Monthly Archives: November 2015

“Technology doesn’t teach, Teachers teach. But today, teachers who don’t use technology will be replaced by teachers who do.”

                                                                                                Kumar Snehansu                     

About 10-15 years ago, my take on technology in the ESL/EFL classroom was that it is certainly helpful for the right kind of teacher, students, and classroom objectives, but it was largely still just an option that could be bypassed without any particular detrimental effect. MOODLE is a good example of this. MOODLE and sites like it were (and are) very helpful for teachers to organize the class, provide materials, collect assignments, and so on. However, I wouldn’t have said  that a teacher utilizing MOODLE would necessarily provide superior learning outcomes for students than a colleague who went with more old school methods. Technology provided some convenience and more options for the teacher and students, and this in-itself made it worthwhile, but it would not necessarily affect the educational bottom line.

Now I’m not so sure. Learning technology has made great improvements over the last decade to the point where a teacher making smart use of technology may indeed provide better learning outcomes in at least some language skills than the teacher who eschews technology.

Don’t get me wrong. Technology alone won’t do much for a poor teacher who is unable to engage the students on a personal level. An engaging and inspirational teacher is always preferable over those who lack the crucial interpersonal skills and knowledge needed to make learning happen in the classroom. However, what I am coming to believe is that given two teachers of generally equal teaching skill, the teacher who utilizes technology more effectively will get better learning outcomes.

Of course, the big caveat here is that teachers use technology effectively. Many may not. Using technology just for its own sake can easily be counter-productive (here’s a helpful article on the effective use of educational technology). My central argument is that any technology that gives students access to more quality practice and individualized feedback than what can practically be provided in the traditional classroom setting alone should result in better learning.

 

The following are some specific areas in which I believe technology can have a strong impact on learning.

Vocabulary Programs

It’s no surprise that in my admittedly biased view this would top my list. I think it’s hard to make an argument against using a vocabulary program that provides spaced repetition of vocabulary to ensure retention and allows tailored instruction to match the students level. Further, these programs allow the teacher more time in class to engage students in communicative activities. If you need more details on these arguments, read just about every other post on this blog. 🙂

 

Grammar

Grammar is another area where a good program can give more opportunities for practice and individualized feedback. Currently I teach an advanced grammar course using the Azar grammar course book. For the first semester I used the accompanying workbook and was not happy with the results. There was no way for me to know if my students just checked the answer key in the back of the workbook rather than sincerely tried to do the exercises. A colleague and I decided to make our own online workbook that covered the concepts taught from the main course book using the Canvas Network  that my university provides. I’ve seen an improvement on test scores that I suspect is due to these online practices more than anything else. For one thing, it is more difficult for the student to get the answers without actually doing the work. Secondly, students can retake the quizzes repeatedly until they get 100%, rather than just submit the workbook and get one score, and the quizzes draw on question banks so not every quiz is identical. Finally, I can see the exact test results, find out where students are having trouble, and then give additional instruction (in class or individually with the student). My students are getting far more additional practice than with the paper workbook, and I’m in a position to better address problematic areas.

Much more than this can be done, however, and this is an area that is ripe for further innovation.  I would love to see spacing effect methodology applied to explicit grammar study and practice, for example. Praxis has done a little work with this, but we haven’t had the chance as of yet to fully implement some of our ideas.

 

Reading and Listening  

Technology can give students access to a lot more practice in reading and listening than is available through standard classroom materials. Through our public school system here in the States, my children have access to a website that has a full line of graded reading materials that students can read on their own outside of class. This is a lot easier to manage than trying to track down books at my children’s level at the library. For instructors doing extensive reading with their students (as well they should), sites like M-reader and X-reading help teachers monitor student progress.  English Central is a site that provides interesting listening materials at different levels, along with a good learner management system for teachers. Students primarily get better at listening and reading by extensive practice. The best listening and reading strategy instruction cannot replace the 1000s of hours on task that is needed for true improvement. A teacher sticking solely with the traditional coursebook simply can’t provide students with the amount of  practice students need to make substantial progress. Technology makes this easier to do.

Writing

The vast majority of writing in the world outside the classroom is done on computers. Students need to become comfortable typing English on keyboards and increasingly on mobile devices. Ample practice on these mediums is crucial. I’ve encountered many students who prefer to write by hand because they aren’t fast enough on the keyboard. Writing by hand is fine, but it doesn’t get you very far in the workplace, and the speed of writing by hand simply cannot compete with typing by keyboard. These are crucial skills a good writing class should develop, with typing speed being at least a secondary objective of the course.

Students should also know how to use spell and grammar checks effectively. They certainly do not replace the need for students to improve their spelling and grammar, but these programs are tools that students will need (just as native speakers do) when they move on from our ESL/EFL classes.

 

Speaking

There are some programs available now that allow students to make recordings of themselves speaking on a topic. These not only give students a chance to increase their fluency by speaking more outside the classroom (in a way that the teacher can check to make sure they have really done it!), but students can also hear how they sound. This is crucial for pronunciation development. The way we think we sound in a new language can be shockingly different than what others are hearing when we speak.

Technology that gives students access to more practice and individualized feedback than what can be provided in the classroom alone should have a strong impact on learning outcomes.  A teacher without these resources would be hard-pressed to match them.

So what does this mean? Should teachers who refuse to take advantage of technology be shown the door? Again, I wouldn’t go this far. Teachers who engage and inspire students are still valuable for a school regardless of the exact methods they use. But at the same time, at what point can we say a teacher is still “good” if he or she purposely avoids tools that are shown to be highly effective for students?

In the meantime, I look forward to the counterpoint article by Clifford Stoll (assuming, of course, this fad known as the Internet is still around).

Learning a second language as an adult is arguably one of the hardest skills an adult can master. This is especially true for people learning a language far removed from their own, such as a Japanese student learning English or a French student learning Chinese. Data from the Foreign Service Institute suggest that learning a new language can take from 500 to over 2,000 hours before reaching a level of general competency, depending on how related your native language is to the new language you are trying to learn. The hours required to achieve mastery would certainly be much higher.

When you do the math, it quickly becomes apparent that learning a language is going to require hours of daily practice and study over several years, and this means forming some new habits. Unfortunately, forming new habits isn’t something humans are particularly good at. The vast majority of dieters revert to old eating habits¹. The majority of people buying gym memberships never use them.

We’ve all struggled with this, and our students are no exception. Despite the best efforts of teachers to reach all their students, we know that students who enter a class with good study habits are most likely the ones that will succeed. Students with poor study habits, despite their best intentions at the beginning of the semester or school year, typically revert to old study habits (i.e., little to none) within a few weeks of the course. As teachers, we do what we can to make the class active and interesting, and I do believe that a good teacher can get a lot out of students. But even when we do manage to get weaker or less motivated students involved in the class,  the time we have with them in the classroom is just a fraction of what they need in the long run. Students need to do more on their own, and short of a teacher visiting every student nightly to make sure they are engaging with the language outside the classroom, it’s difficult to get students to make lasting changes in their study habits.

This shouldn’t be surprising, as most of us are no different. How easy is it for us to eat better, exercise, quit smoking, write that novel we claimed we’d have written by now, and do the hundreds of other things we know we could and should do but simply don’t? I often catch myself (usually in the teacher’s lounge) complaining about students who never do homework while at the same time I’m failing for the 13^th time over just as many years to stick to my resolution to lose weight and exercise more.

What I’m trying to say is that just about all of us suck at this. 

With Praxis, we find that the majority of the students do exactly the number of sessions required by the teachers, even though the program allows them to do more. In my classes, I make it clear that there are no bonus points for doing additional sessions beyond the target for the class², but I encourage them to study more just for their own benefit. Only about 10% of the students would do this, which is not bad (I can’t think of many other types of homework I’ve given in which students voluntarily did more than what was required without the carrot of bonus points), but I know that in most of my classes a lot more than 10% of the students really do want to learn English. With Praxis, we allow students to study for two months beyond the semester (during the summer or winter breaks). However, our data show that only about 5% of students continue to study on their own. Despite student surveys repeatedly showing that the strong majority of students find the site useful for their learning, once the semester ends they quickly revert back to old habits.

Currently, I’m reading the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal on my Kindle which discusses this very topic (and has prompted me to write this entry). Speaking of Kindle, I’ve had mine for over 5 months, yet this is the first book I’ve ordered and read on it. Why? Habit.  Even though I have long been aware of the benefits of devices like Kindle, my three-decade-plus reading habits have always put me off the change. Will I revert back to paper books after I finish Hooked? At this time that seems unlikely, as it was quite nice to have access to the book literally minutes after a colleague recommended it and I’m enjoying the reading experience, but the very book I’m reading tells me that the odds are against me.

And how about teachers? How many of our teaching practices are rooted more in habit rather than actual best practices? How many good ideas have we seen in presentations or read about in articles, and yet we didn’t even make the first step towards implementing them? How many new practices have we tried for one semester and then soon thereafter reverted back to the old, “tried but not necessarily true” practices we are more comfortable with?

In every school I’ve taught in, I’ve encountered resistance to utilizing technology in the classroom by some teachers. Way back when MOODLE first came out, a few professors in my university introduced it to the rest of the faculty and went so far as to set up accounts for all the teachers. The presentation seemed well received, yet only about half actually followed through that semester, and even fewer were still using it a year later. A number of other innovative technologies met the same fate.  I was frustrated with the faculty at the time, but now I realize this had more to do with the difficulty of breaking habits than anything else.

Marketing professor John Gourville at Harvard Business School says that a new product just can’t be better than what currently exists, but it needs to be 9 times better in order to get people to break their habits. It takes something dramatic to get us out of our cognitive ruts. Naturally, this is of particular interest to people like us at Praxis and the developers of other online vocabulary sites. We all know that students need a lot more vocabulary than can be provided in the traditional classroom, and these sites have a proven record of doubling if not tripling the amount of vocabulary learned over a semester. Nonetheless, this is not enough to move the majority of educators.

Octuple the benefits or GTFO

Hooked author Nir Eyal has a number of things to say on the topic (which is a good thing, or his book would be about as long as this blog entry). The focus of the book is on developing products that will attract customers, but this information is clearly useful to anyone who is looking to form better habits that can last longer than two weeks. I’ll have a few more blog entries on the book in the near future.

1) Kassirer J, Angell M. Losing weight—an ill-fated New Year’s resolution. N Engl J Med 1998;338:52–4.

2) When I’ve taught classes on a curve, I worried that allowing bonus points for homework would lead to too much competition and stress among students who were struggling to get the few available A grades. Also, some students prefer to do vocabulary for points rather than other more communicative activities, and I’d prefer that they maintain a balance of individual study and communicative practice.

I’m always interested in seeing how other companies and individuals develop educational technology and have tried quite a few. Though it wouldn’t really be kosher to review a direct competitor, there are many online educational sites that have a different market than Praxis and I’d like to share some of the better ones. Vocabulary.com, a site made primarily for native English speakers who wish to improve their vocabulary, is one such website I’ve come across recently that has some nice things going for it.

Learners have the option of selecting or making their own list of words, or just jump in and let the system find your level of vocabulary. The latter method is how I tried the site, and it found my level fairly quickly. By the third ’round’ (lesson), the system began to introduce words that are on the SAT and GRE vocabulary lists and not long after that I started to get stumped on words that are new to me. The program gives further repetition of words that you get wrong, and as far as I could see the repetition schedule seems consistent with spacing effect research.

As all the questions are multiple choice, you will occasionally guess correctly on a word that you do not know.

 

 

One issue with the program is that some of the definitions of the simpler words taught in the program use vocabulary that is more difficult than the target word itself. For example, with the word mistake, the correct definition that learners need to identify in the exercise reads, “A wrong action attributable to bad judgment or inattention.” The definition has three words  that are arguably more advanced than the target word itself. Mistake is a fairly common word (within the 1000 most frequent words), as is judgment. I would say that the majority of students who do not know the word mistake also do not know what judgement means. Inattention and attributable are both lower frequency and thus even less likely to be known by the average learner. In another exercise for the word planned, the learners need to match it to devised. If a student doesn’t know a rather common word like plan, the chances of the student knowing devise are near zero.

This happens quite often with the easier words and is the main reason why I wouldn’t recommend the site for non-native speakers below the advanced level. To be fair, vocabulary.com definitions are simpler than your average dictionary, but I don’t think they have succeeded in making the definitions as accessible as most learner dictionaries on the market. I don’t mean to be too critical of the site here, though, as the site is designed primarily for native speakers and in any case definitions always pose a major challenge to teaching words. 

 

One interesting feature is their ‘hint’ function. If learners do not answer right away, some hint options appear under the exercise. One hint is ‘50/50’, which takes away two of the wrong answers (think ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’). The next is ‘Words in the Wild’, which gives another example of the word in a sentence. The word is taken from a corpus database of authentic English (with the source properly given), so it’s not likely that the sentence will be less complex than the original example given, but still, it could be helpful. The final hint is ‘Definition’, which, unsurprisingly, gives the definition of the word in question. Clicking on any ‘hint’ does seem to cause the program to assume you need more work with the word, though you do seem to get more credit than if you just got it wrong without using the hint.

After solving a problem, learners can click on words for definitions of all answer choices. Learners can also hear how the word is pronounced in North American English.

After finishing a round, you can see your score and receive some ‘awards’ (small icons that are collected on your home page) if you do particularly well. Reading through the site’s white paper, they discuss using gamification principles to enhance the program, such as giving awards for good effort.  I don’t think the award system really qualifies as gamefication, though. Rewards have to be, well, rewarding. Seeing a small icon congratulating me for getting all the answers correct or getting X number of exercises in a row correct didn’t do much to encourage me to do more on the site. The 50/50 hint described earlier is a bit closer to gamefication principles, but as the benefit is fairly small, I don’t think it has much of an effect.

The site has a pay option which allows teachers to set up classes and monitor student progress. It allows a free trial, but doesn’t seem to give information on prices (you need to contact their sales rep.). I understand the business reasoning behind this, but it still turns me off. Yes, a simple call or email  can get me some answers, but I’d just rather have the information up front. If by chance the prices are out of range for my students or school budget, then time spent contacting their sales rep, let alone doing the free trial, is just wasted.

Despite these relatively minor quibbles, I like the site and recommend it for anyone wanting to expand their vocabulary. It should be particularly useful for native speaker high school and university students preparing for tests like SAT and GRE. For second language learners, I don’t think the site would work well for students at the low to intermediate levels, but it could be useful for advanced learners of English. The ESL/EFL teacher would do well to introduce it to their more advanced students, and perhaps even use it herself!