I have been teaching for 13 years. The first 6 years were as an ESL teacher at King George International College (named not after the King, but the highway in Surrey, B.C., as I understand it) here in Toronto, 1 year was spent doing my Bachelor of Education, and for the last 6 years I have worked as an occasional, and then a full-time contract teacher, teaching French in the Toronto District School Board. As I have always been a language teacher, I intend to create a basic language lesson for this course. I have never taught entirely online, only blended some of my classroom teaching, so creating a course to be taken entirely online is new. I intend to use Connect rather than Moodle simply because I’m familiar with Connect through MET, while I’ve only used Moodle a couple of times.
As ETEC 565 and ETEC 533 are my last courses in MET, I want to create an ePortfolio that I can use when I start searching for jobs in May. It is my hope to get out of the classroom eventually, though I have a classroom job waiting for me in September if I cannot find something else. I would love to design online learning environments and/ or courses, or advise teachers on how to do so, so those are the types of jobs I will be seeking. Thus, my course work here in ETEC 565 is very relevant to these ambitions.
According to EDNet Insight (2013), English Language Learning (ELL) is the largest and fastest growing area in the Education sector. In the table on the site linked to above, ELL is the only growing sector that is not eLearning, but of course eLearning must be a part of it. Because of the amount of opportunity in this area, it will be the focus of my lesson.
Levy (2009) categorizes areas of second language learning as “grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, pronunciation, listening, speaking, and culture”. I also know from experience that besides the usual differentiation required in any classroom due to learning styles and multiple intelligences, different cultures have very different prior knowledge of English. Building upon the written/ grammar-based English background of a Korean student is completely different from building upon the more oral-based knowledge of a Mexican who learns English through American media and the Latin roots of a good portion of English vocabulary. During my ESL-teaching years, I was labelled “Dr. Grammar” so I intend to focus on verbs, but only in a communicative context.
When comparing the state of second language technology use in 2009 with that of a “seminal work” by Garrett in 1991, Levy states “ language teachers still lack a “major voice” in determining which technologies are chosen for their use and technology integration remains an issue.” If this state of affairs had not been remedied between 1991 and 2009, I’m sure it has not changed much in the last 6 years either. He mentions some NLPs, or Natural Language Parsing programs, which allow learners to have their writing parsed for errors that can “be reviewed in their various contexts” (p. 770). One can add parameters like 1st language to this parsing, so that if a learner is Korean, for example, it will compare errors in their work to the writing of other Koreans and look for feedback particular to Korean ELL. I will need to research NLPs, and ideally be able to link to and use an existing one rather than having to build such software myself.
Levy concludes his grammar section with:
Although there are many existing prospects for more sophisticated programs for grammar learning, they do not yet appear to have reached the wider language education market, and it is fair to say that most grammar programs are still very basic in the ways they process learner input, diagnose errors, and provide feedback.
My rather vague vision at this point is to integrate some sort of Social Network into an LMS where ELL students can communicate with one another in writing and video chat and receive automated feedback generated by their errors. The automation would be programmed to be more specific and useful as a database of typical errors builds up. If the automated feedback is insufficient, the error would be escalated to receive peer or teacher feedback. Because I am not a programmer, I will need to research what there is out there in terms error-detection leading to automated feedback, how to integrate it into an LMS, and if I can’t integrate existing software, I’ll need to find out what it would take (perhaps financially, in terms of hiring programmers) to build such a system from scratch.
RESOURCES:
EDNet Insight. (2013). The Global English Language Learning (ELL) Market. Retrieved from: http://www.ednetinsight.com/news-alerts/voice-from-the-industry/the-global-english-language-learning–ell–market.html
Levy, M. (2009). Technologies in Use for Second Language Learning. The Modern language journal, 93, pp. 769-782. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00972.x.