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THE COMPLEAT administrator of a forward-looking foreign language program cannot sidestep the emerging technologies. Nor can that administrator's dean long afford to dismiss these developments as too costly. As the pervasive effect of new audio, video, and computing devices comes to be felt in both classrooms and learning laboratories, departments will reach major decision points. One choice will lead to experimentation, implementation, and positive change; the other will frustrate faculty members and lead to loss of opportunities to improve the way we teach foreign languages.
We make the above claim in its strongest possible form to provoke further reading of this primer. Whether or not technology proves an effective extension of the way we teach languages at American colleges and universities will depend largely on decisions we must now make without knowing the outcome. We cannot know, for example, whether computer-adaptive testing will aid our efforts to articulate with high schools. We cannot be sure that a new generation of tutorial and practice software will boost our students' proficiency. We must still trust our intuition that authentic foreign video materials will motivate and contextualize our students' acquisition of language. It is still one generation too early to prove this technology conclusively; first, we must develop, test, and implement the most promising visions.
Meanwhile, what factors shape the critical administrative decisions at the departmental, collegiate, and institutional levels? How can administrators foster experimentation without squandering precious resources? The following twelve recommendations attempt to provide some guidance without detailed exploration of the many ways we believe language learners can benefit from technology. At the end of this article, we list several publications in which we have more fully described the role of technology in language instruction.
1. Level of Engagement. In developing a departmental policy, set a level of engagement with instructional technology that can reasonably be supported by available and expected resources.
All else being equal, faculty members decide in unpredictable ways whether or not to explore the benefits of instructional technology in their teaching. Our system of tenure and academic freedom allows professors wide latitude in the selection of approaches, textbooks, and media. Many forms of technology require years of lead time before classroom results are visible; other forms require substantial revision of the syllabus—an effort not lightly undertaken. All this dictates that a personal investment in technology by an individual instructor cannot be dictated by a departmental administrator.
At the same time, departments cannot afford to allow inertia or fadism to set long-term policy in this area. A department can decide in a single boisterous faculty meeting, for example, to discard current methodologies and adopt the “Natural Approach” next fall. Changes of this sort play themselves out almost entirely in the realm of training and staff development. By contrast, even a modest experiment with a few computers requires planning, time, staff, facilities, and space that may not be available without significant long-term effort.
A departmental policy on instructional technology will serve as a yardstick in dealings with both deans and faculty members. Of course, this policy should reflect the department's best thinking about the goals and methods of foreign language teaching. It should clearly formulate an approach to technology that can guide future faculty and staff initiatives by considering three questions: Should the department engage in full-scale, research-oriented projects that break new ground in the profession? Should the department develop new materials using existing resources and tools? Or should the department strive to implement materials available from other institutions or commercial sources? The answer to these questions will depend on staff and faculty expertise and on the prospects for funding from institutional or external sources. The distinction between implementation projects, development projects, and research projects is useful to keep in mind in calculating the cost of instructional technology.
2. Facilities. Plan for an appropriate environment to house the appropriate technology.
Equipment costs have a mysterious power: they eclipse all else in minds and budgets dealing with instructional technology. Selection of the appropriate equipment, however, is extremely derivative. Decisions about needs, methods, timetables, and expertise will all tend to dictate which machines to use. This rational process may then be overridden, of course, by institutional policies already in place concerning standards for computer and video acquisition. Departments that have not attempted to play a role in such policy matters should not be surprised when their needs for equipment, based on a review of the field, fail to mesh with the options made available by their purchasing department.
Delivery of the new technologies—computers, VCRs, cable TV, and computer-controlled video-disc—demands a proper environment for the new workstations. While the language laboratory is the logical place for them, these new facilities do not replace the traditional laboratory. Furthermore, because of noise interference and space requirements, they may not coexist well in the same carrels and rooms dedicated to audiotape functions. The first real challenge, then, lies in appropriate expansion of language-lab space to accommodate the new workstations in sufficient numbers to serve the student population.
Several kinds of space must be planned for video-based activities, since facilities must accommodate not only individual work but small- and large-group viewing as well. A carrel works well for individual video viewing, and, in fact, for viewing cable or taped programming it need not even be appreciably larger than an audio carrel. But computer-controlled video configurations that provide intensive, efficient individual work assume a larger carrel design, one that gives the user easy access to both computer and video equipment as well as comfortable viewing of the screens.
Small-group viewing is an excellent way to enhance students' meaningful language experiences outside the classroom. At the same time, it is a practical solution to the problem of providing access to a large number of students who must complete video assignments in a short period of time. Video viewing areas must be acoustically isolated to foster the interactions that should take place among students. Having the freedom to converse and to discuss what is being seen and heard is essential if group members are to help one another's comprehension and to exchange impressions and ideas.
3. Access to Materials. Match your investment in equipment with an equivalent investment in materials.
No benefits can be harvested from new technology without good access to suitable instructional software. At any institution, suitable access can be gained only through a determined effort to match any investment in equipment and physical space with funding to acquire, catalog, and archive materials and to develop channels for delivery to faculty members and students. One of the most difficult problems facing campuses today is how to afford the necessary copies of instructional computer and video software. Given prices often ranging from fifty or seventy-five dollars to several hundred dollars a tape or disk and the legal restrictions on making copies of commercial materials, full-scale integration of media-related courseware becomes difficult, if not impossible. There are no easy solutions that are legal. The answers lie in one of two approaches: (1) negotiation of multiple-copy site licenses—an approach that is currently common for computer software and will become more common for video software as well; and (2) on-campus development of materials for which copyright clearance has been obtained.
4. Development Support Staff. Commit resources for support staff members who guide the faculty's involvement with technology and ensure full value from investments in facilities and materials.
Machines and software need support from professional staff whose expertise lies in both language instruction and technology. Professional staff begin their work by demonstrating the use of the technology to professors and consulting with them on its possible applications to language teaching. Training must follow encouragement. Through workshops, short courses, and one-on-one instructional sessions, these support professionals introduce faculty members to the use of existing program materials. They teach them how to use the available development tools and resources, and they demonstrate effective techniques and strategies for generating computer and video materials for students. Thus equipped, the faculty member can begin to produce materials within the framework of existing programs and systems that simplify access to the technology and promote concepts of good instructional design. These so-called authoring tools and systems make it possible to create a large corpus of technology-based teaching materials and are, consequently, an invaluable resource to energetic and dedicated language teachers.
Few projects that target the use of complex technologies in instructional applications are realized by developers working single-handedly. The task of creating well-conceived, sophisticated computer and video instructional materials that will have an impact on curriculum requires a team of specialists who cooperate in the creation of the product. They bring to the project three kinds of expertise: knowledge of the subject matter, skill in instructional design for technological applications, and technical assistance with production or programming. Full exploitation of any technology will occur only when the professor can rely on the kind of team support just described. The language professor should be able to look to the language laboratory for help in assembling this team of experts, at least one of whom should be a member of the laboratory staff.
5. Networking among Colleagues. Encourage faculty members to identify, and collaborate with, like-minded colleagues in other departments and fields.
Nothing differs more radically from traditional humanities research in literature and linguistics than work with technology does. In both their teaching and their scholarship, college-level faculty members customarily work in splendid isolation from their colleagues, communicating with them most frequently through footnotes. Effective use of instructional technology requires a collaborative spirit and the ability to share expertise and equipment. When several faculty and staff members come together for a long-term project, the balance of perspectives and the effort to reconcile differing approaches can be extremely invigorating, both for the individuals and for the project.
Often only one professor in a given department may be willing to devote time and effort to the exploration of new technologies. This means that other departments, institutions, and disciplines must provide the context for an individual's growth. Beyond the forging of alliances with nearby colleagues in other departments, regional and national conferences play a vital role here. To the extent that administrators can set aside special travel funds for faculty members to attend workshops and symposia on instructional technology, the department's progress in this field will be greatly accelerated. We have passed the era in technology when exemplary projects could emerge from solitary labor.
6. Collegiate Coordination and Support. Ensure that your departmental initiatives in instructional technology correspond to higher-level policies and goals.
The effort to carry out a departmental plan for instructional technology will always tend to move the department into new policy realms. Space, equipment funds, staff needs, and even software expenses often exceed the decision-making scope of the departmental administrator and require at least a trip to the next level. Moreover, many institutions work primarily at the collegiate or institutional level to make progress in this area, so that it becomes critical to maintain constant awareness of changing institutional plans and policies that relate to technology. Programs may be in place or grant proposals may already be in the works to undertake campuswide initiatives to improve teaching through technology. If this is so, fruitful collaboration will be possible. Opportunities to use technology are still scarcer in the humanities than they are in the natural and social sciences. This means that good ideas arising from the departments will usually find a positive echo among higher-level administrators who either realize this imbalance or already see the possibilities and need faculty members to join in a grant or project.
7. Released Time for Faculty Members. Give high priority to releasing faculty members from normal teaching duties on behalf of major projects using instructional technology.
It has been two decades since the field of foreign language teaching began to explore instructional technologies. During this span of years we have learned that hardware will not suffice; appropriate human resources must be dedicated to any major project. In the jargon of technology, the faculty members who provide language-teaching expertise to a computer project are known as the SMEs, or “subject-matter experts.” Ironically enough, instructional designers, programmers, and technology administrators have never doubted the key role of experienced teachers; it is the departmental administrators who have frequently failed to recognize the commitment in time, effort, and attention that projects in instructional technology demand.
Although our faculty colleagues will not have to become computer programmers, they must often undergo a long process of retooling to launch a project using instructional technology. They must explore alien fields and learn mountains of trivia about machines and methods. They must grope their way to key decisions about a new form of teaching or learning languages on the basis of very inadequate information. All this precedes the actual development of new courseware. The development process, in turn, requires countless hours dedicated to minute issues of screen layout, graphic design, interaction types, answer evaluation, and the like, as well as the creation of radically different and unfamiliar kinds of teaching materials. It is not really possible to treat this work as an incidental task on the level of a committee assignment. Faculty members must be released from some other responsibilities if the department and institution desire serious benefits for students. For development and research projects, released time must extend over several semesters or years.
8. Student Assistance. Use qualified student assistants to amplify faculty and staff efforts.
Typical projects in instructional technology require large amounts of time devoted to bibliographic searches, scanning of print and video materials, text-entry and related data manipulation, lexical analysis, proofreading, and software testing. Student assistants can often relieve faculty and staff members from many such time-consuming burdens. The ideal assistant is a native-speaker graduate student with classroom teaching experience, including experience using computers, audio, and video. But even undergraduate language majors can benefit the project and themselves, given proper tasks and adequate training. At some institutions additional programming assistance may be available from students in other departments or colleges, such as computer science, engineering, education, or linguistics.
9. Collaboration with Campus Support Units. Foster campuswide cooperation among providers of relevant services.
The future of foreign language technology rests in more hands than just those in the language laboratory and the departments it serves. During the development phase a number of campus support units will, because of their broader mission, naturally ally themselves to projects. These include the computer center (programming, hardware consulting), instructional design centers, the library (acquisition, collection management), and the video center (production and postproduction services).
Where serious institutional commitments to instructional technology have been made, there will also be collaborative support for the delivery of materials to students through instructional computer and video “clusters” in dorms, libraries, the student union, and classroom buildings. Such clusters, coordinated by computer and video centers and administered by departments and service units, represent the rational approach to establishing adequate campuswide access to technology-based materials for students in a wide range of disciplines.
10. Delivery Support. Anticipate the need for orientation and consulting when students use technology.
Once workstations and programs are in place, support must continue to optimize student use of them. Providing good documentation that outlines how to use the equipment and software is critically important to easy use of materials. Further support through class demonstrations gives the student guided, hands-on experience with the software. They serve not only to introduce students to the benefits of using the materials but also to lessen any feelings of intimidation that might be generated by unfamiliar tools.
Even with documentation and orientation, students should not be left to work on their own. Student work areas should be monitored by trained assistants whose responsibilities include checking out software and manuals, scheduling equipment usage, troubleshooting problems with hardware and software, answering questions, and safeguarding the equipment against abuse and theft.
11. Student Acquisition Plan. Work with your institution to provide widespread student access to computers.
Strategic planning is vital to success with technology. Even while attempting various tactics to motivate faculty members and assemble resources, administrators must anticipate success and plan for it. Many projects may be geared to specialized, advanced, or intensive courses with small enrollments; here the number of student workstations required is not overwhelming. For foreign language instructional technology, the critical moment will come when a major piece of software becomes operational and deserves to be released to all students at, say, the elementary level of Spanish. A lab with twenty workstations available fifty hours a week can serve up to one thousand students-to the exclusion of all other courses and languages. Simple arithmetic will usually show that most institutions will never be able afford computers for all language students who will be computing for even one hour a week. Even with unlimited funding for equipment, there will seldom be space for the required number of workstations. Clearly, this problem cannot be resolved at the departmental level. Low-interest, low-cost purchase plans must allow students to acquire their own machines on a voluntary basis. If basic computing (e.g., at the level of word processing) can be shifted to generic campus computer clusters and student-owned machines, then language laboratories can focus on specialized applications such as those using videodisc players for listening comprehension.
12. Reward System. Make a realistic evaluation of your institution's reward system for work with instructional technology; candidly inform faculty members how such work will affect their promotions, tenure, and salaries.
Faculty effort to integrate instructional technology into the foreign language curriculum diverts time and attention away from other areas: literary or linguistic research, committee work, advising, even other forms of improved teaching. In a faculty vita, publication of instructional materials and pedagogical scholarship often ranks lower than traditional book and article writing. Since truly innovative technology-based projects only bear fruit after several years of development and testing, faculty commitment to such a project can be fatal unless administrators pay attention to this problem from the start. Large research universities can often adapt less readily to this predicament than can smaller schools that put a premium on innovation and national visibility. The message here is to consider faculty vitality and survivability when calculating the costs of technology.
Administrators of foreign language departments cannot be expected to know everything. Familiarity with the intricacies of instructional technology, in fact, will probably remain low on their list of priorities. The true priority should be support for faculty initiatives that promise to improve language teaching and learning, including initiatives in technology. Faced with an overwhelming set of alternatives and decisions in this area, how can an administrator make valid choices? One university vice president for educational research and development put it this way:
I don't know that an administrator is very good at identifying what needs to be done; you really have to bet on people—creative people. They develop a track record. You invest a little when they're just starting out. If that works out pretty well, you invest some more; and then you do everything you can to help them do what it is that they want to do. (Spriestersbach)
We believe our students have much to gain from the synergism of creative faculty and staff members, farsighted administrators, and promising technologies.
Sue E. K. Otto is Director of the Language Media Center and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Spanish, and James P. Pusack is Associate Professor of German and Director of the Project for International Communication Studies at the University of Iowa.
Spriestersbach, Duane C. Interview. Videodisc in Education Teleconference, 22 Oct. 1987.
Hope, Geoffrey R., Heimy Taylor, and James P. Pusack. Using Computers in Teaching Foreign Languages. Language and Education: Theory and Practice 57. Orlando: Harcourt, 1984.
Otto, Sue E. K. “The Language Laboratory in the Computer Age.” Modern Technology in Foreign Language Education: Applications and Projects. Ed. William Flint Smith. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, forthcoming.
Otto, Sue E. K., and James P. Pusack. “Tools for Creating Foreign Language CAI.” Meeting the Call for Excellence in the Foreign Language Classroom. Proc. of the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Ed. Patricia B. Westphal. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1985. 96–108.
Pusack, James P. “Problems and Prospects in Foreign Language Computing.” Modern Media in Foreign Language Education: Theory and Implementation. Ed. William Flint Smith. Lincolnwood: Natl. Textbook, 1987. 13–39.
Pusack, James P., and Sue E. K. Otto. “Blueprint for a Comprehensive Foreign Language CAI Curriculum.” Computers and the Humanities 18 (1984): 195–204.
———. “FLINT University: Fostering the Use of Foreign Language Instructional Technology.” CALICO Journal 4.1 (1986): 3–12.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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