The blending of new technologies: The emergence of effective distance language learning

Ellen Bunker, Alexis Young and Jessica Davis
Brigham Young University - Hawaii
Hawaii, USA

As new technologies continually change the educational landscape, new educational opportunities emerge; and from these changes, new pedagogies also emerge. Managing these changes and using them to produce effective education is both exciting and challenging for nearly all educators. However, the advent of new Internet and communication technologies has given language teachers an especially powerful boost and made teaching languages at a distance both more possible and more effective. This presentation focuses on the use of new technologies in the design and development of academic English language courses taught at a distance at Brigham Young University -- Hawaii.

This presentation shows how new technologies have been blended into a more traditional campus pedagogy to teach languages at a distance. Following a charge from a new university administration, the department that teaches English to international students at the University immediately began to develop distance education language courses. Since it was required that new students arriving on campus had higher levels of academic English, the programme explored how the potential students in their target area could be helped to achieve the new requirements through distance courses. These changes generated a new distance education programme in which advanced technology is blended with the programme’s original, more traditional teaching practices.

In general, distance language learning courses have been slower to develop than distance courses in other subject areas: although several institutions currently offer distance language courses, the numbers of learners are small compared to those in other subjects. This situation is due partly to the fact that learning a language involves several factors -- comprehensible input (i.e. content that the students can understand), interaction with other users of the language, and the negotiation of meaning (i.e. clarification requests and comprehension checks). More traditional methods of distance education easily provide comprehensible input in language classes in the form of textbooks, study guides and other written or audio/ visual materials; and these materials can also be produced electronically, creating new forms for online learning. But effective interaction and negotiation of meaning are both difficult to achieve in independent learning contexts or at a distance and in the past have been costly. The emergence of new technologies, however, makes interaction more possible, more readily available to a wider variety of learners and more cost-effective. In addition, the newest technologies also create contexts in which students can negotiate meaning with teachers, student assistants and other classmates.

An early key decision led the team to match the language curriculum in the distance courses with the corresponding curriculum on campus, creating a situation calling for the blending of new and old forms of pedagogy and technology. The design teams used the same course objectives and textbooks as the campus courses, all traditional in nature, but accompanied these materials with new practices -- student study guides to provide the ‘teacher-talk’, multi­media presentations using audio/video pdf files, CD-ROMs and electronically-based language practice activities, all of which produced rich opportunities for comprehensible input for the learner. To augment these provisions for comprehensible input, several newer technologies were used to provide opportunities for the much needed interaction and negotiation of meaning -- a web-based learner management system (Blackboard), e-mail, a voice-over Internet protocol and Web 2.0 tools (wikis and blogs). This presentation focuses more specifically on how the use of these new technologies has affected the design and outcomes of student learning in the courses.

Currently, three courses have been developed and piloted, with student enrolments coming from countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands. This paper discusses the design decisions, development processes, piloting and launching of these distance language courses, including the roles of the distance education programme coordinator and student team members. The formative evaluation results have highlighted the early success produced by the blending of traditional and new teaching practices and technologies. With preliminary completion rates high and distance students coming to campus and showing good progress in their studies, the programme development team remains optimistic that the new technological environment will foster exciting opportunities to teach and learn languages at a distance.