

"I'm not sure they're appropriate for high school students," says Wilson, who does not use MOOs because of worries about profanity and "provocative language" on line. "If I did [take part in one], I'd have another teacher and her class meet us, and I'd lock the door."

Access to a sufficient number of computers is an issue for others. One or two computers for a class of 20 students or more simply isn't enough, say foreign language teachers, many of whom report that their departments are beginning to develop computer labs of their own.

Time, too, is a problem. Authoring software allows teachers to create their own multimedia presentations, combining cultural information and language, but the learning curve can be steep. "There's just a large amount of time involved in learning something like HyperStudio," says Pearl. And if students are to put together stacks of information for multimedia presentations in foreign languages, they have to master the software, and that, Pearl and others say, takes time away from things like conversation. Perhaps for that reason, many schools report using simpler software in the foreign language classroom. According to Quality Education Data, which tracks school spending in technology, 58 percent of schools reported using drill-and-practice or tutorial programs to teach foreign languages in 1996, and 34 percent said they used computers for reference.

Perhaps most important, say those who've studied second-language learning, teachers have to do more than simply master the new technology: If their goal is to enable students to become truly fluent, they have to change their pedagogy as well. Instead of relying solely on lecture and discussion (or drill and practice), they need to incorporate project-based learning and collaborative groups into the foreign language classroom. Technology can help teachers make that transition more quickly.

For Kurt Fendt, a professor of German at MIT and codirector of Berliner sehen, a hypermedia documentary that makes extensive use of video footage, historical archives, and the Internet, the challenge is preparing students for the real world. And to do that, he says, they must know the culture, they must talk with people, and they must be able to take cues from conversations and texts. "That's a pretty big thing they need to master," says Fendt. "So you need to bring as much as possible into the classroom." Technology is helping teachers find ways to do precisely that.

Sidebar: The New Language Lab

Like other foreign language teachers at Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tenn., German teacher Gary Bennett agreed to have his students spend 20 percent of their classroom time in the high school language laboratory this year--a commitment Bennett and his colleagues hope will make students more fluent in their target languages. But instead of simply sitting in soundproof listening booths and parroting back words or phrases, the students will use the school's new state-of-the-art lab to access the Internet, write essays in the target languages, converse in pairs and groups, and watch foreign language videos or satellite newscasts.

The new lab, a $67,000 investment on the part of the Oak Ridge school board, mixes computer technology with high-tech listening-and-speaking stations--a mix that's fast becoming the new standard in foreign language programs.

Oak Ridge has purchased 15 state-of-the-art listening-and-speaking stations designed by the German company ASC, Bennett says. Using these stations, students might listen to a cassette tape or an audio CD and then record their responses on a tape recorder. A computer at the front of the lab allows teachers to review students' work and listen in on their progress, as well as group students for various listening and speaking activities. Several students, for example, might read Romeo and Juliet aloud in Italian and record their performance.

Virtually any technology--cassette tapes, video, CD-ROM, laser disc--can be incorporated into the system, Bennett says, and teachers can tailor programs for students to use in the labs. In addition, the lab is outfitted with 11 PCs, which are used for vocabulary-building software, reading programs, and writing software. The lab can also easily be wired for Internet access, Bennett says.

Why the mix? "We originally looked at doing only a computer lab," says Bennett, "but we found that the opportunities for speaking and listening were too limited." The teachers also couldn't envision having students work solely on the computer or at the listening station for an entire 50-minute period. Instead, Bennett says, students will probably spend half a period working on basic skills at the computers, and half a period working on individual and group activities at the listening-and-speaking stations.

Another reason for the mix, Bennett says, is that a computer-only lab would not give the school the ability to store a large number of samples of the students' work. Bennett records 30-second samples of every student's speech at several points throughout the year. "It just took too much computer memory to store student speech," the German teacher says.

What's more, the high-tech lab helps keep students on task. Students gravitate toward technology anyway, Bennett says. And teachers using the speaking-and-listening stations are only one click of the mouse away from listening in on what students are doing. "Face it," says Bennett. "Students are students, and with the old language lab setup, teachers generally had to leave the front of the room and walk around" to see if students were doing the work.

Bennett doesn't expect too much in the way of students' sloughing off at the lab, though. "It's 20 percent of their grade," he says realistically, "so they've got to run with it."

Sidebar: Where on the Web

The Internet contains a wealth of culturally rich materials for teachers of foreign languages. The only problem: web sites come and go. And the wide array of sites can almost be overwhelming. The following sites are good places to start, though, and many contain links to other useful sites.

General sites

• How do you say "bandwidth" in Spanish? Check out NetGlos: The Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology. Among the languages included are Dutch, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Maori. One caveat: The hyperlinks take you to a page of the glossary, not necessarily to a specific entry, so you need to be familiar with the language to distinguish between two or three similar entries.
• Try Foreign Language Exercises on the Web, too. This site, from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, lists links to exercises on the World Wide Web. Several languages, including French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, and Japanese, are represented.

French

• Tennessee Bob's Famous French Links is an exhaustive list of Francophone web sites. Developed and maintained by Bob Peckham of the University of Tennessee, this site contains links to a list of web servers in France as well as to a list of French Gopher servers; a link to the Web Louvre and to subway maps of Paris, Lyon, and other French cities; and a link to an online list of French texts at the University of Virginia. Peckham also includes French newspapers, magazines, and radio stations.
• For links to major French libraries, including La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, go to the Francophone Libraries site.

Spanish

• This site, Mundo Hispano: The Spanish Language Learning MOO, describes what a MOO is and provides instructions for participating. It also includes addresses for Telnet access.
• You can also read the prominent Spanish daily newspaper ABC, which has stories summarized and presented in full text.
• Another useful site is REvista Web, which includes links to Spanish-language newspapers (including ABC and El Pais) as well as to art resources and literary archives.
• Spanish students can also try Almogaver, a general interest online magazine available in Catalan and Castilian. One section of the magazine includes a form asking readers to send in their responses to a specific story electronically.

German

• The German Internet Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is one of the most comprehensive sites for teachers of German. The site provides links to German art museums, the Goethe Institute, and other German language resources; it also includes units on using the Internet in German classes.

Japanese

• MIT's JP NET: The Japanese Language and Cultural Network contains curriculum materials for use in Japanese classes, instructions for making your computer Japanese compatible, and links to other Japanese language sites on the web. It also includes a tutorial featuring video clips showing proper brush strokes for making Japanese characters.

-- Donna Harrington-Lueker is a freelance writer in Newport, R.I.