How can ICT improve Language Teaching and Learning? Paul Dolan

How can ICT improve Language Teaching and Learning?

Paul Dolan

The enquiry network focus The network focus was upon how ICT can improve MFL teaching and learning. Both teachers chose to trial the use of the web tool SoundCloud to explore effects on students’ speaking skills and/or confidence in speaking.

Dimensions of the enquiry network The network was facilitated by Paul Dolan and included two teachers from middle schools in Northumberland. Two classes of Year 8 students participated in the enquiry.

Summary of findings

The Timperley Model is a helpful tool for thinking about ICT focused professional development. The model’s focus on student needs (in addition to that of the teacher) forms a familiar context in the mind of the teacher and can support the purposeful application of technology to teaching and learning.

Teachers and students in this study were positive about using SoundCloud to support their language teaching and learning, although the school network and ICT provision must be of a good enough standard to support it.

Web 2.0 tools such as SoundCloud can be used to connect student language learning in and outside of the classroom. The anxiety students feel when speaking a foreign language in front of their peers can be reduced by practicing a recording in private and sharing it only when it is ready.

Network 2 How can ICT improve Language Teaching and Learning? Paul Dolan

The Enquiry Network The facilitator, Paul Dolan, is Teaching Fellow in Technology Enhanced Learning at Newcastle University and a Creative Agent for Creative Partnerships. His background is in secondary Art and Media teaching, with experience of enquiry based learning and curriculum design. Rachel Said, Teacher of French at Chantry Middle School in Morpeth, has taken part in previous Links into Languages network events. Rachel worked with a class of Year 8 students of mixed ability. Andy Cottiss, Teacher of French at Newminister Middle School in Morpeth, has also taken part in previous Links into Languages events. Andy also worked with a Year 8 mixed ability class. Two additional teachers began the network but yielded incomplete data sets due to illness and personal reasons.

The Enquiry Process The focus of the network was shaped by the question: How can ICT improve Language Teaching and Learning? Teachers involved in the network were provided with the following over a two-month period:

Network support to develop the use of ICT in their language teaching/student’s learning;

School visits from myself to provide one to one support;

Experience of the teacher enquiry process;

The opportunity to contribute to a regional and national Links into Languages report.

The facilitator organised the first network meeting as follows:

The Helen Timperley model (Timperley et al. 2007) was introduced to the group and used as an organising framework.

The facilitator asked the teachers to consider aspects of their class they would like to change. What did their class need help with? At this stage the facilitator asked teachers to ignore ICT and focus entirely on student needs.

The facilitator then demonstrated a few examples of web 2.0 technologies, in particular SoundCloud - an online audio recording, feedback and sharing tool and JayCut - an online video-editing tool. The input was very brief and served only to excite the teachers about possibilities. The facilitator offered to provide one to one support with each teacher at a later date should they need it. The stance of the facilitator was: ‘I know how to use the technology, but I don’t know the best way for you to use it in your class.’


The teachers were then asked to form an Enquiry question that incorporated one of these technologies and a student need.

This served as the end of the first meeting. The teachers were asked to consider what their question would be and to email it to the facilitator the following week.

The facilitator sent out suggestions for adjustments to Enquiry questions. Some questions were too broad and needed focussing to match the data that could realistically be collected over such a short period of time.

One member of the group needed some support to set up SoundCloud in the school and learn how to use its functions.

At this stage, the facilitator maintained email support with the teachers and forwarded examples of data collection methods that may be useful. Personal emails with each teacher clarified what data collection methods would be used and to what purpose. A second meeting was organised mid way through the project. This meeting was an opportunity for the teachers to share their experiences and discuss any matters arising. Teachers compared data collection techniques and talked about student reactions to the interventions. Three weeks later the final meeting was organised, a chance for the teachers to share their findings and discuss their thoughts on the teacher enquiry process.

Enquiry 1: Rachel Said

Can SoundCloud help my students to be more confident French speakers? Rachel felt as though her students needed to be more confident at speaking French. Although some students in the class were confident and contributed often, the majority of students lacked confidence and were reticent to contribute. This led to Rachel considering what her needs were as a teacher to facilitate this change. The meta-question focus meant the teacher’s learning was in part ICT focused, but Rachel identified other needs beyond technical knowledge: I was interested in what other teachers would do as well. I also just needed to know about what software would help me out. The facilitator demonstrated a range of online software that he thought may be of use to language teachers. Rachel chose SoundCloud as the basis for her intervention in class. SoundCloud is an online audio recording and sharing software. Recordings can be made directly through a microphone on the computer or into files on a voice recorder that are uploaded to the computer by USB cable. Once the recordings are on the computer, they can be


uploaded to the SoundCloud website and shared with private or public groups. The screen grab below shows an audio file of a student reading a text. The sound is depicted on screen in ‘wave’ form. The teacher or student can use this visualisation to locate where sentences and words begin by finding where the ‘waves’ start and end. Figure 1: screen grab displaying an audio file of a student reading a text

Teachers and students can click on the blue bar underneath the sound file and add text comments. These comments show up to anyone else looking at the same audio file online. In general use, Soundcloud is used to share music and the comments are feedback from fans. In this case, Rachel used the feedback system to get her students to assess an audio file of a student reading from a text. Purposeful mistakes were added as an impetus for discussion. Figure 2 below displays the feedback system.

Figure 2: screen grab displaying the feedback system

Once logged in, the student or teacher would click on ‘post reply’ and add a comment at a certain point in the audio file. Here, there are multiple comments at 0.05 in the track. The intervention was designed as follows:

Whole class session in which students were taken to the ICT suite and asked to register with Soundcloud for a free account.

A student with good French speaking ability was asked to record themselves reading a teacher-prepared text with deliberate mistakes.


Rachel uploaded the file to SoundCloud and then posted a link to it on the school VLE.

Students were asked to access the file for homework and provide feedback on the quality of spoken French.

After this initial task, which was designed primarily to test the use of the software in class and enable the students to sign up for an account, Rachel planned to set a ‘conversation homework’ which was designed as follows:

Rachel records a statement or question that could start a conversation e.g. ‘What did you do at the weekend?’;

The file is uploaded to SoundCloud and the link is shared with students via the school VLE;

Rachel asks the students to ‘have a SoundCloud conversation’ for homework – i.e., record a response to the previous person’s audio and upload it for the next person to respond to.

Rachel’s ‘Teaching Actions’ followed the first stage of the design, but due to time considerations, she was unable to fit in the second stage before the end of the official network enquiry cycle. Rachel changed the design of the first stage after reading the initial student feedback online. ‘A lot of the feedback was just students agreeing with each other…it wasn’t as deep as I would have liked’. This led to Rachel reviewing the quality of the

feedback with the class and then asking them to revisit their feedback. “I heard two students who had written very basic statements online have an amazing conversation about the SoundCloud file and what improvements could be made at the end of a lesson. I said ‘that’s what you should be writing online!’” An interesting area for future research would be to give students the choice to feedback either in written or audio form depending on their preferences. Evidence Collected Rachel chose the following methods of data collection:

1. Pupil Views Templates (a visual aid that prompts metacognition by asking participants to write what they would think and say in a certain situation, Wall et al. 2007). In this case the PVTs were used to measure student’s perceptions of speaking French in class;

2. SoundCloud documents of students’ written feedback; 3. Student evaluation of the use of SoundCloud in teaching

French. At the time of print the audio recording and student feedback is available from: http://soundcloud.com/misssaid/ce-weekend2/s-1fEqJ

http://soundcloud.com/misssaid/ce-weekend2/s-1fEqJ

http://soundcloud.com/misssaid/ce-weekend2/s-1fEqJ


Pupil Views Templates Rachel asked her class to complete the pupil views template at the start of the enquiry. Students were asked to imagine themselves being asked to answer a question in French in the class – what would they say and what would they think? Each student was provided with a diagram of a student with a speech and though bubble emanating from the head. The purpose of this task was to establish whether Rachel was accurate about her class’s lack of confidence and to provide a benchmark of opinion before the SoundCloud intervention. Figure 3: Completed Pupil Views Template

As can be seen in Figure 4 below the majority of students’ responses were classified by the teacher as ‘not confident’: Figure 4: teacher classification of students’ Pupil Views Template responses

SoundCloud documents of students’ written feedback 17 Students collectively posted 87 comments on the SoundCloud recording over a period of 3 separate days. 60% of these students provided advice, support and encouragement in their comments.


40% of the group contributed ‘perfunctory’ statements – those that merely agreed or disagreed with the preceding statement. The majority of students made use of SoundCloud to help each other improve their French speaking ability. Student Feedback on the usage of SoundCloud in Language Learning. At the end of the enquiry, the students were asked to respond to the following questions on the school VLE for homework:

What do you think of SoundCloud? Good and bad things. How easy was it to use?

What did you think about the listening activity to spot the mistakes?

How useful was it to see other people’s comments?

What other things could SoundCloud be used for in a language lesson?”

A summary of their opinions is shown in Figure 5 below: Figure 5: Summary of student feedback


Figure 6 on the following page further displays the findings of the three data sets collected by Rachel in a Venn diagram. The facilitator analysed each data set individually before comparisons were made. It is important to note that the short length of the enquiry made it difficult to collect large data sets. The limited time also impacted the amount of engagement students had with SoundCloud.

In general terms, the data set indicated students were keen to continue using SoundCloud as a language learning tool.

Discussion of Results Rachel noted the following impacts of the intervention:

60% of students provided helpful advice and support in their online feedback.

40% of students were inclined to provide perfunctory and limited feedback until Rachel outlined a set of guidelines for good feedback.

Students were generally positive about using SoundCloud.

The majority of issues students had with SoundCloud related to technical issues with the school network and Internet connection speed.

At the end of the enquiry, Rachel was starting to develop answers to her question: “How can Soundcloud be used to increase speaking confidence?” Rachel’s end evaluation did not explicitly measure student confidence levels. However, given the early stage Rachel was at with the research, a second measurement of student confidence would have been too early. The quality of student feedback evidenced on the SoundCloud file is indication of growing student confidence and it is felt that students need further opportunity to engage with the software. Rachel’s research poses many questions about the use of SoundCloud in language teaching. Does using SoundCloud feel less like homework to students than a tape recorder activity? How useful is it in developing an online community of support between peers? What impact does web identity (avatars, usernames, profile pictures) have on confidence and willingness to contribute?


Figure 6: Venn diagram displaying Rachel’s three data sets


Conclusions Learning about MFL Rachel’s research was a positive step forward in using ICT to support a universal and typical issue: that of new language learner’s speaking confidence. Now Rachel has successfully used SoundCloud in class, it would be interesting if she could integrate it into future schemes of work. Using SoundCloud as a way of expanding out of school learning opportunities and developing peer assessment methods would be interesting directions to take.

Learning through enquiry Rachel did not see the Timperley Model as the main reason for the success of her enquiry, although had positive things to say about the process: “It seemed logical to me”. Rachel identified time as an issue, and would have preferred to spend more time on the different stages of the enquiry cycle.

Leaning through enquiry networks Rachel thought a group of 6 would be ideal for the network as there was less opportunities to learn from the experiences and ideas of other teachers with such a small network. This was compounded by the fact that Andy, the other remaining network member, worked in a school on the same site and was therefore in frequent contact with Rachel.

In addition, Rachel thought that the one-to-one time spent with the facilitator was a good support and lessened the stress of embarking on an enquiry alone. Rachel thought it could be a good idea for a network group to contain a Senior Management Team member, either to motivate other members, or to involve a member of staff who could more easily distribute learning from the network throughout the school. Rachel attended a separate Links into Languages event after the network had finished, citing the success of the enquiry as a motivating factor.

Enquiry 2: Andy Cottiss Andy Cottiss also identified his student’s confidence about speaking and reading aloud as an issue. In addition Andy was interested in his students’ need to develop their phonic recognition. Andy identified his own need to improve use of peer assessment techniques and understanding of how to use SoundCloud in a classroom context.


Andy designed an intervention as follows:

An account would be set up for the whole class - http://soundcloud.com/newminster to simplify the log on process. In order to identify themselves, students would have to initial or write their name after each comment.

Students would take a piece of their own writing and record themselves reading it onto a voice recorder.

These recordings would be uploaded to SoundCloud.

Andy would set a homework task for each student to review each other’s work and leave written feedback at different points on the audio file.

Andy would then teach a lesson on phonics.

The students would then complete a second SoundCloud recording.

Figure 7 displays an example of a student reflecting on her recording using the SoundCloud feedback system.

Figure 7: Screen grab of student reflecting on her recording

Andy’s teaching actions developed the process beyond these initial steps. The intervention went as planned, although Andy was keen to see how SoundCloud could support the teaching of phonics. As a result Andy developed a secondary intervention:

Andy taught a lesson in which students completed paper-based tasks, creating words from phonic cues;

Students were asked to revisit their audio recordings and re-record them.

http://soundcloud.com/newminster


The students reacted well. The general response to using SoundCloud in their studies was positive. Evidence Collected Andy chose the following data collection methods:

1. SoundCloud audio files and student’s written feedback 2. Teacher assessment of student confidence before and

after SoundCloud intervention. 3. Graphic organiser sheet completed by students to gauge

their perception of SoundCloud intervention SoundCloud audio files and student feedback At time of publishing these are available at: http://soundcloud.com/newminster/tracks?page=6 Andy had created a single, ‘class’ account for his students, removing the need for them to sign up individually. Everybody in the class had access to the username and password for the SoundCloud account. In order to identify themselves, each student ‘signed off’ their comments by writing their name. The students also used their names as the title of each track to identify the author.

Teacher assessment of student confidence before and after intervention Andy compared two SoundCloud recordings for each student. The second assessment was completed 3 weeks later, and after a lesson on phonics. The results of the teacher assessment can be seen in the pie chart in Figure 8 below. Andy commented upon the difference in ability with a focus on confidence in speaking. Figure 8

http://soundcloud.com/newminster/tracks?page=6


Student evaluations The graphic organiser asked students to consider the impact of SoundCloud on their French speaking ability and confidence before and after they underwent the intervention. The pie chart below summarises the student’s responses. Figure 9

Summary of student perceptions of the effect of SoundCloud on their

French speaking confidence and ability

More confident

Pronunciation improved

Accent improved

Benefitted from listening to own voice

Figure 10 on the following page displays the findings of Andy’s three data sets arranged in a Venn diagram. The facilitator analysed each data set individually before comparisons were made. A general pattern emerged with students in agreement with Andy about the positive effect of SoundCloud on their speaking ability. Interestingly, students were more inclined to comment on aspects of their speaking ability rather than confidence. It is likely that this is a result of the final student evaluation not asking for a specific measure of confidence, and instead prompting students to list general improvements.


Figure 10: Venn diagram displaying Andy’s three data sets


Discussion of Results Andy noted the following impacts of the intervention:

100% of students in this class completed the final questionnaire with comments that suggested their French speaking ability had improved. However, their comments were not direct measurements of a confidence level. Due to the nature of Andy’s intervention, these statements may also reference the phonics work Andy did in class.

50% of students said their pronunciation had improved as a result of using Soundcloud.

SoundCloud allowed students to repeatedly listen to recordings of their own and peers’ voices, allowing for personalised reflection. 31% of students said this was helpful.

SoundCloud provided a central way of visualising and accessing multiple students’ audio files in a way that is not possible with tape and digital recordings.

The SoundCloud interface allowed written (typed) feedback to be input at specific times during the audio recordings, allowing student feedback to be temporarily specific in a way which is more difficult whilst assessing spoken language.

Andy preferred SoundCloud to video as a language teaching tool as he felt students tend to become overly self-conscious about their voice and image:

We’ve used video before, but I think that makes a lot them more self conscious. If it’s just the sound, they don’t mind.

The evidence that Andy collected seems to support his initial prediction that SoundCloud could be used to help support student confidence in speaking French.

Conclusions

Learning about MFL Andy’s enquiry highlighted interesting ways in which ICT can support language learners. Andy has started to integrate SoundCloud with his existing practice and teaching resources. He has started to use SoundCloud with PowerPoint, so student work can contain recordings of their voices as well as written work. An interesting area for future study could be the use of SoundCloud to support students with a visual learning preference bias.

Learning through enquiry Overall Andy was positive about the Timperly Model as a model for professional development. “It’s been a really obvious process”. He felt the focus on students’ needs in addition to teacher needs was a benefit and enjoyed the aspect of choice in the teacher enquiry.

I think we all had the same aim, but the way we got there... we got to choose. I think that worked really well.

The short enquiry cycle was an issue for Andy: For me, the unusual thing was the timescale. It was so short. Maybe a little too short. Things were a bit packed in. But I think doing it like that’s a lot better than having something that takes a year to do.


Andy felt the most important aspect of the experience was seeing a genuine impact on what happens in his classroom:

Sometimes, you collect all this work, and I’ll hand it in to County or University and it’ll all be lovely and then they put it in the cupboard. The fact that it’s now something I’m going to be using as well (is a benefit).

Leaning through enquiry networks Whilst Andy did feel the enquiry cycle had been short, he further commented upon how networks that operate over a larger time period can become cumbersome and offer less immediate learning for teachers.

The small size of the group appealed to Andy: “I think having a smaller group is much better than say, a group of twenty.” Although he also commented on a group of six as an ideal number for a network group.

Summary The three most important findings about this enquiry network are:

1. The Timperley Model is a helpful tool for thinking about ICT focused professional development. The model’s focus on student needs (in addition to that of the teacher) forms a familiar context in the mind of the teacher and can support the purposeful application of technology to teaching and learning. The role of the facilitator in this process is critical to managing the network participants’ ownership of how ICT is used to support their classroom practice.

2. The recent proliferation of free, online audio tools is opening up a range of pedagogic opportunities for language teachers and students. Teachers and students in this study were positive about using SoundCloud to support their language teaching and learning, although the school network and ICT provision must be of a good enough standard to support it.

3. Web 2.0 tools such as SoundCloud can be used to connect

student language learning in and outside of the classroom. The anxiety students feel when speaking a foreign language in front of their peers can be reduced by practicing a recording in private and sharing it only when it’s ready.

References Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H. & Fung, I. (2007) Teacher Professional Learning and Development: Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Wall, K. Higgins, S. Packard, E. (2007) Talking about Learning Using templates to find out about pupils’ views. Southgate. Campaign for learning.

Documents

How can ICT improve Language Teaching and Learning? Paul Dolan