- Email: [email protected]
learning Chinese as second language
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Computers & Education 50 (2008) 693–702 www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
Web-based synchronized multimedia lecture system design for teaching/learning Chinese as second language Herng-Yow Chen *, Kuo-Yu Liu Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chi-Nan University, 1st University Road, Pu-Li, Nan-Tou County, 545, Taiwan, ROC Received 27 March 2006; received in revised form 10 July 2006; accepted 18 July 2006
Abstract In the past decade, the use of computer technology for language instruction has expanded rapidly. In Taiwan, overseas students whose native languages are not Chinese mostly get trouble in learning and communicating particularly during the first year of their study. To overcome their language barrier in National Chi Nan University (NCNU), a Web-based Chinese classroom (http://chinese.csie.ncnu.edu.tw) exploiting advanced Web and multimedia technologies has been initiated since 2002. This paper presents the core developments of the Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) system for fulfilling language learning requirements on listening, speaking, reading and writing. It facilitates students in Chinese comprehension self-learning on the Web and can easily be customized for different foreign language learning. Technical issues are addressed from two perspectives to meet the pedagogical approaches of teaching and learning foreign languages: (1) the synchronized multimedia tutoring and the exercise practice functions for students, and (2) the multimedia lecture authoring and the exercise management tools for teachers. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multimedia/hypermedia systems; Architectures for educational technology system; Navigation; Human–computer interface
1. Introduction The emerging Web/Internet technologies have opened a new era for Web-based instruction where online courses can be created and accessed by a very easy way that never happened before over the last decade. Much research work on real classroom experiences capturing has been done to create live lecturing scenarios with real-time two-ways interactions between remote teacher and student sites (Anderson, Beavers, VanDeGrift, & Videon, 2003; Shi et al., 2003). Nevertheless, the simpler lecture-on-demand learning model (Gregory, 1999; Lin & Xie, 2001; Muller & Ottmann, 2000) is still most popularly used in almost every school (e.g., Web courses) because students can review online materials several times without restrictions and teachers *
Corresponding author. Fax: +886 49 2915226. E-mail address: [email protected] (H.-Y. Chen).
0360-1315/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.07.010
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can easily reuse/revise the materials for other purposes. Therefore, more and more online lectures created for self-learning will be a trend. However, without interactive multimedia support most lecture-on-demand e-learning systems nowadays still use static HTML pages as teaching materials, which can only be treated as dumb networked lectures, accordingly limit users’ learning efficacy. The advantage of using multimedia in education is to convey information quickly and effectively to all students and keep them interested in learning (Zimmer, 2003). In Taiwan, overseas students whose native languages are not Chinese mostly encounter learning and communication difficulties, particularly during the first year of their study. To overcome their language barrier in Chinese, we enhance the success of the developed Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) (Chen, Chen, & Hong, 1999) framework to construct the project development of the Web-based Chinese classroom (http://chinese.csie.ncnu.edu.tw) in National Chi Nan University. This project has been initiated since 2002 with the aim of constructing a more conformable, flexible, and effective Web-based instruction environment and focuses on a specific domain within language learning: Chinese as Second Language (CSL). Using computers to assist in language learning, the so-called Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), has been surveyed since the computer technology was presented to public. The history of CALL can be divided into three main stages: behavioristic CALL (late 1970s to early 1980s), communicative CALL (late 1980s to early 1990s), and integrative CALL (late 1990s until now) (Warschauer, 1996). Each stage corresponds to a certain level of computer technology as well as a certain pedagogical approach. Nowadays multimedia computers and Internet lead to a new perspective on technology and language learning which attempts to integrate both more fully with various skills (e.g., listening, speaking, reading, and writing). The multimedia such as pictures, audio, or movies, is usually used as assisted materials for providing more information or knowledge to arouse students’ interest in learning. For example, voice is the most natural communication mode to guide the attention and give value to the learning content through intonation. It offers an alternative to get information from static text or pictures. Moreover, dynamic presentation (with animations) is helpful for descriptions of dynamic context (e.g., meaning of a sentence) or a process (e.g., writing guidance or stroke orders of a word) (Schar & Krueger, 2000). These multimedia characteristics benefit the development of language learning systems and show information more realistically. The purpose of this paper is to present what the main components of the WSML system are and how it is designed to meet the language learning skills for teachers/students in Web-based Chinese teaching/learning. The advantages of the WSML system are summarized as follows: (1) Dynamic media presentation of lecture can increase students’ learning efficacy. The WSML integrates more vigorous types of media such as pictures, streaming audio/video, and animated navigation events with traditionally text media like static HTML pages to support different learning goals. Imagine that if one can record every and each detail of lecturing events happening on class, and reconstruct all them faithfully on the Web, students would experience the most realistic, on-demand knowledge in selflearning. To fulfill this scenario, the WSML system provides an authoring tool to record the temporal and spatial relationships (so-called synchronization information) (Blakowski & Steinmetz, 1996; Cruz & Mahalley, 1999) among media involved and thus can facilitate the synchronized presentation and crossmedia access (Chu & Chen, 2002). (2) Online self-assessment tool can measure students’ performance. Each lecture created by teachers will have a corresponding self-assessment exercise which is associated to subject matter of the lecture. The online self-assessment tool is used as a way to inform students about how well they understand in the courses having been taught. The personal profile for each student contains all information for each exercise (e.g., the questions, student’s answers, and score), and several useful statistics, such as how many exercises have been done for each month and how many students have chosen the answers in a question. From a teacher’s point of view, he will know the quality/difficulty of questions by analyzing the statistics of each answer in each question. (3) Useful course management system can facilitate teachers to create their own courseware and questions for Web-based instruction. The course management system in WSML comprises an easy-to-use content
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authoring tool and a Web-based self-assessment management tool. Both tools allow teachers to produce language learning materials and online exercises more efficiently without any programming skills. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, we survey several related Web-based language learning systems. Next, the overview of WSML system framework will be described. Then, we present the functions and features of system framework reinforcing the WSML system for CFL learning followed by the system evaluation. Next, a comparison of system features with other developed language learning systems will be discussed. Finally, concluding remarks are given. 2. Related work Several language learning systems, such as Web-CALL, IWiLL, and BRIX, have been developed by integrating state-of-the-art multimedia and Web technologies for online language learning. These systems have tried to develop their own functionalities supporting language learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills or online assessment. The common characteristic of these systems is to enable teachers to produce Web-based teaching materials and to facilitate students to study them online. The Web-CALL (Fujii, Iwata, Hattori, Iijima, & Mizuno, 2000) is an easy-to-use system allowing teachers to add or modify the content of the teaching materials according to their needs. The construction of ‘‘Web-CALL’’ consists of two units: Web-page Materials Production Unit (WMPU) and Learning Support Unit (LSU). The former is a useful tool for teachers to produce Web-page materials without knowledge of programming skills and the latter enables students to study online language lessons produced by the teacher. Multimedia features such as sound, pictures, and movie files can be attached on a lecture as supplemental materials. The goal of the Intelligent Web-based Interactive Language Learning (IWiLL) (Kuo et al., 2001) system is to build a networked learning system by integrating language pedagogy, linguistics, computer networks, and multimedia technologies. Two kinds of writing environments in IWiLL are designed for supporting asynchronous and synchronous writing correction process. The asynchronous writing environment mainly provides functions allowing students to turn in essays via the Internet and to examine essays that have been returned from the teacher. On the contrary, the synchronous writing environment provides functions enabling students and teachers to work on the same essay and to communicate with each other in real-time. In addition, the Video-on-Demand technology is also applied in IWiLL system to support online movie access. The BRIX (Sawatpanit, Suthers, & Fleming, 2004) is developed to address the need for a generic language learning environment that fulfills language learning activities. Ease of use was important in the design of BRIX which can yield great benefits to teachers by saving the time and cost to develop courseware. Several functions are implemented for teachers to create teaching materials, such as vocabulary, grammar, discussion, essay, self-test, and quiz. All of the resources can be accessed by the students via the Internet. The systems described above primarily use the network to distribute and share the language learning resources. However, multimedia features that are most important for developing online learning systems, particularly for language learning, are less investigated. The Web-CALL loosely integrates multimedia files by containing voice information into lectures for listening practice. For the IWiLL system, co-editing and online conversation capabilities are beneficial for essays correction. On the other hand, online movies are other types of teaching materials for listening practice. Although various types of media are adopted by these two systems, they did not provide an integrated authoring/presentation environment to decrease the complexity of content creation and lecture presentation. In contrast to the Web-CALL and IWiLL systems, the BRIX paid little attention to the use of multimedia materials. It focused on development of functions for fulfilling the instructional activities. In this paper, we present a language learning system enhancing the developed WSML technology to construct a vivid and vigorous Web-based instruction environment. In the WSML system, teaching materials containing various types of media such as audio/video and navigation events (e.g., pen drawing, highlight, hyperlink event, tele-pointer and scrolling) are fully integrated to benefit students in learning language skills. The elaborate designed course and exercise are also helpful for self-learning of students.
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3. Overview of WSML system The Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) system integrates audiovisual lectures, HTML slides, and navigation events (cf., Table 1) to provide synchronized presentations. In our learning environment, teachers use computers to teach and a synchronization recorder keeps track of the oral guidance along with several navigation events. The navigation events are guided media to provide alternative information for context. For example, a teacher usually has a habit of moving tele-pointer (i.e., cursor) to a word or highlighting a phrase when he is talking about it. Those recorded media objects and navigated events will be presented dynamically in a browser by the implementation of JavaScript code and dynamic HTML techniques. Through the integration of static (e.g., HTML-format slides) and dynamic media (e.g., voice and animation), this system provides integrated multimedia documents with automatic navigation features. Fig. 1 shows the framework of the WSML system. It contains three major components: The WSML Recorder records speech along with the associated navigation events imposed on HTML slides. It mainly comprises two components, which are temporal and spatial synchronization information recorders (cf. Fig. 2), to keep track of the temporal and spatial relations between a variety of navigation events, audio/video, and HTML lecture notes.
Table 1 Navigation events and its description Navigation events
Description
Hyperlink Scrolling
Teacher can add some supplementary materials and some related links about some keywords in the lecture Because of the limit of display size, some lectures may not be presented in one page. When content out of the displayed window, the scroll event is triggered to move content to the displayed window Tele-pointer cooperates with the recitation/explanation to indicate the part is being taught now A teacher can simulate stroke orders of a Chinese character. The result will become an animation in the presentation stage A teacher can define the vocabulary. The defined vocabularies will become online dictionary when the students navigate or browse that word. The online dictionary includes the vocabulary explanation, an example and the pronunciation Teacher can highlight some important words or sentence in the lecture. The students will pay more attention in the highlighted part
Tele-pointer Pen drawing Vocabulary note
Highlight
Fig. 1. The WSML system framework.
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Fig. 2. The architecture of WSML Recorder.
(1) Temporal synchronization information recorder: the temporal relations between media objects or navigation events are recorded on the basis of a global timer. The type and associated timestamps for each event (e.g., initiate AV URL, HTML URL for lecture change, pen-stroke, tele-pointer, and document scrolling) are recorded in the Temporal Information Log, when the Event Detector detects the occurrence of navigation events. (2) Spatial synchronization information recorder: the Document Parser initially parses and partitions the HTML lecture into small and individual objects while the lecture is loading. A lightweight Spatial Information Extractor computes the relative positions of a current event (e.g., a pen-stroke occurring) which the spatial information and basis objects will be recorded in the Spatial Information Log. When a teacher stops the recording, the temporal and spatial information will be combined into a synchronization information log, being transferred to a remote Web server for on-demand access and presentation. When a student accesses a particular online recorded lecture, all involved objects and relevant synchronization information will be streamed to user’s browser, so that the objects could be rendered at right time and on correct positions by the developed WSML Browser. The WSML Event Server receives, deposits, and dispatches those events to clients. When a user requests a specific lecture, all associated media that are correlated with captured information will be dispatched and transmitted to the client side. The WSML Browser combining an AV player, an HTML Browser, and a synchronization mechanism implemented by JavaScript, is for presenting AV lectures and replaying the corresponding navigation events which are recorded during the recording stage. Through the WSML system, teachers can create an online lecture as well as teaching in real-classroom. The teachers’ oral guidance and teaching activities on HTML slides will be recorded faithfully and stored as synchronization information for later playback. Therefore, a real teaching experience will be reconstructed to client sides by applying an elaborate synchronization mechanism.
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4. System framework for CFL learning Fig. 3 shows the system framework reinforcing the WSML system for CFL learning. The framework consists of three main components: WSML Content Repository, WSML Browser, and Exercise Repository. In what follows the three main components will be described, respectively. 4.1. WSML Content Repository All of media involved in a lecture will be stored in the WSML Content Repository. A teacher prepares a short essay or excerpts from a famous book in HTML-format as basic lecture slides for pre-readings. During the recording stage, the WSML Authoring tool (i.e., WSML Recorder) is used to capture a teacher’s speech (e.g., recitation or explanation of textual content) and navigation events imposed on the HTML slides. The kernel of our capturing program is implemented by Visual Basic and packaged as an ActiveX control for triggering via the Web Browser. Fig. 4 is an example that a teacher is teaching several sentences coming from local news and using pen drawing events to show the stroke orders of a word. Some navigation events are also used to facilitate the teaching process.
Synchronized Multimedia Technologies
WSML Content Repository
WSML Browser
Authoring Exercise Repository
WSML Server
Lecture
Exercise
Recitation n Bi-lingual Explanation Personal Profile Statistical Result
Fig. 3. The system framework for CSL learning.
Fig. 4. Multimedia content authoring during the recording stage.
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• Different pronunciation Advanced
of a word
• Idiomatic phrases
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• Vocabulary • Erratum
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• • • •
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• Vocabulary • Grammar • Listening
Writing
Online Exercise
699
practicee
• Comparison between Intermediate
Primary
Chinese and Cantonese • Chinese in daily life • Words and Phrases
• Pronunciationn • Bi-lingual Tutoring (Chinese v.s. Indonesian Chinese v.s. English) Listening/Speaking
Reading
Vocabulary Erratum Grammar Listening
Fig. 5. Designed courses and the corresponding exercises.
In order to achieve different learning goals for different degree of students, three levels of courses are elaborately designed by teachers. As Fig. 5 shows each level of courses contain several lectures and literature readings for training students’ listening, speaking and reading skills of Chinese. Students can choose the appropriate lecture according to their own learning pace. For example, Indonesian students who have difficulty in pronunciation can find the related lectures to improve their pronunciation. Once a student accomplishes the objectives of a course, he can write a reflection or an essay composition and turn in it online through an upload interface. Subsequently, the teacher can correct it or give comments by the WSML Authoring tool. Sometimes, each student is also requested to recite his own essay in the same way as correcting process. The intention is to assist students in learning basic language skills such as speaking and writing. 4.2. WSML Browser Once a student requests a lecture, the recorded lecture including the media objects involved, navigation events and synchronization information will be dispatched to the WSML Browser for synchronized presentation. During audio/video playback, navigation events will be presented at appropriate time and spatial positions under the control of synchronization mechanism. Fig. 6 shows an example of the integrated synchronized presentation in the client side. At T1 the AV and HTML URL are loaded into the browser. The HTML URL shows the content by the embedded HTML Browser, and the AV player will play the corresponding AV lecture. During T2 to T3 the ‘‘keyword’’ is highlighted gradually. At T4, the scrolling event that the instructor acted at the recording is now triggered, moving content focus from one to another. At T5 a pen drawing event is driven to mark some words. Through this presentation scenario, students can easily access the lecture containing teacher’s speech with navigation events. 4.3. Exercise repository Self-assessment tool in our system is designed to evaluate the learning efficiency of students. Several types of exercises, such as listening exercise, cloze exercise, and choice exercise, are designed to support specific lecture material. The questions for different types of exercise are prepared beforehand by the teacher and stored in the Exercise Repository. We provide a Web-based management interface to generate questions by teachers for different types of exercise. The functions in this management tool include the creation of a new question and re-editing an existing question. Fig. 7 shows an example of creating a question for cloze exercise. The content of this question is a quote from the Chinese newspaper.
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Events Highlight
Keyword
Scrolling Pen drawing HTML loading
URL1
Mouse track AV T1
T2
T3
T4
T5
Time
Fig. 6. An example of integrated presentation in the WSML Browser.
Fig. 7. An easy-to-use Web-based exercise authoring tool.
If a student wants to do an exercise, he can choose the type of exercise and the number of questions for this exercise. The system will retrieve the questions randomly from Exercise Repository to generate the exercise. After he finishes and submits the exercise result, the answers of each question will be checked and the score will be shown to him. The exercise information including the type of exercise, questions of exercise, student’s answers of exercise, and score of exercise will be recorded for evaluating the student’s learning efficiency. Additionally, the statistics of answers for each question can be further analyzed and provide as a clue for teachers to determine the quality/difficulty of each question. In order to provide sufficient information for self-assessment of students, several exercise statistics are computed. For example, in the Fig. 8(a), the number of questions done by one particular student in each month is computed and presented by a bar chart. Overall evaluation of exercises, such as total number of correct/incorrect questions, total score of correct/incorrect answers and the final score, will be provided for
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Fig. 8. Statistics information for students and teachers.
each student to inform him of his learning efficiency (c.f. Fig. 8 (b)). Moreover, the student can access specific exercise information that he did before (c.f. Fig. 8(c)). From a teacher’s point of view, the answers of each question should be designed carefully to differentiate the degree of students. Therefore, as Fig. 8(d) shows, the statistics information of answer distribution for each question is collected. Teachers can determine what kinds of questions or answers are inadequate and should be revised. 5. System comparison In this section we briefly compare several language learning systems in Web-based instruction capabilities and pedagogical issues. Table 2 shows the summarized comparison of the four CALL systems: the WebCALL system, the IWiLL system, the BRIX project, and the WSML system. Each system is designed for facilitating content access and fulfilling the language learning skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, by integrating Web and multimedia technologies. More interesting multimedia-based lecture presentation increases students’ learning motivation. Unlike Web-CALL, IWiLL, and BRIX systems, the WSML provides classroom experience presentation of lectures faithfully. With the support of multimedia features, teachers can produce teaching materials for listening practice easily. Through Internet the reading materials can easily be prepared by teachers and accessed by students. Furthermore, the dynamic readings presentation with the teacher’s speech guidance gets more learning efficiency. For the speaking skill the online conversation of IWiLL system and the composition recitation/pronunciation lectures of WSML system can be treated as speaking practice approaches. The development of the writing practice function of the BRIX system is only to provide pure text comments of teachers. Table 2 Summarized comparison of various systems Systems
Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide
multimedia teaching materials dynamic lecture presentation online dictionary online exercise listening practice speaking practice reading practice writing practice
Web-CALL
IWiLL
BRIX
WSML
Medium N/A N/A Yes Medium N/A Medium N/A
Medium N/A N/A Yes Medium Medium Medium High
Low N/A Yes Yes Low N/A Medium Medium
High Yes Yes Yes High Medium High High
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6. Conclusion The WSML system has been implemented in National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, to assist Chinese as Foreign Language learning for overseas students. In developing and testing the WSML system for its online use, we consulted three teachers with experience in the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) field. The comments are summarized as follows: The recording function is helpful for teachers to prepare materials for different language learning goals, but it is a little bit unstable when uploading the lecture. The management tools are good for managing online courses and self-assessment questions, but the operations are complex (i.e. it is not user-friendly). We were delighted to discover that they are satisfied with the features of the WSML system. About the unstable of the authoring tool, we found that the problem was caused by the unstable network connection because the teachers usually record the lectures at their home with low uploading network bandwidth. The assessment tool is also well-done for teachers to create exercise more conveniently and for students to evaluate their achievement of courses by self-assessment. To this end, the WSML system has been a very helpful online language tutor in our school and also been adopted by several universities in Taiwan for EFL and different foreign languages teaching/learning. In our next step, we will keep going to improve on user interface of the management tools which are often used by teachers, and to investigate the approach for students to enhance their speaking abilities. References Anderson, R., Beavers, J., VanDeGrift, T., & Videon, F. (2003). Videoconferencing and presentation support for synchronous distance learning. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual frontiers in education (Vol. 2, pp. F3F_13–F3F_18). Blakowski, G., & Steinmetz, R. (1996). A media synchronization survey: Reference model, specification, and case studies. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 14(1), 5–35. Chen, H. Y., Chen, G. Y., & Hong, J. S. (1999). Design a Web-based synchronized multimedia lecture system for distance education. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on multimedia computing and systems (Vol. 2, pp. 887–891). Chu, W. T., & Chen, H. Y. (2002). Cross-media correlation: a case study of navigated hypermedia documents. In Proceedings of ACM workshops on multimedia (pp. 57–66). Cruz, I. F., & Mahalley, P. S. (1999). Temporal synchronization in multimedia presentations. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on multimedia computing and systems (Vol. 2, pp. 851–856). Fujii, S., Iwata, J., Hattori, M., Iijima, M., & Mizuno, T. (2000). Web-CALL: a language learning support system using Internet. In Proceedings of seventh international conference on parallel and distributed systems workshops (pp. 326–331). Gregory, D. A. (1999). Classroom 2000: An experiment with the instrumentation of a living educational environment. Journal of IBM Systems, Special issue on Pervasive Computing, 38(4), 508–530. Kuo, C. H., Wible, D., Chen, M. C., Sung, L. C., Tsao, N. L., & Chio, C. L. (2001). Design and implementation of an intelligent Webbased interactive language learning system. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on multimedia and expo (pp. 785–788). Lin, F., & Xie, X. (2001). The practice in the Web-based teaching and learning for three years. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on advanced learning technologies (pp. 411–412). Muller, R., & Ottmann, T. (2000). The ‘Authoring on the Fly’ system for automated recording and replay of (tele)presentations. Journal of Multimedia Systems, 8(3), 158–176. Sawatpanit, M., Suthers, D., & Fleming, S. (2004). BRIX: Meeting the requirements for online second language learning. In Proceedings of the 37th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 4–13). Schar, S. G., & Krueger, H. (2000). Using new learning technologies with multimedia. IEEE Multimedia Magazine, 7(3), 40–51. Shi, Y., Xie, W., Xu, G., Shi, R., Chen, E., Mao, Y., et al. (2003). The smart classroom: Merging technologies for seamless tele-education. IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, 2(2), 47–55. Warschauer, M. (1996). Computer-assisted language learning: an introduction. Multimedia language teaching (pp. 3–20). Tokyo: Logos International. Available from http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/call.html. Zimmer, J. E. (2003). Teaching effectively with multimedia. Visionlearning. Available from http://www.visionlearning.com/library/ module_viewer.php?mid=87.
Computers & Education 50 (2008) 693–702 www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
Web-based synchronized multimedia lecture system design for teaching/learning Chinese as second language Herng-Yow Chen *, Kuo-Yu Liu Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chi-Nan University, 1st University Road, Pu-Li, Nan-Tou County, 545, Taiwan, ROC Received 27 March 2006; received in revised form 10 July 2006; accepted 18 July 2006
Abstract In the past decade, the use of computer technology for language instruction has expanded rapidly. In Taiwan, overseas students whose native languages are not Chinese mostly get trouble in learning and communicating particularly during the first year of their study. To overcome their language barrier in National Chi Nan University (NCNU), a Web-based Chinese classroom (http://chinese.csie.ncnu.edu.tw) exploiting advanced Web and multimedia technologies has been initiated since 2002. This paper presents the core developments of the Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) system for fulfilling language learning requirements on listening, speaking, reading and writing. It facilitates students in Chinese comprehension self-learning on the Web and can easily be customized for different foreign language learning. Technical issues are addressed from two perspectives to meet the pedagogical approaches of teaching and learning foreign languages: (1) the synchronized multimedia tutoring and the exercise practice functions for students, and (2) the multimedia lecture authoring and the exercise management tools for teachers. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multimedia/hypermedia systems; Architectures for educational technology system; Navigation; Human–computer interface
1. Introduction The emerging Web/Internet technologies have opened a new era for Web-based instruction where online courses can be created and accessed by a very easy way that never happened before over the last decade. Much research work on real classroom experiences capturing has been done to create live lecturing scenarios with real-time two-ways interactions between remote teacher and student sites (Anderson, Beavers, VanDeGrift, & Videon, 2003; Shi et al., 2003). Nevertheless, the simpler lecture-on-demand learning model (Gregory, 1999; Lin & Xie, 2001; Muller & Ottmann, 2000) is still most popularly used in almost every school (e.g., Web courses) because students can review online materials several times without restrictions and teachers *
Corresponding author. Fax: +886 49 2915226. E-mail address: [email protected] (H.-Y. Chen).
0360-1315/$ - see front matter Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2006.07.010
694
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can easily reuse/revise the materials for other purposes. Therefore, more and more online lectures created for self-learning will be a trend. However, without interactive multimedia support most lecture-on-demand e-learning systems nowadays still use static HTML pages as teaching materials, which can only be treated as dumb networked lectures, accordingly limit users’ learning efficacy. The advantage of using multimedia in education is to convey information quickly and effectively to all students and keep them interested in learning (Zimmer, 2003). In Taiwan, overseas students whose native languages are not Chinese mostly encounter learning and communication difficulties, particularly during the first year of their study. To overcome their language barrier in Chinese, we enhance the success of the developed Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) (Chen, Chen, & Hong, 1999) framework to construct the project development of the Web-based Chinese classroom (http://chinese.csie.ncnu.edu.tw) in National Chi Nan University. This project has been initiated since 2002 with the aim of constructing a more conformable, flexible, and effective Web-based instruction environment and focuses on a specific domain within language learning: Chinese as Second Language (CSL). Using computers to assist in language learning, the so-called Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL), has been surveyed since the computer technology was presented to public. The history of CALL can be divided into three main stages: behavioristic CALL (late 1970s to early 1980s), communicative CALL (late 1980s to early 1990s), and integrative CALL (late 1990s until now) (Warschauer, 1996). Each stage corresponds to a certain level of computer technology as well as a certain pedagogical approach. Nowadays multimedia computers and Internet lead to a new perspective on technology and language learning which attempts to integrate both more fully with various skills (e.g., listening, speaking, reading, and writing). The multimedia such as pictures, audio, or movies, is usually used as assisted materials for providing more information or knowledge to arouse students’ interest in learning. For example, voice is the most natural communication mode to guide the attention and give value to the learning content through intonation. It offers an alternative to get information from static text or pictures. Moreover, dynamic presentation (with animations) is helpful for descriptions of dynamic context (e.g., meaning of a sentence) or a process (e.g., writing guidance or stroke orders of a word) (Schar & Krueger, 2000). These multimedia characteristics benefit the development of language learning systems and show information more realistically. The purpose of this paper is to present what the main components of the WSML system are and how it is designed to meet the language learning skills for teachers/students in Web-based Chinese teaching/learning. The advantages of the WSML system are summarized as follows: (1) Dynamic media presentation of lecture can increase students’ learning efficacy. The WSML integrates more vigorous types of media such as pictures, streaming audio/video, and animated navigation events with traditionally text media like static HTML pages to support different learning goals. Imagine that if one can record every and each detail of lecturing events happening on class, and reconstruct all them faithfully on the Web, students would experience the most realistic, on-demand knowledge in selflearning. To fulfill this scenario, the WSML system provides an authoring tool to record the temporal and spatial relationships (so-called synchronization information) (Blakowski & Steinmetz, 1996; Cruz & Mahalley, 1999) among media involved and thus can facilitate the synchronized presentation and crossmedia access (Chu & Chen, 2002). (2) Online self-assessment tool can measure students’ performance. Each lecture created by teachers will have a corresponding self-assessment exercise which is associated to subject matter of the lecture. The online self-assessment tool is used as a way to inform students about how well they understand in the courses having been taught. The personal profile for each student contains all information for each exercise (e.g., the questions, student’s answers, and score), and several useful statistics, such as how many exercises have been done for each month and how many students have chosen the answers in a question. From a teacher’s point of view, he will know the quality/difficulty of questions by analyzing the statistics of each answer in each question. (3) Useful course management system can facilitate teachers to create their own courseware and questions for Web-based instruction. The course management system in WSML comprises an easy-to-use content
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authoring tool and a Web-based self-assessment management tool. Both tools allow teachers to produce language learning materials and online exercises more efficiently without any programming skills. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First, we survey several related Web-based language learning systems. Next, the overview of WSML system framework will be described. Then, we present the functions and features of system framework reinforcing the WSML system for CFL learning followed by the system evaluation. Next, a comparison of system features with other developed language learning systems will be discussed. Finally, concluding remarks are given. 2. Related work Several language learning systems, such as Web-CALL, IWiLL, and BRIX, have been developed by integrating state-of-the-art multimedia and Web technologies for online language learning. These systems have tried to develop their own functionalities supporting language learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills or online assessment. The common characteristic of these systems is to enable teachers to produce Web-based teaching materials and to facilitate students to study them online. The Web-CALL (Fujii, Iwata, Hattori, Iijima, & Mizuno, 2000) is an easy-to-use system allowing teachers to add or modify the content of the teaching materials according to their needs. The construction of ‘‘Web-CALL’’ consists of two units: Web-page Materials Production Unit (WMPU) and Learning Support Unit (LSU). The former is a useful tool for teachers to produce Web-page materials without knowledge of programming skills and the latter enables students to study online language lessons produced by the teacher. Multimedia features such as sound, pictures, and movie files can be attached on a lecture as supplemental materials. The goal of the Intelligent Web-based Interactive Language Learning (IWiLL) (Kuo et al., 2001) system is to build a networked learning system by integrating language pedagogy, linguistics, computer networks, and multimedia technologies. Two kinds of writing environments in IWiLL are designed for supporting asynchronous and synchronous writing correction process. The asynchronous writing environment mainly provides functions allowing students to turn in essays via the Internet and to examine essays that have been returned from the teacher. On the contrary, the synchronous writing environment provides functions enabling students and teachers to work on the same essay and to communicate with each other in real-time. In addition, the Video-on-Demand technology is also applied in IWiLL system to support online movie access. The BRIX (Sawatpanit, Suthers, & Fleming, 2004) is developed to address the need for a generic language learning environment that fulfills language learning activities. Ease of use was important in the design of BRIX which can yield great benefits to teachers by saving the time and cost to develop courseware. Several functions are implemented for teachers to create teaching materials, such as vocabulary, grammar, discussion, essay, self-test, and quiz. All of the resources can be accessed by the students via the Internet. The systems described above primarily use the network to distribute and share the language learning resources. However, multimedia features that are most important for developing online learning systems, particularly for language learning, are less investigated. The Web-CALL loosely integrates multimedia files by containing voice information into lectures for listening practice. For the IWiLL system, co-editing and online conversation capabilities are beneficial for essays correction. On the other hand, online movies are other types of teaching materials for listening practice. Although various types of media are adopted by these two systems, they did not provide an integrated authoring/presentation environment to decrease the complexity of content creation and lecture presentation. In contrast to the Web-CALL and IWiLL systems, the BRIX paid little attention to the use of multimedia materials. It focused on development of functions for fulfilling the instructional activities. In this paper, we present a language learning system enhancing the developed WSML technology to construct a vivid and vigorous Web-based instruction environment. In the WSML system, teaching materials containing various types of media such as audio/video and navigation events (e.g., pen drawing, highlight, hyperlink event, tele-pointer and scrolling) are fully integrated to benefit students in learning language skills. The elaborate designed course and exercise are also helpful for self-learning of students.
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3. Overview of WSML system The Web-based Synchronized Multimedia Lecture (WSML) system integrates audiovisual lectures, HTML slides, and navigation events (cf., Table 1) to provide synchronized presentations. In our learning environment, teachers use computers to teach and a synchronization recorder keeps track of the oral guidance along with several navigation events. The navigation events are guided media to provide alternative information for context. For example, a teacher usually has a habit of moving tele-pointer (i.e., cursor) to a word or highlighting a phrase when he is talking about it. Those recorded media objects and navigated events will be presented dynamically in a browser by the implementation of JavaScript code and dynamic HTML techniques. Through the integration of static (e.g., HTML-format slides) and dynamic media (e.g., voice and animation), this system provides integrated multimedia documents with automatic navigation features. Fig. 1 shows the framework of the WSML system. It contains three major components: The WSML Recorder records speech along with the associated navigation events imposed on HTML slides. It mainly comprises two components, which are temporal and spatial synchronization information recorders (cf. Fig. 2), to keep track of the temporal and spatial relations between a variety of navigation events, audio/video, and HTML lecture notes.
Table 1 Navigation events and its description Navigation events
Description
Hyperlink Scrolling
Teacher can add some supplementary materials and some related links about some keywords in the lecture Because of the limit of display size, some lectures may not be presented in one page. When content out of the displayed window, the scroll event is triggered to move content to the displayed window Tele-pointer cooperates with the recitation/explanation to indicate the part is being taught now A teacher can simulate stroke orders of a Chinese character. The result will become an animation in the presentation stage A teacher can define the vocabulary. The defined vocabularies will become online dictionary when the students navigate or browse that word. The online dictionary includes the vocabulary explanation, an example and the pronunciation Teacher can highlight some important words or sentence in the lecture. The students will pay more attention in the highlighted part
Tele-pointer Pen drawing Vocabulary note
Highlight
Fig. 1. The WSML system framework.
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Fig. 2. The architecture of WSML Recorder.
(1) Temporal synchronization information recorder: the temporal relations between media objects or navigation events are recorded on the basis of a global timer. The type and associated timestamps for each event (e.g., initiate AV URL, HTML URL for lecture change, pen-stroke, tele-pointer, and document scrolling) are recorded in the Temporal Information Log, when the Event Detector detects the occurrence of navigation events. (2) Spatial synchronization information recorder: the Document Parser initially parses and partitions the HTML lecture into small and individual objects while the lecture is loading. A lightweight Spatial Information Extractor computes the relative positions of a current event (e.g., a pen-stroke occurring) which the spatial information and basis objects will be recorded in the Spatial Information Log. When a teacher stops the recording, the temporal and spatial information will be combined into a synchronization information log, being transferred to a remote Web server for on-demand access and presentation. When a student accesses a particular online recorded lecture, all involved objects and relevant synchronization information will be streamed to user’s browser, so that the objects could be rendered at right time and on correct positions by the developed WSML Browser. The WSML Event Server receives, deposits, and dispatches those events to clients. When a user requests a specific lecture, all associated media that are correlated with captured information will be dispatched and transmitted to the client side. The WSML Browser combining an AV player, an HTML Browser, and a synchronization mechanism implemented by JavaScript, is for presenting AV lectures and replaying the corresponding navigation events which are recorded during the recording stage. Through the WSML system, teachers can create an online lecture as well as teaching in real-classroom. The teachers’ oral guidance and teaching activities on HTML slides will be recorded faithfully and stored as synchronization information for later playback. Therefore, a real teaching experience will be reconstructed to client sides by applying an elaborate synchronization mechanism.
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4. System framework for CFL learning Fig. 3 shows the system framework reinforcing the WSML system for CFL learning. The framework consists of three main components: WSML Content Repository, WSML Browser, and Exercise Repository. In what follows the three main components will be described, respectively. 4.1. WSML Content Repository All of media involved in a lecture will be stored in the WSML Content Repository. A teacher prepares a short essay or excerpts from a famous book in HTML-format as basic lecture slides for pre-readings. During the recording stage, the WSML Authoring tool (i.e., WSML Recorder) is used to capture a teacher’s speech (e.g., recitation or explanation of textual content) and navigation events imposed on the HTML slides. The kernel of our capturing program is implemented by Visual Basic and packaged as an ActiveX control for triggering via the Web Browser. Fig. 4 is an example that a teacher is teaching several sentences coming from local news and using pen drawing events to show the stroke orders of a word. Some navigation events are also used to facilitate the teaching process.
Synchronized Multimedia Technologies
WSML Content Repository
WSML Browser
Authoring Exercise Repository
WSML Server
Lecture
Exercise
Recitation n Bi-lingual Explanation Personal Profile Statistical Result
Fig. 3. The system framework for CSL learning.
Fig. 4. Multimedia content authoring during the recording stage.
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• Different pronunciation Advanced
of a word
• Idiomatic phrases
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• Vocabulary • Erratum
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• • • •
Literature Reading
Essay Composition
• Vocabulary • Grammar • Listening
Writing
Online Exercise
699
practicee
• Comparison between Intermediate
Primary
Chinese and Cantonese • Chinese in daily life • Words and Phrases
• Pronunciationn • Bi-lingual Tutoring (Chinese v.s. Indonesian Chinese v.s. English) Listening/Speaking
Reading
Vocabulary Erratum Grammar Listening
Fig. 5. Designed courses and the corresponding exercises.
In order to achieve different learning goals for different degree of students, three levels of courses are elaborately designed by teachers. As Fig. 5 shows each level of courses contain several lectures and literature readings for training students’ listening, speaking and reading skills of Chinese. Students can choose the appropriate lecture according to their own learning pace. For example, Indonesian students who have difficulty in pronunciation can find the related lectures to improve their pronunciation. Once a student accomplishes the objectives of a course, he can write a reflection or an essay composition and turn in it online through an upload interface. Subsequently, the teacher can correct it or give comments by the WSML Authoring tool. Sometimes, each student is also requested to recite his own essay in the same way as correcting process. The intention is to assist students in learning basic language skills such as speaking and writing. 4.2. WSML Browser Once a student requests a lecture, the recorded lecture including the media objects involved, navigation events and synchronization information will be dispatched to the WSML Browser for synchronized presentation. During audio/video playback, navigation events will be presented at appropriate time and spatial positions under the control of synchronization mechanism. Fig. 6 shows an example of the integrated synchronized presentation in the client side. At T1 the AV and HTML URL are loaded into the browser. The HTML URL shows the content by the embedded HTML Browser, and the AV player will play the corresponding AV lecture. During T2 to T3 the ‘‘keyword’’ is highlighted gradually. At T4, the scrolling event that the instructor acted at the recording is now triggered, moving content focus from one to another. At T5 a pen drawing event is driven to mark some words. Through this presentation scenario, students can easily access the lecture containing teacher’s speech with navigation events. 4.3. Exercise repository Self-assessment tool in our system is designed to evaluate the learning efficiency of students. Several types of exercises, such as listening exercise, cloze exercise, and choice exercise, are designed to support specific lecture material. The questions for different types of exercise are prepared beforehand by the teacher and stored in the Exercise Repository. We provide a Web-based management interface to generate questions by teachers for different types of exercise. The functions in this management tool include the creation of a new question and re-editing an existing question. Fig. 7 shows an example of creating a question for cloze exercise. The content of this question is a quote from the Chinese newspaper.
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Events Highlight
Keyword
Scrolling Pen drawing HTML loading
URL1
Mouse track AV T1
T2
T3
T4
T5
Time
Fig. 6. An example of integrated presentation in the WSML Browser.
Fig. 7. An easy-to-use Web-based exercise authoring tool.
If a student wants to do an exercise, he can choose the type of exercise and the number of questions for this exercise. The system will retrieve the questions randomly from Exercise Repository to generate the exercise. After he finishes and submits the exercise result, the answers of each question will be checked and the score will be shown to him. The exercise information including the type of exercise, questions of exercise, student’s answers of exercise, and score of exercise will be recorded for evaluating the student’s learning efficiency. Additionally, the statistics of answers for each question can be further analyzed and provide as a clue for teachers to determine the quality/difficulty of each question. In order to provide sufficient information for self-assessment of students, several exercise statistics are computed. For example, in the Fig. 8(a), the number of questions done by one particular student in each month is computed and presented by a bar chart. Overall evaluation of exercises, such as total number of correct/incorrect questions, total score of correct/incorrect answers and the final score, will be provided for
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Fig. 8. Statistics information for students and teachers.
each student to inform him of his learning efficiency (c.f. Fig. 8 (b)). Moreover, the student can access specific exercise information that he did before (c.f. Fig. 8(c)). From a teacher’s point of view, the answers of each question should be designed carefully to differentiate the degree of students. Therefore, as Fig. 8(d) shows, the statistics information of answer distribution for each question is collected. Teachers can determine what kinds of questions or answers are inadequate and should be revised. 5. System comparison In this section we briefly compare several language learning systems in Web-based instruction capabilities and pedagogical issues. Table 2 shows the summarized comparison of the four CALL systems: the WebCALL system, the IWiLL system, the BRIX project, and the WSML system. Each system is designed for facilitating content access and fulfilling the language learning skills, such as listening, speaking, reading and writing, by integrating Web and multimedia technologies. More interesting multimedia-based lecture presentation increases students’ learning motivation. Unlike Web-CALL, IWiLL, and BRIX systems, the WSML provides classroom experience presentation of lectures faithfully. With the support of multimedia features, teachers can produce teaching materials for listening practice easily. Through Internet the reading materials can easily be prepared by teachers and accessed by students. Furthermore, the dynamic readings presentation with the teacher’s speech guidance gets more learning efficiency. For the speaking skill the online conversation of IWiLL system and the composition recitation/pronunciation lectures of WSML system can be treated as speaking practice approaches. The development of the writing practice function of the BRIX system is only to provide pure text comments of teachers. Table 2 Summarized comparison of various systems Systems
Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide Provide
multimedia teaching materials dynamic lecture presentation online dictionary online exercise listening practice speaking practice reading practice writing practice
Web-CALL
IWiLL
BRIX
WSML
Medium N/A N/A Yes Medium N/A Medium N/A
Medium N/A N/A Yes Medium Medium Medium High
Low N/A Yes Yes Low N/A Medium Medium
High Yes Yes Yes High Medium High High
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6. Conclusion The WSML system has been implemented in National Chi Nan University, Taiwan, to assist Chinese as Foreign Language learning for overseas students. In developing and testing the WSML system for its online use, we consulted three teachers with experience in the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) field. The comments are summarized as follows: The recording function is helpful for teachers to prepare materials for different language learning goals, but it is a little bit unstable when uploading the lecture. The management tools are good for managing online courses and self-assessment questions, but the operations are complex (i.e. it is not user-friendly). We were delighted to discover that they are satisfied with the features of the WSML system. About the unstable of the authoring tool, we found that the problem was caused by the unstable network connection because the teachers usually record the lectures at their home with low uploading network bandwidth. The assessment tool is also well-done for teachers to create exercise more conveniently and for students to evaluate their achievement of courses by self-assessment. To this end, the WSML system has been a very helpful online language tutor in our school and also been adopted by several universities in Taiwan for EFL and different foreign languages teaching/learning. In our next step, we will keep going to improve on user interface of the management tools which are often used by teachers, and to investigate the approach for students to enhance their speaking abilities. References Anderson, R., Beavers, J., VanDeGrift, T., & Videon, F. (2003). Videoconferencing and presentation support for synchronous distance learning. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual frontiers in education (Vol. 2, pp. F3F_13–F3F_18). Blakowski, G., & Steinmetz, R. (1996). A media synchronization survey: Reference model, specification, and case studies. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 14(1), 5–35. Chen, H. Y., Chen, G. Y., & Hong, J. S. (1999). Design a Web-based synchronized multimedia lecture system for distance education. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on multimedia computing and systems (Vol. 2, pp. 887–891). Chu, W. T., & Chen, H. Y. (2002). Cross-media correlation: a case study of navigated hypermedia documents. In Proceedings of ACM workshops on multimedia (pp. 57–66). Cruz, I. F., & Mahalley, P. S. (1999). Temporal synchronization in multimedia presentations. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on multimedia computing and systems (Vol. 2, pp. 851–856). Fujii, S., Iwata, J., Hattori, M., Iijima, M., & Mizuno, T. (2000). Web-CALL: a language learning support system using Internet. In Proceedings of seventh international conference on parallel and distributed systems workshops (pp. 326–331). Gregory, D. A. (1999). Classroom 2000: An experiment with the instrumentation of a living educational environment. Journal of IBM Systems, Special issue on Pervasive Computing, 38(4), 508–530. Kuo, C. H., Wible, D., Chen, M. C., Sung, L. C., Tsao, N. L., & Chio, C. L. (2001). Design and implementation of an intelligent Webbased interactive language learning system. In Proceedings of IEEE international conference on multimedia and expo (pp. 785–788). Lin, F., & Xie, X. (2001). The practice in the Web-based teaching and learning for three years. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on advanced learning technologies (pp. 411–412). Muller, R., & Ottmann, T. (2000). The ‘Authoring on the Fly’ system for automated recording and replay of (tele)presentations. Journal of Multimedia Systems, 8(3), 158–176. Sawatpanit, M., Suthers, D., & Fleming, S. (2004). BRIX: Meeting the requirements for online second language learning. In Proceedings of the 37th annual hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 4–13). Schar, S. G., & Krueger, H. (2000). Using new learning technologies with multimedia. IEEE Multimedia Magazine, 7(3), 40–51. Shi, Y., Xie, W., Xu, G., Shi, R., Chen, E., Mao, Y., et al. (2003). The smart classroom: Merging technologies for seamless tele-education. IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, 2(2), 47–55. Warschauer, M. (1996). Computer-assisted language learning: an introduction. Multimedia language teaching (pp. 3–20). Tokyo: Logos International. Available from http://www.gse.uci.edu/markw/call.html. Zimmer, J. E. (2003). Teaching effectively with multimedia. Visionlearning. Available from http://www.visionlearning.com/library/ module_viewer.php?mid=87.