Spoken English Zone

1. Spoken English Zone Conversational English Online Wuping Lu School of Education Stanford University 06/07/06

2. Introduction • Sub-community of the second language acquisition community “Exue.” • Focuses on oral English learning • Audience: adult English learners in China. • Learning needs: improve spoken English. • Serves the leaning needs by providing various services and tools: message board, file uploading and downloading, chatting room, blogging, social bookmarking, sub-groups, online dictionary tools, short message/email, and RSS feed subscription.

3. Message Board • Sharing learning strategies/reflections, presenting learning materials in the message body or as attachments, and making request for learning materials/learning strategies. • Three sub-forums/aggregators: Downloading Center, Highly Recommended, English Pronunciation • Can read/write • Use collective intelligence

5. File Uploading and Downloading • learning materials, rarely created by users themselves in a strict sense. • Attached to posts • having different access restriction decided by owners • More active users, the higher levels they can access

6. Chatting Room • both text and voice • English only • either publicly (many to many) or privately (one to one) • More experienced members seems not willing to communicate with less experienced ones

8. Blogging • Journal: users can write text and insert image, flash, video/audio, and links into the journal body. • Photos: user can upload and share their photos with others. • Files: user can upload and share actually any type of files with others. • Buddy List: user can add and delete their buddies • Social Bookmarking: user can book and tag the websites they might want to visit later and share with others • Favorite Websites: users share their favorite websites with others. • RSS Feeds Input: users can input RSS feeds from other websites into their own blogs • Forum Post Input: members can input their own forum posts into the blog and keep posts synchronized at both places. • Comments: the blog allows readers to make comments. Its educational use has not yet been fully explored (05/29/06)

10. Sub-Groups • Launched recently (06/02/06) • Currently, just a few groups • Textual posting • One group called “Friends Learning Group” • More time to see how it evolves and how it can be utilized for educational purpose.

12. Other Services • Dictionary: general dictionary (kind of mush-up between two free web applications), grammar dictionary, and idiom dictionary. • Short message/email • RSS feed subscription

13. Ranking Mechanism • best contents on the top • Ranked by the community administrators • Active members are rewarded e-money and points depending on the amount and quality of posts and uploaded files • With e-money and points, members can access restricted and core contents.

14. Web 2.0 Features • A read/write web platform for services • Harnessing collective intelligence • Emphasizing participation and sharing • User-generated content • Providing RSS feeds for subscription • Using mash-up technology • Keeping continuous changing.

15. Recommendations – Community Building • Clear and Visible Purpose • A short tag line that identifies the community’s purpose: Talk to Learn, Learn to Talk. • A longer mission statement that explains what the community is all about • A distinct visual design that sets a mood and sets the group apart from others • A backstory that tells about the history of the group, and how it came to exist

16. Recommendations – Community Building • Social scaffolding to support a range of roles • Create a visitor center • Instruct the novices • Send email letter confirming their membership and telling them something about how the community works and relevant links, but info should not be too overwhelming • Welcome the novice with gifts. • Educate novices by meeting, special message board topics, and chatting room events to try and practice • Reward the regulars • Get personal: provide a start page (e.g., eBay’s My eBay for a serious eBay user) as a reward, my buddy list, and private gathering places • Empower the leaders • Honor your elders

17. Recommendations – Community Building • Asking for feedback • use email, message boards, chat, surveys, or even interviews to collect data for complaints about technical problems, a wish list for new features, and requests for new gathering places or topics. • During my 6 weeks’ participation, I did not see any of the above happened.

18. Recommendations – Community Building • Leveraging Sub-Groups • the management almost provide its members no group guidelines/strategies • provide an environment and guidelines to facilitate and help purposeful groups to coalesce and flourish.

19. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Use wiki for vocabulary, expressions, and grammar • the learners first have to know what vocabulary and sentence patterns to be used in expressing what they want to express in a specific situation or context. • the threaded posts and comments do not reach a (tentative) final product based on collective intelligence. • Wiki technology can be used to address this problem

20. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Provide audio dictionary for pronunciation • To effectively communicate orally, learners have to pronounce correctly • Current dictionary tools do not have pronunciation function

21. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room • Common scenarios: two members meet and start chatting, soon stop • provide supporting tools to offset the skill gap between more competent members and less competent members so that both parties can benefit from the online chatting. • The management should also provide tutoring tools to voluntary tutors to maximum the tutoring outcomes.

22. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room - Scenario/Topic-Based Skit Resource Center • wiki-based and use collective intelligence • A scenario simulating a real-life situation in a specific social context • One scenario can have different level skits • Different versions to accommodate different number of participants

23. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Add communicative language learning aids into chatting room - Tutoring Support Center • the volunteer tutor might not be pedagogically trained • a collection of user-generated lesson plans using collective intelligence • including learning objectives, content, learning activities, and assessment • ensure at least a bottom line quality of learning outcome, even if the trainer does not have pedagogical expertise specific to the language

24. Student: Guided Conversation Space Shared visual space with learner. Includes images (i.e. menu) to prompt conversation, and drawing and whiteboard tools Video over IP – video greatly enhances ability to learn language Jane Doe • Scenario Progress • You’ve answer 12 of 30 questions. • You have used 5 of the recommended vocab words • Your trainer has made 10 corrections You Said: “Fresh salad has most desire I would say: “Fresh salad is the most desired” Integrated Vocabulary lookup The word is: abundance Abundance: ### Add to vocab Recordable methods to interact with trainer without interrupting flow of conversation Vocab To Use • Hot • Rice • Spicy Please say that again Can you type that word? Vocabulary student is trying to learn

25. Recommendations – Pedagogical Issues • Attract native English speakers to join by providing Chinese learning • Gaming for language acquisition: create a virtual town for realistic simulations of communicative situations • Blog as e-portfolio for assessment • Video/audio annotating for correct feedback

27. More User-Friendly Interface • Contains false clues • There is too much information on the screen and it makes users cognitively overloaded • Added functionality generally comes along at the price of added complexity • Unnecessary features should be avoided • The decorative pictures should be avoided • private text chatting should be separated from public chatting

28. Evaluate the Success of the Changes • Adopting Cothrel (2000)’s incremental value approach • The incremental value can be calculated by comparing the measures before the changes and after the changes in two aspects: participation and learning.

29. Participation Index • Page views • Session time • Community click-through • Registered members • Repeat visits • Frequent visitors • Postings per day/week/month • Read-to-post ratio • Page additions • Page revisions • Peak number of concurrent users (in live events) • Total number of users (in live events) • Audience penetration (if the total size of the target population is known) • Conversion rate from visitors, members, to active members

30. Learning Outcome • Most of participation measures describe what is happening in the community, but they do not tell much about what it means to the learning • The learning outcome should be measured too • Use online survey for members to self-report their learning experiences.

31. Questions?