Holiday posting

I'm visiting with family for the Thanksgiving holidays, so I have limited Internet access. I'll post something again next Friday.

Online language resources - a few examples

Here are a few of the online services I've been playing with so far.

Live Mocha is a language instruction site emphasizing social networking. They support a wide variety of languages. Online lessons are available. They look a bit like a poor man's Rosetta Stone. They're free, but I would not recommend relying on them to learn a language. More advanced versions of the training software, including tutorial sessions, are available for a subscription fee. The more innovative aspect of the system is in the social networking end. You can set up chat sessions in your target language with other students or with native speakers. This is helpful, though as I said last time, I'm not sure my chat skills are all that good even in English.

A similar site I haven't tried is the Spanish-based company Busuu, focusing mainly on West European languages.

Zon is an intriguing site to teach Chinese, presented as a multiplayer online game. You create an avatar for your character, who navigates around different scenes. You interact with different objects to get lessons, exercises, and so on. This shows some promise, though I haven't gone very far with it yet.

Italki is another social networking site for language learning. Based in Shanghai, it provides no language learning resources of its own, at least along the lines of what LiveMocha has, but acts as a network and marketplace for students and teachers. Apart from that, it feels much like any other social networking site. The ready availability of specialized groups and forums is something that I found lacking in LiveMocha. The market provides links to language teachers, most online.

This last feature is something I find intriguing as I study the history of language teaching. It seems as though most language teaching sites are now emphasizing providing online tutors and instructors. Even Rosetta Stone recently announced the creation of a new subscription service which includes, among many other features, access to "Studio Coaches" who are native speakers in the target language. On the one hand, this development seems like a natural extension of the increased communications available, and a useful way to increase practice in the language. On the other hand, I'm left to wonder how the supply of competent language tutors will be able to keep up with a growing number of students online.

Technology as Language

One quick point before this post. I didn't mean in last week's rather involved suggestion that I was proposing a solution assuming Comprehensible Input as the sole method of teaching. Nor am I opposed to it. I have no idea how anything actually gets taught. I'm just a techie who wonders whether there is any software model of the methods teachers actually use. If my proposal sounds like Comprehensible Input, it's because I was focusing exclusively on finding text to be read as a means of simplifying (perhaps oversimplifying) the model.



Traditionally, the four language skills are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Is communication using technology a new and separate language skill? To some extent, a student engaged in texting, or on-line chat, or posting to a forum is using a specialized form of reading and writing. However, the skills needed to communicate online are not immediately accessible to someone who has mastered the other skills. This is certainly obvious to people of my generation, seeing younger people's abilities in texting.

I haven't yet found anyone suggesting that computer communications are a fifth skill, except for this presentation by Professors Wayne Wenchao He and Dela Jiao, which hints at the idea in its title A New Five-Skilled Approach to Teaching Chinese. Despite the title, the focus is mainly on using word processing software to aid in learning Chinese characters. It appears to treat computer lookup of characters as an extension of writing.

A number of different academic and commercial systems make use of online chat to encourage language learning. LiveMocha and Buusu are two examples of such commercial sites.Many studies have commented how online, networked communications between students or between a student and a native speaker of the language can greatly enhance learning. I've played with LiveMocha a little and learned an important lesson. I'm not even all that good at online conversations in English.

Where are the models and services for language learning?

If these postings still seems like a random series of observations, that's because they are. So far, these amount to little more than scribbled notes in response to my attempts at research. This entry is no different, or if anything, probably more random than the others.

This morning (very early this morning), I listened in on a TESOL webinar about the use of Moodle in language teaching, as well as more generalized comments about practical use of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

Now the talk was very informative, and the work seems quite interesting. Most of the technological applications described by the teacher are quite sound -

• Creating custom websites to aid students in the class.
• Populating these websites with customized tests and exercises.
• Uploading specialized texts, videos, and other media for the students to access.
• Providing links to other sites the students might use in study.
• Tracking student participation by counting logins to the site or similar methods.

While I understand the reason that things are done this way, the overwhelming response I feel as a software designer is: Is computer use in language learning completely mired in the 90's?

Websites are no longer supposed to be islands of content with a few links to other locations. They can incorporate information from other sources directly. Non-technical people should not be expected to have to learn markup languages or to have to create ad-hoc content for ordinary tasks. Today, many of the plugins and content add-ons you can put on Facebook or Drupal or any blog site or wherever are driven by services that take advantage of the information already available on the site or elsewhere on the net.

Where are the language learning services, rather than websites? Is there just a fundamental aspect of language learning I still haven't grasped, or am I still missing information about software that someone somewhere is really making?

An example of what I mean would be something like the following:

Is it possible to define a practical model of student knowledge in a language? As a first pass, consider a collection of vocabulary the student understands. If we want to get fancy, we could add idioms and grammatical constructs, and a measure of the complexity of text the student can read easily. I'll refer chiefly to vocabulary in the following examples, but it should not be difficult to extend the services to handle other aspects of language understanding. For further simplicity, let's focus exclusively on reading comprehension of texts.

1.) We could create instances of such a model simply by feeding a series of documents to a service and associating it with a student. In effect, I'm saying that the student can understand each of the texts given. The service can then extract the vocabulary and other data and add it to the model of the student's knowledge.

This model could apply to a specific student or to an ideal student. That is, I could feed the service a list of texts that I know I can read in order to build a model of my understanding of a language, or I could create a list of documents that I believe that a student at a particular level of learning should know to create a model of an ideal beginner or advanced student.

2.) We could create a search filter that searches the web for content containing mostly vocabulary and a level of complexity understandable to a particular student. This search could also be constrained by normal search terms. The results of the search should find comprehensible text with some new vocabulary to learn.

So for example, I could construct a search for texts about dinosaurs in Portuguese that should be understandable to a beginner student. (This is something that would greatly benefit my eight-year-old niece, since anything about dinosaurs would be a motivator to learn Portuguese, which would please her Brazilian grandparents.)

Note that once the text found by the search is read and understood, it can be used to refine the student's model of knowledge in the language, and presumably reflect the learning that occurred by reading the text.

3.) In addition to searching for any comprehensible text, I could search for comprehensible text whose new vocabulary tends to include words from a target model.

So for example, if I wanted to study legal Chinese, I could have two models. The first would represent my current abilities to read Chinese. The second would represent the knowledge needed to read average legal documents in Chinese.

The search engine could then find me new texts containing mostly vocabulary I already understand, but also some new vocabulary also contained in the target model of legal Chinese. As I read and understand these new texts, I slowly build up my abilities to match the new model, while still choosing the texts that I find compelling to read.


It is already past midnight on a day I woke up at 4:30 AM to listen to a webinar, so I suspect the preceding description is not entirely coherent. However, I'm convinced that the concept would be relatively easy to implement and would be useful in aiding language learning.

I'm probably just missing some project somewhere that is already doing this. If not, I'm probably missing some obvious reason why such a project would in fact not help in language learning. I just wish I knew which it was.