This dissertation will outline the curriculum and plans to teach a group of 11-13 year old children some French and German. We intend teaching a mixture of fifth and sixth class pupils in the Virgin Mary Boy’s National School in Ballymun, for one hour per week and having a computer-based class on the fourth week of each month. Each child will learn either French or German. Computer Aided Language Learning, from now on referred to as CALL, is a means of aiding the work done in the classroom by the teacher and also a means of independently learning a language along with collaborative learning. We intend to develop this CALL module on the Internet, making it a web-based interactive language-learning tool. It will revise the material the children have been taught in the previous three weeks in class and also provide some exercises to test the children’s ability. Our third year project provides the first three weeks worth of teaching material and the first CALL session. This is our mini-implementation.
To begin with, we’d like to give a brief summary of our objectives and also some information on why we chose a project such as this one.
You may be wondering what we hope to achieve with our project?
We both feel that having a second language at your disposal in today’s world is very important. This fact is quite evident when one considers the multi-cultural and indeed multi-lingual society in which we live today. One only needs to consider the number of different cultures and languages surrounding us in everyday life, to realise the validity of this. Consider for example the booming tourist industry in Ireland, which attracts visitors from around the world, or the number of foreign nationals who now reside in Ireland. One should even consider Ireland’s membership in the European Union, and the multitude of cultures and languages this union represents. While learning French and/or German won’t provide the communicative means to interact with all of these people, it will however open the student’s eyes to other cultures and we hope, will make them less prejudiced towards them.
Knowing personally how difficult the transition between primary and secondary school can be, we felt that a project like ours might make this transition less challenging for some students. It would provide the student with an advantage when he or she commences his or her foreign language class.
The CALL aspect of the course will help the children with their computer literacy or provide them with some, if they have never worked with a computer before. This aspect will also provide some experience for the students in learner autonomy. We hope it will provide useful skills for when they begin secondary school.
So what motivated us to undertake a project such as this one?
We chose the area of CALL for our third year project as we always had an interest in teaching. We saw that we both had a very keen interest in education and educational issues. In fact, we had both contemplated becoming primary school teachers when filling out our C.A.O. forms. We started discussing the idea of doing our third year project together so that we could have both French and German in our curriculum. Through our primary school education, we have seen how computers had a minimal role in education. We would like to bring the computer into focus as a learning tool and develop some courseware, which could be integrated into the school system. The opportunity to actually teach a class is also very appealing to us.
One of us actually had the opportunity to take some French lessons during fifth and sixth class in primary school and felt it was very worthwhile. Most other primary schools don’t offer this activity and we think that it would be a worthwhile project to initiate. Having spent a day in the Holy Spirit primary school observing teaching methods and the general standard the children were at, we had the chance to speak to a teacher who used to offer this type of activity. He told us that the children had really enjoyed learning French and given the option, had always chosen it over football or art. Unfortunately, due to time limitations he had to stop offering French. He added that the girl’s primary school had a similar project that was ongoing. We saw this as an opening to take up teaching French in the school and to offer German as well.
We hope to develop a worthy language-learning tool which could possibly be implemented by primary schools the following year. We also hope that it will keep us up to date in the development of our fourth year project. We will have a new addition to the courseware every month, which will cover the curriculum we will have taught. We can then use the final six weeks allocated to programming our projects, to amend any glitches and implement any suggestions.
Our dissertation will be divided into sections. Section one will contain our literature review. This will give an overview of the theory behind our project. It will start off describing First Language Acquisition, in particular, information on Universal Grammar (UG). It will then go on to talk about Second Language Acquisition (SLA) or Learning. This will include a large section on the role age plays in SLA. We feel this is relevant as we are gearing the project towards children between the ages of eleven and thirteen. We will give four different explanations for the effect age has on SLA. The final topic of discussion in SLA will discuss whether UG is accessed in SLA. The discussion then moves on to learner autonomy and the area of Information Technology (IT) and Autonomy. This will lead us on to a brief background of CALL. The discussion then shifts to a specific area of CALL – Web-based Interactive Learning. Our final topic is about the integration of CALL into the classroom and the role of the teacher.
Section two will hold all of the Course Design information, including needs analysis, and curriculum. The curriculum contains exact teaching plans and class handouts.
Section three deals with Integration of CALL into the classroom. It also gives a description and design of our mini-implementation.
Section four is our Evaluation Methodology. This section holds our evaluation survey and the results. The second part of this section will describe how we will go about evaluating our fourth year design.
Section five is our plan for fourth year activities and project work. We will describe how the pilot programme will be implemented. During fourth year, we will collect data and identify areas to modify for the final version.