Authoring tools and teacher training for call

Sysfem, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 151-160, Printed in Great Britain

AUTHORING

0346-251X/92 $5.00 + 0.00 0 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd

1992

TOOLS AND TEACHER GARY

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MOTTERAM

Centre for English Language Studies in Education, Kingdom

University of Manchester,

United

It has been suggested by some that authoring languages are a way of teaching language teachers how to make their own software. Others have felt that these packages take too long to learn and when they have been learned they are not really powerful enough to do anything worthwhile. This paper reports the success of using authoring languages on Masters degree courses at Manchester University. It talks about the tools themselves, taking three different packages with differing powers and facilities and describes their strengths and weaknesses as tools for language learning materials development. The role of such packages in the teacher training is then presented, showing that the use of such tools enables teachers to become more critically aware of available software. Finally, some examples of the materials and how they were used is given. This is offered along with student comments on the software itself and how well it performed.

INTRODUCTION Roland Sussex in his recent article in System (1991: p. 21) makes the very valid point that “Unless teachers can be creatively motivated, CALL will never succeed. And author programs are the most likely means of success”. In this article I would like to describe my attempts at Manchester University to use authoring tools as one part of a Master’s degree in Educational Technology for TESOL. The Master’s degree at Manchester has three technology elements (participants also do mainstream TESOL modules like Psychology of Language Learning, Assessment etc.) and includes both video and computer techniques. Its central rationale is a movement through exposure to basic classroom software, then the next stage is the development of materials and finally looking at the larger “generic” packages and their uses in the wider realm of ELT like research, administration or teacher training. The course starts by looking, for example, at a package like Eclipse or the CALL uses of a word processor like PCWrite. These ideas are mirrored in the video area by looking first at core packages like A Weekend Away or Television English. The second stage would be to look in the computing area at an authoring package like CALLS, Microtext, or HyperCard. In the equivalent video material we would look at the uses of satellite or off-air materials and make simple classroom video. In the third stage packages like dBase, Ventura, or PageMaker are considered as well as the uses of video in areas of ELT research or teacher training. 151

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This article is going to concentrate on the uses made of the authoring tools CALIS, Microfext and HyperCard in teacher training showing how teachers can be creative, how the use of authoring programs can enhance knowledge about CALL and how simple communicative activities can be generated. A number of pieces of software will be described that have been produced by teachers involved in these courses.

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CALIS’ stands for Computer Assisted Language Instruction System and it was developed at Duke University in America for the delivery of computer-based materials in a wide range of languages; one could almost say from Amharic to Zulu. More recently it has been shown to be a possible tool for a wide range of computer assisted learning materials and would certainly function in any discipline in which text and questions interact. It is based around the concept of a series of linked windows in which are written either text, instructions, tasks, background information etc. The three central windows are the directions window, the text window and the question window. The units of material are written in a script which is easily modifiable. The advantage of writing these scripts is that they need no special editing environment and can be written using a text editor like PCWrite, or Notebook in Windows. In the modules that are run at Manchester many of the students come from developing countries and the use of shareware products like PCWrite or CALIS means that the participants can return home with materials that they can use immediately and also develop further. Basic uses of Microtext have been described elsewhere (see Motteram, 1990); at a more sophisticated level it is possible to produce a wide range of games and simulations and also to import pictures and graphics. It has been used to produce business training software and mazes.2 It can be used to control audio and/or video disks to create interactive materials. It can import routines from programing languages like BASIC. It is clearly very flexible.

Microtext

was chosen because it can run in both the BBC/Acorn and also the IBM/Nimbus environments. Thus it is usable both by course participants who work in Britain and also by many of the overseas students as well. As the M.Ed at Manchester attracts a number of students from overseas as well as local students, the need to cover a range of computer implementations is imperative.

Uses of HyperCard? and its value can be read about in the article already mentioned (Sussex, 1991) and also that by Harland (1990). Much of the work described by Nyns (1988) was also developed using HyperCard (see also Meinhoff, 1990). The use of HyperCard has not featured prominently until recently because Macintosh computers were not widely available in this country, but recently a number of Local Education Authorities in Britain and a number of British Council offices overseas have adopted them. They have been prominently used in America and Canada, however, for a number of years. TEACHER The actual CALL module

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AND CALL term 2 of the course.

As Manchester

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offers a flexible M.Ed scheme, it is also available in the summer and by distance. But on the main year-round course the students will certainly be in a position such that having had a basic introduction to software uses in the classroom they are ready to look at the issues involved in the design and implementation of software. The module enables the participants to try “programing” for themselves, to see on the one hand how simplistic much of the currently available software really is and also to demonstrate how relatively easy it is to produce good communicative materials (see Jones 1991) in a short space of time. The participants work through all the stages of designing and producing a piece of software and in some cases try it out whilst attending the course. Producing software helps to enhance the participants’ evaluative skills, (see Nethercott, 1991) which they may well also address at the authoring packages themselves through books like Barker and Yeates (1985) or Criswell (1989). Microtext has its own independently published primer in Carter (1988) and of course both Microtext and CALZS have their own manuals which help to add to the courseware developer’s knowledge about good programing style and structure. The participants in the CALL module are pointed towards such references in the opening stages of the course, the course itself being divided into three parts. The main academic year modules at Manchester last ten weeks and each week there is a 2.5 hr teaching slot. In addition to this there is a weekly development tutorial of l-2 hr so that the participants can try out tasks they have been set and begin to develop their own software. The first part of the course is an introduction to MS DOS batch files. This is done early because it acts as a bridge from earlier modules. Participants will have learned basic commands like dir, copy, or del, and need, as teachers, to understand how to set up disks to make them easily accessible for their learners. Also, batch processing is a simple introduction to programing languages with commands like cls which are identifiable in all languages, at whatever level of sophistication. Batch files are dealt with in the first week and the next four weeks are currently spent looking at CALZS. It is envisaged that this part of the module will be shortened to enable us to spend time learning to use HyperCard. It is expected that eventually the material will be delivered in a series of self-access units whereby participants are shown the different systems and then choose which ones they wish to work with. Alternatively, the course may simply consist of Microtext and HyperCard. This will enable it to cover the development of more traditional and also hypertext-like software. CALZS is difficult to do anything exciting with, but cloze materials, multiple choice and sentence ordering are easy to produce. As with all teaching materials it is the ideas that are the most difficult to come up with. The power of CALZS is in that it has the ability to give students feedback on items. It can also import data from external word processed sources, so there can be dictionary files, or grammar help etc. These can be built up by the students and can be part of the word processing output of the class who are working with the computers. The modules described below will show the extent of the materials that it is possible to produce. The rest of the course is currently devoted to Microtext. This is in many ways much simpler to get started with and participants have recently suggested that the course should begin with this. It is possible that in future courses this is what will happen. Simple reading materials are very easy to produce, as are the standard types of programs described earlier. More complex, or longer materials inevitably take more time, but the product is much more satisfying and useful. The value of creating the software in this way is that it can

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be trialed and debugged easily with groups of learners and modifications can be effected by local staff. Another plus for these types of authoring programs over standard ELT software is that in a college or school where English is not the only subject on the curriculum, materials can be developed in these areas as well. Authoring languages enable teachers to produce, in a relatively short space of time, actual usable materials that they can trial to see their effectiveness and modify and adjust to produce appropriate and effective language production tools. The fact that the participating teachers are able to produce their own materials means that they are better motivated to carry on in their home institutions. This helps to widen the number of practitioners involved in the production of materials and, paraphrase Sussex (1991: p. 26), to reduce the burden on a small number of committed CALL specialists of creating CALL materials.

EXAMPLE

MATERIALS

The materials that are produced as part of the course take into account good current ELT practice and also ideas from the field of CAL/CBL. Materials are therefore often produced that include both on and off screen texts and visuals. It is my intention to describe two pieces of material from each authoring package to demonstrate the potentials of each system.5 CALIS, as has been said, is more limited than the other two systems and the materials described below include a reading passage about the penal system and a set of instructions about tools that are jumbled up as a sentence ordering exercise. However, despite appearing simple on the surface, the material about the penal system has its own context sensitive dictionary file which can be called up at any time. It can also be altered by the students or teachers to reflect words or phrases that proved difficult, but which did not occur in the dictionary, or proved simple enough to be removed. This is reminiscent of the work described by Nyns (op. cit.). This material has been used with a number of students and proved successful. The main text is shown in Fig. 1. The second piece of material is a simple sentence ordering exercise. This again has proved motivating and challenging for a number of lower level groups who have been working in the area of instructional language. This piece of software reflects normal classroom practice in which a teacher would perhaps cut up a text and give it to the learners in groups so that they can reconstruct it. The computer-based version has the added advantage that it provides on-going feedback. The appearance of the basic screen can be seen in Fig. 2. When a selection is made and it is a correct choice, appropriate feedback is given, the chosen sentence is highlighted and the initial letter changes to a number, indicating the order of the sentences. If a choice is wrong, help is given in the form of hints or directions. These are context sensitive and can be more or less sophisticated as required, e.g. Is there an alternative which might be introduced earlier than this one? Within 04 LIS there is always a quit option available at any point. However, you are encouraged to try at least once. You can also skip a question and come back to it at a later stage. This particular program is set up so that at the end a final version of the text is printed on the screen. Using the

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PRISON

I

The first objective of all sentences should be denunciation of and retribution'for the crime, Depending on the offence and the offender, the sentence may also aim to achieve reparation, public protection and reform of the offender. Incarceration is justiable in the case of serious offenders, the murderer, the rapist, drug trafficker and armed robber, in order to protect the public. However, for those convicted of petty crimes; punishment can be served elsewhere than in prison. Not only is prison enormously expensive and degrading to human dignity, but individual responsibility is eroded. Prisoners are not required to face up to the consequences of their actions, nor to compensate their victims. Judges will be encouraged to impose non-custodial penalties. There are several alternatives to prison such as community service, day centre attendance, probation, fine and compensation, a suspended sentence, a deferred sentence, curfews and a new and rather controversial option of electronic tagging. 1) A sentence should be aimed at openly condemning a crime and at the punishment thereof. Type true or false:

Fl P

/ F2

1 F3 A 1 F4

1 Fb Giveup ) F'7Directions 1 +/- Pass 1 Esc Exit

Fig.

I. A text-based activity in CALLS.

TOOLS

a.

b. c. d. e. f.

If that doesn’t work, you could use a blowlamp to heat the bolt. first you could try ailing it. Well, another thing you could do is to cut the head off the bolt with a hacksaw. Turn it while it is still hot. If a bolt sticks because the threads are rusty, how can you free One more idea: you could use a cold chisel and a hammer to

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the nut. of oil. do this near turn the bolt

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Use plenty Don’t

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Question 1: Start by finding the first Type in the letter ==>

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statement

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Fig. 2. The main screenfor a sentenceorderingactivity.

I Esc Exit

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SHIFT/PRINT SCREEN facility of the PC you can give the learners a final copy of the text to take home, or back to the class for further work. There is a scoring facility which can be turned off at will. CALIS materials are not difficult to produce and many traditional exercises like True/False or multiple choice are as easy as with other authoring packages. As with all such testing material it is the skill of producing the items and the feedback that makes useful and meaningful courseware.

Microtext materials

can range in their sophistication. One of the pieces of material described below is a reading maze, the other is an adventure game set on an island. Both of these pieces of software were used for general ELT teaching during July 1991. The current writer observed these materials and collected student reactions on their effectiveness.

For the adventure game there were four groups involved, all of approximately intermediate level, from a number of countries including Japan, Spain, Greece and Portugal. All the students had had at least one prior session in the computer lab, but had not been prepared particularly for the adventure. The pairings were deliberately mixed. In the early stages there was quite a lot of discussion, decision making and excitement. Diane Slaouti, who wrote the software, had made it fairly directive so that the students were encouraged to actually finish the adventure within a fairly short space of time. Three of the groups took about half an hour and then did additional vocabulary work, the fourth group took things much more slowly and used the very valuable “on-line dictionary” to great effect. The idea was to record the journey on the following map (Fig. 3):

Cke

a,

TREASURE

this nap to help you ydu co around the

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ISLAND _

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Muk tn it qthiq

you think will be as&l

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for use with Island.

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so that students could write a summary of their journey. The software proved effective and bore out the claims that are being made in this and other articles for the use of authoring programs in teaching teachers to produce their own software. There is no denying that there was a good deal of heartache caused by the writing of the software, but at the end of the day the teacher has an eminently usable ELT simulation, of which there have been many promised, but few delivered, and at the same time has understood the process of CALL in much greater depth than previously. The same is true of the second piece of software. This is a reading maze and is based around a space adventure. Several students tried this independently. This was partly to give one of the learners the opportunity to work in this way. He had expressed several times his dissatisfaction with group work around the computer in his learner diary and I wanted to see whether he was motivated by an independent piece of work. At the end of the exercise he said that he had liked doing this because it was “logical” and a “challenge”. The software works on the basis of a text screen followed by a number of choices. The right decisions need to be made in order to solve the problem. The original material on which this is based was a much more sophisticated story. The material had to be constrained so that it fitted in with the memory load of the software and also to make it into a manageable lesson length. This is an important factor. One of the useful features of Microtext is a summary facility. So, at the end of each stage a printout can be obtained. This shows the decisions that have been made and in future “games” the learners can take alternative strategies. A summary looks like Fig. 4.

HERE IS THE SUMMARY OF YOUR STORY ‘SPACE HERO’ : You can get a printout of the summary by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing Print Screen-see top right of the keyboard. The Platons are attacking the Nirians. You must go and rescue them. You decide to take the spaceship Colomba. You decide to tell the Nirians you are coming. Your computer isn’t working; you cannot contact the Nirians. You decide to continue on your journey anyway. You decide to stop and help the X25. On the X25 you find a frozen Captain and a recorded SOS message. You decide to try and wake the Captain up. You decide to press the green button as the Captain orders you to. The Captain’s story makes you very scared and you return to the Colomba. The Captain has a friend on Platon who can help you. You decide to contact him on your monitor. The Captain’s friend tells you where the Platon Warships are, and you destroy them using long-distance missiles. You can go to Nirius. On Nirius, you get a Heroes’ Welcome. You have been successful. Fig. 4. A summary created by learners using Space Hero.

The summary can be used as the basis of more sophisticated written text. It can be made into a report for the commanding officer, for example. Another similar idea is described in Nethercott (1991). There is no attempt to claim that these programs produced in Microtext

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break new CALL boundaries, but they have enabled ordinary teachers to produce usable software and learn enough about software production to make informed decisions about CALL use and CALL software production in their future careers.

HyperCard is rather different

and is being used in a rather different context by me from the materials described in the above. It is being used in a small secondary school in Oldham to help support both bilingual learners and learners with special educational needs. These learners are in their tenth year of schooling and it is a GCSE course that they are following. In addition to the normal classwork they are being given the opportunity to prepare materials on the Apple Mac. This, at the moment, is mainly word processing, but also includes two simple HyperCard stacks, one of which is a note-taking mechanism while the second is helping them with their spelling. The main book that they are reading at the moment is A Kestrel for a Knave, Hines (196W1989) and this is one of the screens from the notetaking stack (Fig. 5).

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Font

Style

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Write a description a picture to remind

of Billy. There is uou. L/jcA* & 1,k 10,

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The idea of this material as they Billy Casper, the a social worker’s

stack is that it helps the learners to focus on small individual chunks of read which they then can put together to make a larger statement about hero of the book. They will eventually use some of the material to write report, or a school report about Billy. The great advantage of HyperCard

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is the ease with which graphics can be made use of. As can be seen from the example above, a simple line drawing has been produced and then scanned in. The potentials for motivation here are tremendous. The second stack, as was said above, is to do with spelling. In their initial self-assessments many of the learners said that, in the first place, they felt they had problems with spelling and, in the second, they would like to do something about it. The school has a policy of targeting certain very common spelling mistakes and this stack will enable the learners to keep a track of their new words and test to see if they have improved in any way. It works on the very simple principle of displaying a word then deleting it. The learner types in the word as they remember it and then can compare it to the original. This is one of the screens from this stack (Fig. 6):

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The material is simple and effective. Using the clipboard can be cut and pasted into the word processed text. HyperCard Macintosh

feature

AM

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stack.

of a Macintosh,

words

will prove a useful, interesting and simple environment to author in. The LC on which this material has been pioneered has a sound facility and it will

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therefore be possible to include small samples of sound, certainly the pronunciation of individual words, if not short sentences. There is also the realm of pictures. The graphics in this article are produced by doing screen “snapshots”, another integral feature included in the modern Macintosh. Harland (1991) describes other features of HyperCard and mentions that it was used to produce a 2000 word English-Portuguese dictionary including sound and graphics.

CONCLUSION The work that has been done by my students over the past three years on their M.Ed modules has made me confident that authoring languages can, in Sussex’s words (1991: p. 21) “creatively motivate” teachers who are interested in the advanced uses of educational technology in the language classroom. Teachers’ needs may continue to change and the power of authoring tools will inevitably grow, but it is clear that useful materials have been and will continue to be made and that the teachers involved will go away with a clear idea about how software can be generated, the skills to criticize a variety of software types, their own piece of software to try with their own students and the skills to produce more if they so wish.

NOTES ’ CALIS is obtainable from Frank L. Borchardt, Chairman, Dept. of German, 104, Language Building, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, USA. 2 See the software produced by the company Leading Edge, available through Wida Software. 3 Microtext is available in the IBM format described here from Distance Learning Systems. The BBC version is produced by Acorn. ’ HyperCard is shipped with a Macintosh when you buy it, although the full tutorial and example stacks are now sold as a separate package. 5 The teachers who produced these materials are: Sandy Van der Meer Lieftnick, Xu Dong, Diane Slaouti and Richard Fay.

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R. (1988) CBTProgrumming

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E. (1989) The Design of Computer-Based

HARLAND,

M. (1990) HyperCard:

B. (1968/1989)

assessing

Surrey:

JONES, F. (1991) Mickey-Mouse and state-of-the-art: communicative CALL. System 19, 1-13. MEINHOFF, MOTTERAM, NETHERCOTT, NYNS,

U. (1990) In ANIVAN,

S. (ed.) Language

G. J. (1990) Using a standard S. (1991) Negotiating

R. (1988) Using the computer

SUSSEX, R. (1991) Author languages, aided learning. System 19, 15-27.

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Assisted

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