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Outline
Thesis sentence: English teaching must keep pace with the Information Times, so CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) should be used widely and properly, so that students can study English effectively, and teachers can improve the quality of teaching.
Ⅰ. Theories related to CALL
A. Behaviorism Learning Theory
B. Cognitive Learning Theory
C. Constructivism Learning and Teaching Theory
Ⅱ. Practice
A. The computer system’s functions for CALL
B. Soft wares for CALL
C. Course wares and network
D. The types, structures and standards of course wares
E. The structure, characteristics and application of network
Ⅲ. Discussion
A. Importance as well as advantages of CALL
B. The points that should be paid attention to
English Teaching Via Computer Teaching
As is known to all, teaching should keep pace with the Information Times, so that students can study English more effectively, and teachers can improve the quality of teaching. With the swift development of science, more and more modern techniques have begun to serve teaching, and the most glaring is that computer and network techniques, widely used in western countries, are spreading in China rapidly, and their advantages have begun to show. CAI (Computer Assistant Instruction), the modernest means, is possible to be applied to teaching. Multimedia techniques compounds texts, graphics, images, animations, audio and videos, and have the characteristics of variety, interactivity, and integration which make CAI more vivid and comprehensive. What’s more, when computers are linked to network, the quick, common and abundant information lets CAI go out of classrooms. And network can accompany the students’ daily life, and must be created, collected and developed by the teachers’ profound knowledge and hard work. So CAI will be effecting the teaching greatly, and there’s no doubt that he who exercises CAI early and appropriately will be in the lead in teaching. For English teaching, CAI is much different from the use for other subjects, and CAI derivates a branch—CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning). In this paper, I will introduce CALL from three angels: theory, practice and discussion.
Ⅰ.Theory
A. Behaviorism Learning Theory
Behaviorism Learning Theory was popular from early 1960’s to late 1970’s for CAI, and this is the primary phase of CAI’s learning theory. CAI was developed from programmed instruction whose founder is behaviorism psychologist Skinner, the theories for CAI were strongly effected by behaviorism learning theory. In CAI course wares the programming based on branchy and small steps is the main mode of CAI’s designing all along, and today we can see its trace of behaviorism’s effect.
B. Cognitive Learning Theory
From late 1970’s to early 1990’s, experts began to notice
learners’ psychological processes and research learners’ psychological characteristics and cognitive laws, and they did not regard learning as passive adaptable reactions by outer stimulation any longer, but initiative optional procedures of information processing that are based on learners’ attitudes, demands, interests, habits, and their own knowledge, that are reacted by the information from current outside stimulation. During that period, Anderson who apply Cognitive Learning Theory to CAI raised ACT (Adaptive Control Thought), which emphasizes the controlling procedure of advanced thought and tries to reveal the controlling mechanism and principles of directional and diverted thoughts.
C. Constructivism Learning and Teaching Theory
Applying constructivism to CAI was being prevailing from early 1990’s up to now. The initiator, Swedish, J. Piaget, adhered to research the learners’ recognitive development with the interactive effect between internal causes and external causes. The basic concepts of Constructivism Learning are: 1. Knowledge is not obtained by teaching but by others’ help, and suitable learning materials from constructivism ways under a certain social cultural backgrounds. 2. The four essential factors are: situation, cooperation, dialogue and constructivism meaning. So teachers’ role must be changed from conductor of knowledge to helper and promoter for students’ initiative learning, and teachers should put new modes, ways and designing thoughts of teaching into practice of teaching, especially CAI. (In CALL, the language’s complex of form, sound, and meaning demands them surely.)
Ⅱ.Practice
The practice of CALL is perhaps easy for English teachers whose computer knowledge is good, but creating a good CALL courseware is not easy for anybody. A good CALL courseware requires that English teachers have suitable computer systems, choose proper soft wares, know the relationships and operations between courseware and network, comprehend the types, structures, and standards, functions, characteristics and applications to CALL of the network.
A. The computer system’s functions for CALL
1.Store a great quantity of teaching soft wares and students’ information, so the computer must have enough internal storage.
2.Offer teaching content and feedback information to students and offer teaching facilities for interactive teaching.
3. Offer tools and supporting environment of creating course wares for teachers and program designers.
4.Offer and run all kinds of systematic soft wares of controlling and managing working system
5.Provide necessary capacities of communication such as the network
6.Cater to the demands of CALL and offer the functions of English teaching, so multimedia is needed, and the outer facilities such as cable television, VCD, scanitor, radio, and slide projector are well to link to serve English teaching.
B. Soft wares for CALL
There are many ready-made course wares for CALL in China, especially English learning soft wares such as “Super Listening( Ting Ba )”.They can be used in English class directly sometimes. However, good course wares are not for performances and demonstrations. Good course wares should be created by teachers based on specific situations, taking into consideration such elements as students, teaching materials and teaching aims with suitable soft wares.
We can make course wares by means of many soft wares such as PowerPoint, Authorware, Tool Book, Visual Basic, Director, MEDIAScpript and FrontPage. We’d better choose equivalent one to apply to our practice.
PowerPoint is a part of Office family produced by Microsoft. It is convenient to use and can create wonderful demonstrating texts, with sound and video, being inserted in PowerPoint, and its course wares are better to help teaching. On the contrary, the course wares made by Authorware are better to help students’ learning because it is more integral and its functions of multimedia and interactivity are much more than PowerPoint’s, but it is not so easy. FrontPage is a web page editor, however, it has an easy window of operation for making course wares and a class’ procedure can be shown with menus clearly. Its biggest advantage is that as a web page editor even the complicated course wares made by it can be uploaded to the network.
C. Course Ware and Network
Network is mushrooming every minute. English teachers should try to let it serve English teaching to improve its quality. According to the demands, aims, and conditions of English teaching, some course wares or some parts of a course ware may be uploaded to the network, so that students can browse and learn them any time out of class. However, the contents of web pages for network had better not only contain the course wares but also many other things such as chat room, BBS (Bulletin Board System ), E-mail box, English songs collection, Study Guide and so on, in order that students can add their interests of learning English and learn English in any ways at any time. On the other hand, network may be helpful for making course wares. Teachers can download useful files from network to accumulate the original data for course wares and may visit the web sites on CAI ( especially CALL ) to download ready-made course wares which can be used in English class directly.
D. The types, structure, and standards of course wares
1. Course wares can be devided into 4 types: Assisted self-study wares, demonstrating wares, exercise wares and encyclopaedia wares. Assisted self-study wares are created for students’ learning on their own; they are difficult to make, because they demand that teachers should have much knowledge of psychology, linguistics and computer, and have much time to make meticulous course wares. Demonstrating course wares and exercise wares are ordinary in daily teaching. They are much easy to create and convenient for students’ study with teachers’ instructions. The combination of demonstrating and exercise wares is often used, and it conforms to the laws of study, and it is suitable for English class. Encyclopaedia wares are more comprehensive than assisted self-study wares, and they are often made by experts and used out of class. Fig.3 is a diagrammatic sketch of the combination of demonstrating and exercise ware for Lesson 14”County Music” in BookⅠA of senior English materials. It may be a reference of course wares’ types and structure.
2. Every courseware has several pages, and the pages are mainly arranged in 3 kinds of structures—lined net, ringlike net, and diamond net. English teachers can make course wares with the different structure according to the objective demand. Fig.1 is a course ware with lined net structure.
3. Standards of good course wares:
(1)Sufficiently using the 2-dimension and 3-dimension to make the course
wares vivid.
(2) Synchronizing with the students’ thoughts
(3) Offering more ways to think, understand and exercise
(4) Transmitting information appropriately (don’t insert picture, music, background etc. at random.)
(5) Being exquisite visually and audibly.
Fig.1 The structures of course wares
E. The structures, functions, characteristics and application of network
1. The structure for Call includes 5 layers (see fig.2), and every layer is needed,
otherwise, CALL will not realized.
Course wares & web pages
Teaching/editing environment
Multimedia network layer
Network layer( data link of OSI layer,network layer, & transmission layer)
Physical substance layer
Fig.2 The structure of network for CALL
Fig.3.Diagmmatic sketch of the course ware’s structure & Class process
Introduce American
Music CAI6 (music +
Background + picture)
Appreciate extracts of American music CAI7
(music +video )
Appreciate Denver’s
“Country Road”CAI8
(captions + video )
Appreciate US country
music and train their listening
Reading + discussion +exercise CAI9(captions + music)
Principles of teaching
Assignment + composition: Current American Music
CAI10 (captions + music)
2.The system of browser / server for network must have the following functions: offering the same or different study service asynchronously for every student; keeping the record of students’ study process; perceiving the current learning state of students. ( See Fig.4)
Fig.4 Functions of network for CALL
3.The network for CALL should have the following characteristics:
(1) Asynchronism: students may arrange their learning process according to their
own ability.
(2) Integration: the network can link thousands of computers, many course wares and web pages for CALL can be contained.
(3) Interactivity: students can communicate freely through the network with teachers, classmates, and even the computer itself.
(4) Liveliness: modern network can simulate the reality and the multimedia makes the network colorful and exciting.
(5) Large information capacity.
4.Application of network for CALL have begun for several years, and it develops very quickly, and now we can find many web sites for CALL on internet such as English Practice World( http://www.englishpractice.com/). The web sites make students study languages freely out of class by many means such as discussing in BBS, chatting in chat-room, sending E-mail in E-mail box in English. Fig.5 is a diagrammatic sketch of an imaginary web site for CALL.
Ⅲ.Discussion
A. Importance as well as advantages of CALL
1. CALL allows students to practise procedures as well as to achieve defined competencies. This helps level the ground where students bring a wide range of native skills and educational backgrounds to a classroom. Students with a strong desire to learn English can succeed even with weak background when given the right learning tools and a supporting environment.
Fig.5 Diagrammatic sketch of a web-site for CALL
2.Immediate feedback provided by CALL saves time and prevents learning the “ wrong “ concepts. In traditional training, students do substantial amounts of homework. Unfortunately, a student may have a number of problems on a homework assignment. The student would not be aware of his misconceptions until the paper to the student. Now, the student must not only learn the proper procedures but “ unclear” the wrong problems as well.
3.With CALL, students can detect their own weaknesses and concentrate efforts on overcoming those weaknesses before moving on more advanced concepts. All to often, students continue to work on some advanced concepts while still holding misconceptions about the fundamentals of a topic. This leads to irritation and the feeling that English is more complex than it is in reality.
4. Good CALL materials reward students immediately with correct responses and directions. This encourages students to confidently move to more complex concepts. CALL can make learning interesting and exciting. On the other hand, some students are satisfied with only a cursory grasp for important fundamental concepts. This often leads to problems in that students’ understanding of a concept is not sufficient to enable her/him to progress smoothy to the next concept. CALL materials can help such students stay on a task or concept until it is fully mastered.
5. A small but important benefit of good CALL material is on-line immediate evaluation and grading of student work. Very few instructors and English teachers will miss the hours of mindlessly correcting and scoring student homework. More importantly, this aspect of CALL leaves the instructor more time to work with students on an individual basis.
All aspects being considered, CALL does not necessarily replace teachers, textbooks, classrooms, or language laboratories. CALL is another aspect of training that harnesses the computer and makes it a tireless participant in the educational process. Perhaps the greatest benefit of CALL is giving the material student that small boost which leads to success.
B. The points that should be paid attention to
1.English teaching should combine CALL with traditional teaching techniques such as recorders, radios, and micro-teaching appropriately. The former two can remedy CALL’s shortcoming that computer and its outer facilities cost too much. The last one is well to record the whole procedures of English class to check the teacher’s teaching and students’ learning directly.
2. Course wares and websites should be changed and renewed creatively often. CALL is vivid, but any vivid teaching may become boring with the flying time, so when teachers make course wares, they ought to change their habits or hobbies to render the structures, backgrounds and teaching methods, so that students can touch completely new English class everyday. So do the web sites for CALL. The content of the web sites should be renewed frequently in order that students have the interest to visit the Webster all along, or they will ignore them gradually.
3. The network is an enormous melting-pot, and there are many evil things on the network (especially internet ), so teachers should pay much attention to the political and ideological education through the English teaching with CALL.
4. The quick spread of CALL demands a great number of English teachers who are good at making multimedia course wares and teaching with computer proficiently. Therefore, educational competent authorities and schools at different levels ought to attach importance to train CALL knowledge to English teachers.
5. The students, as the beneficiaries of CALL, should know some basic knowledge of computer and network, so that the English teaching can be efficient and CALL can bring its advantages into teaching, so teachers may conduct the basic operations of computer to the students when necessary.
6.The well-equipped hard-wares and soft-wares of computer, multimedia and network are in great need for English teaching. Currently, a contradiction exists: in some developed coastal regions, personal computers are popular and CAI (CALL) is used widely, but some advanced facilities are not applied enough, and even laid aside and neglected. However, in some regions it’s rare to use computers to serve English teaching because of the economy, knowledge, and guiding principles for education. So in these regions, governments at different levels should increase the input in education further and train English teachers, and most important of all, in my opinion, is that for every English teacher, his/her educational thinking should be proper, advanced and creative.
References
Liu Ganna 刘甘娜 “Jisuanji Fuzhu Jiaoxue” 计算机辅助教学 (“Computer Assisted Instructions”) Beijing: Higher Education Publishing House, 1988.
Lu Qingqing 陆青青 “ CAI Zai Gaozhong Yingyu Jiaoxue Zhongde Yingyong” “试论CAI在高中英语教学中的应用”(“ The Application of CAI to Senior English Teaching”) Zhongxioaxue Yingyu Jiaoxue Yu Yanjiu 中小学英语教学与研究（“English Teaching and Research in Primary and Middle Schools”）1(1998): 113
Li Xiaoyan et al 李晓燕等 “Jisuanji Duomeiti Jichu Jiaocheng” 计算机多媒体基础教程 （”Basic Course for Computer Multimedia”）Beijing: China Economy & Commercial Press, 1998
Shen Erguang 沈尔光 “Duogongneng Kaifang Jiaoxue Kejian de Bianzhi” 多媒体开放教学课件的编制 （“Multi-functional Open Course-wares’ Making”） Lostory’s Curse Ware Beginner, 1999 ( http://cw123.yeah.net / )
Liu Zhong 刘忠 “Kaifang de Wangluo Jiaoxue” 开放的网络教学 （“Open and Intelligent Network Teaching”） Liu Zhong de CAI Shijie刘忠的CAI 世界（”CAI world of Liu Zhong”）( http://worldofcai.yeah.net/ )
He Kekang 何克抗 “CAI de Lilun Jichu” CAI的理论基础（The Theoretical Foundations of CAI”） Lostory’s Curse Ware Beginner, 1999 (http://sq.k12.com.cn/~courseware/ )
Frank Berberich Developing Your Own Software: The Impossible Dream? The Language Teachers Online 2 (1998): 22 (http://langue.hyper.chutu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/ )
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