Innovative activities in a multimedia laboratory for language learning

Giuliana Dettori
Institute for Educational Technology
Italy’s National Research Council
Genoa, Italy

Valentina Lupi
University of Genoa and Don Milani-Colombo Junior High School
Genoa, Italy

This paper is concerned with the design and implementation of innovative learning activities in a bilingual multimedia laboratory in a junior high school. The laboratory work was an optional activity offered by the school to improve students’ linguistic competence in two foreign languages (English and French) while practising with the use of ICT tools. Traditionally, it had been run using drill-and-practice and grammatical exercises on CD-ROMs -- but when a new teacher took charge, she decided to change the pedagogical approach by introducing meaningful use of the Internet.

The new pedagogical approach relied on task-based learning, which consists of actively involving students in group work on tasks that are relevant to their experience and, therefore, make sense to them and can raise intrinsic motivation. The implementation of such a learning approach entails defining a number of limited self-consistent tasks (micro-tasks) which together contribute to the realization of a wider task (a macro-task) which, in turn, increases the meaning and motivates the development of micro-tasks.

For this purpose, the teacher planned as a macro-task the development by the pupils of a bilingual website to be put on the school website. This was to contain linguistic exercises that the pupils designed and implemented for sharing with their schoolmates on the Web and potentially with any pupil of their age interested in practising language learning. The CDs previously used became a source of inspiration for the types of exercises to create, and the use of authoring environments supported their development. Moreover, the pupils produced short videos, some of which involved a conversation in a foreign language, which were the basis for listening comprehension exercises. Other activities included the construction of two blogs to exchange opinions with peers around the world and a web-page presenting their views on several game sites retrieved from the Web.

This activity was a success, in that the pupils enjoyed the tasks and engaged fully in them throughout the year; the learning outcomes were good; and the productions were appreciated by their colleagues and families.

The introduction of this innovative laboratory work to complement traditional classroom lessons can be viewed as a blended learning experience because of the variety of activities, tools and approaches employed. Several aspects appear particularly noteworthy:

1. The Internet is a window on the world that can be useful not only for communicating or getting information, but for presenting one’s work outside the school. Here, the pupils were not working for their teacher, but for an audience larger than their class and their school, and even outside the country. This resulted in a level of commitment far beyond what can be achieved by a note from the teacher. It also helped the pupils to realize that languages are tools for communicating with real people, not simply school subjects, which had a positive influence on their learning.

2. The available software was used as a source of inspiration for individual productions rather than for studying, hence motivating and stimulating the use of creativity. This is an important point since creativity is increasingly recognized as an essential life skill that can help us to cope with the complexity and uncertainty of our rapidly changing world. Moreover, the creative pleasure produced appeared to support learning in both its cognitive and motivational aspects.

3. The laboratory work required pedagogical planning by the teacher and a different use of simple tools already available (the CDs) but did not involve any particular equipment or extra cost, since all the new tools used were open source or free software. This underlines the importance of learning theories and pedagogical planning, as well openness in looking at our usual tools with different eyes.

This paper illustrates the work carried out and discusses its outcomes, in the hope that it will provide inspiration and guidance for the development of similarly innovative experiences.