CALICO 97

[ Conference Reports ]

Content! Content! Content!

June 23-27, 1997
West Point, New York

Report by Philippe Delcloque, University of Abertay Dundee, with additional material by Matthew Fox, Southampton Institute and Jenny Parsons, CTI Modern Languages, University of Hull.

Pre-conference Workshops

As has happened for many years at CALICO, the event started with 2 days of Pre-Conference Workshops.

There was a pre-conference session for first time attendees - a regular CALICO feature, much appreciated by this year's new participants. The session was chaired by Frank Borchardt whose reference to linguists who 'discovered technology and ruined their careers' struck a chord with some there. One aim of the session was to equip those who were complete novices with a 'critical eye' to cast over what they were going to be seeing at the conference. Most, though by no means all, participants were from the USA, and it was interesting that many issues such as technophobia in colleagues, lack of higher degree provision for linguists who wished to combine further study with technolgy, and the tendency of innovative younger institutions to outshine old prestigious universities in the language learning technology arena, are live issues also in the UK.

Other pre-conference workshops included a session led by Andr� Oberl� (University of Winnipeg) to guide the uninitiated in their "First steps in authoring interactive CALL materials". This was based on an Exercise Generator for IBM compatibles called CALLGEN, but Apple Mac users were also provided with a Mac equivalent. Scott Hart and R Kent Wood from Utah State University were presenting courseware authoring using the new Digital Video Disc (DVD) media system. There was a short workshop on using Powerpoint for "Presenting your great ideas with technology", presumably for novices. A two part Web workshop was run by Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Virginia Commonwealth University), who is well known for running the Live Chat facility as part of the activities of the �Second Language Acquisition & Technology� Special Interest Group. She provided a basic introduction to the Web followed by a promotion of the excellent FLOWW project (Foreign Languages on the World Wide Web).

There was a parallel event organised by CALICO�s Web Master, Carolyn Fidelman, comprising a series of closed workshops to do with the Face to Face Project (see later), with presenters such as Eric Keller and Odile Ledru-Menot.

Poster Sessions/Courseware Fair

In the afternoon of the second day, we had Poster Sessions and the Courseware Fair. Philippe Delcloque was presenting some of the work of the CALLIFAT Project (courses in French, German and Spanish, authored in Speaker) and Matthew Fox was demonstrating the Language Learning Network, a customised business language course designed primarily for distance study, developed at Southampton Institute. There was an excellent
new product, SpeechWorks, elaborated by Linda Ferrier from Northeastern University (Boston) and Lawry Reid from Dean College (Franklin). It is a cross
platform Pronunciation Tutor for North American English, with advanced and unique features which will soon be reviewed in the European CALL literature. Walter Oliver from California State University/San Bernardino exhibited a website offering a novel game-based role-playing project for intermediate students of French and German, in which students collaborate to solve a murder mystery using email, a list and a home page. Other exhibits of note included the Camille French for Specific purposes CDROMs, presented by Delphine Reni� of the University of Ottawa, and Web Course in a Box, an integrated approach to setting up course web pages, by Robert Godwin-Jones (Virginia Commonwealth University) whose paper on the topic is mentioned later.

At the end of the 2 days of pre-conference workshops, we were treated to a Welcome Cruise on the Hudson River hosted by the organiser, Colonel Dr Stephen La Rocca. The excellent food, local beer and wine blended well with the idyllic surroundings in the light summer breeze. The human networking exercise was just beginning.

Keynote Speeches 1 & 2

The conference started in earnest the next day when the pillar of CALICO�s recent past, its Executive Director for the last time, Frank Borchardt from Duke University introduced the Captain who is in charge of Cadet Training at West Point. The energetic officer with an inimitable style reminded us that every cadet is required to take 2 semesters of foreign language before graduating, a model which could usefully be applied elsewhere! Steve La Rocca then introduced the first Keynote Speaker, Dean of Studies, General Fletcher M. Lankin, Jr. The General�s measured approach to the introduction of effective IT into language learning impressed everyone as did his slides which had departed from the traditional "blue wizard" background of Powerpoint! We were reminded that the Thayer collection of military literature is mostly in French, largely because the British would not supply the newly independent USA, witnessing the historic links of the Academy.

Starting with the Mark Twain quote �All you need is ignorance and confidence; the success is sure� the General embarked on a discussion of the three goals which he felt should be pertinent to CALICO:

Technological and Information Dominance
Creativity (Flexibility and Adaptability)
Cultural Perspective including mutual respect
West Point has always had a high technological base in support of language learning. He felt it would continue to do so but made the following predictions:
"Smart" classrooms won�t work!
Classrooms without walls will (with some modifications)!
The Internet must be harnessed for education and it won�t be easy!

He felt that what we need is content (the conference theme), not authoring systems! I�m sure Graham Davies and many on the EUROCALL discussion list would agree with him! He felt �the biggest gains can be made by developing course materials and infrastructure to support out-of-classroom learning�. Many of us, it is fair to say, were struck by his persuasive and inspirational contribution.

The other Keynote speech that day was given by Seth Schneider from Multilingual Computing. Seth confessed to being a technology nerd, and in a light-hearted presentation over lunch managed to warn us against undertaking work without looking at the need for it, to encourage us to develop technology which is appropriate and for which the time is right, and to point to the barriers between industry, government and education which lead to duplication of effort.

Conference Papers

Among the first of the conference papers, Eric Keller�s presentation on Automatic Intonation Extraction and Generation for French dealt with his Speech Synthesis project led from the University of Lausanne. He is also the author of the speech analysis program for the Apple Mac called Signalyze. A subsequent paper on speech synthesis work was given by his colleague Brigitte Zelner, who outlined the importance of the psycholinguistic dimension in Improving speech fluency in French through Psycholinguistics principles, a joint paper with Carolyn Fidelman, Northeastern University.

There was an interesting Intelligent CALL contribution involving a team of three: William DeSmedt from Amber Productions, Donald Loritz from Georgetown University and Lance Miller from Science Applications International Corporation. It described the integration of three established ICALL/NLP systems into an environment for authoring instructional materials.

The paper by Allen Rowe and Scott Hart (Utah State University) provided an insight into the amazing storage potential for DVD. This new standard is set to replace CD ROMs just as they are becoming established as a medium, and will revolutionise our ability to store video and to access it in a non-linear fashion. A demonstration later in the day aimed to provide sufficient information for participants to begin developing courseware for DVD.

One of the most original and yet simple technological innovations on show at CALICO was WELLS: Web Enhanced Language Learning (Edwin Kuipers, Duco Dokter, and Alessandro Allodi, University of Groningen, The Netherlands), a Java application which gives you desktop access to web-based language tools without having to access them through your browser. The software allows automatic access to established web-based language tools such as dictionaries, parsers, morphological analysers and trims down the content to a purely textual form, thus giving very rapid access (www.let.rug.nl/~glosser/wells).

On Thursday, second day of the conference proper, there was a report on the Face to Face Project by Carolyn Fidelman (Northeastern University), Joel Goldfield (Fairfield University) and Warren Roby (Washington State University). This Project deals with the incorporation within a Communicative Language Learning framework of an acquisition strategy based on a nonverbal authentic (and largely cultural) component.

The paper by Robert Godwin-Jones (Virginia Commonwealth University) offered an extremely clear and practical demonstration of a simple web-authoring template called Web in a Box, which allows courses to be authored and implemented by non-expert programmers. Although the end product is a purely text-based language course, the software helps develop relatively painlessly interactive exercises, web chat modules and student home pages which can be used to enhance the broader learning experience (www.madduck.com/wcbinfo/web.html).

One of the US Military Academy sponsored sessions was on Echos, the Speech Recognition Project for French Intermediate Learners, presented by Indeborg Kohn and Steve La Rocca from a teachers� perspective.

A panel discussion of Models of Faculty Development and Involvement in CALL was led by Claire Bradin (Michigan State University), Nina Garrett (Wesleyan University), Sue Otto (University of Iowa), Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Virginia Commonwealth University) and Mark Lewis (Regis College).

In EWeb and HomePage Maker: Making It Easier to Develop Contents on the WWW Daxing Chen (University of South Carolina) gave an account of the web template materials he has developed in the same vein as Bob Godwin-Jones. His upbeat presentation explored the pedagogical issues as well as practical implementation questions regarding the development of web-based courses.

For Philippe, the gem that one always expects to find at any conference was the paper given by Linda Ferrier from Northeastern and Lawry Reid from Dean College on the Efficacy of Computer Assisted Accent Modification. The somewhat unusual terminology used to describe an American English Pronunciation Tutor comes from Linda�s background in Speech Pathology, which also accounted for some of the empirical experimentation which the Courseware and its tracking facilities were subjected to.

In Effects of Multimedia courseware on teaching methods and learning styles, by Jack and Monique Burston (Monash University, Australia) Jack described how the intrinsic media richness of a sociolinguistics course could be enhanced by developing the storage and access of materials for the course. Using the resource database for lecture presentation had been evaluated and the presentation dealt with the expected and unexpected outcomes of this evaluation. It is planned to make an expanded data resource, Vari�t�s de fran�ais, available to colleagues at cost, and to create a prototype instructional shell.

The presentation by 3 MIT staff, Multimedia as an interactive narrative environment for learning, promised better than it delivered, a Show & Tell resuscitating A la Rencontre de Philippe and associated LaserDisc or Video products. This was meant to be a discussion of the place of narratives in CALL but, despite exceeding their allocated time, the presenters seemed to fail in putting the message across in any theoretical sense. The fact that sessions are no longer chaired at CALICO conferences and that the temperature in the non air-conditioned packed room was close to 100F did not help!

Debra Hoven, (University of Queensland, Australia) gave a paper entitled Media as Content: Using the new media to teach language and learning strategies. Her presentation explored issues behind distance learning of Indonesian for intermediate learners. Along with printed and video materials, learners were encouraged to use the web and discussion lists as well as e-mailing their tutor for feedback on their work. The paper looked at practical measures for ensuring learner participation and that participants have access to diverse and stimulating materials.

Jos� Noijons from CITO in Holland was presenting his work in Testing Multimedia Language Courses: Function, Format and Flexibility at the start of a �North American Tour� paid for by the US Government! Jos� has become one of the world�s specialists in the use of CALL for Language Placement and Diagnostic Testing. He gave an insight into the impending curriculum revolution in the Netherlands, with post 16 education focusing far more on information technology. The demands of the changes require, for the teaching of English at least, a significant computer-based assessment component. The adoption of adaptive testing will render the process far more efficient, it is claimed. But the demands on resources will be enormous. Is this the shape of things to come in the UK?

Keynote Speech 3

It was now time to return to where most attendees were staying, the excellent Thayer Hotel, based on the USMA campus overlooking the river Hudson, where Special Interest Group Meetings and the Banquet were taking place. The Keynote after the meal was given by Ali Moeller. The speech touched on issues of authority, power and control in the communicative and technological classroom, and the concept of disequilibrium. Heavy going for after dinner, perhaps, but ending on a note which most there appreciated - �technology is cool; teachers are cooler�.

Conference papers (continued)

The last day, Friday, included a session covering some Toolbook Grammatical Exerciseware Templates which allowed object manipulation on screen to teach the use of pronouns: Manipulative Interactions to Enhance Learning Grammar by Robert Mee from Delta College and Neil Toporski from Lehigh University.

Janine Spencer & Harlan Wallach (Northwestern University) gave a paper on Le Fran�ais Internautique, Second-Year French Course on-line. Le Fran�ais Internautique is an established intermediate French course at Northwestern University. It has been converted for use on the Web and allows for the distribution of multimedia grammar revision materials beyond the confines of a single language laboratory where it was originally scheduled. It serves as a model for campus wide distribution of learning resources - but at a cost in terms of conversion and restrictions in copyright.

An Empirical Study of TELL in Elementary College French by Laurel Willingham-McLain and Bonnie Earnest-Youngs (Carnegie Mellon University) was one of the few presentations at CALICO giving results from an empirical research. The project compared the results of students who had one taught class replaced with a single supervised lab session with a conventionally taught control group. Their initial findings showed that, in their approach at least, student performance is not affected by such a change in the learning experience. Their detailed study collected both qualitative and quantitative data and should over the coming months provide some interesting information on motivational and performance issues in technology-mediated learning. The increasing tendency towards empirical studies in CALL must be welcome as long as we have a clear definition of what we are able to put to the test without running the risk of �impressionistic findings� based on poorly designed qualitative methods. CMU fortunately has much experience of research methods in other fields.

Content with your content? was the title of an excellent presentation led by Mary Ann Lyman-Hager (Pennsylvania State University), a member of the new CALICO Executive. Mary Ann�s work is outstanding in design terms and in terms of its integration of the audio dimension. She also explained that her Toolbook templates could be used under license by other institutions, a point that is unlikely to have been missed by most of her large audience.

The supported distance learning work carried out at Southampton Institute in the UK was presented by Matthew Fox. It was Matthew�s second consecutive appearance as a CALICO presenter and his talk on Beyond the technocentric- Developing and Evaluating Content-Driven, Internet Based Language Acquisition Courses was well attended and received.

Rika Yoshii and Alastair Milne of California State University outlined A Diagrammatic Reasoning Tool for Learning the English Article System. They have developed an interesting novel approach to reasoning processes in the acquisition of English articles based on diagrams and conditional interactions.

In his presentation on the CALLIFAT project, Philippe Delcloque started with a sketch of the history of CALL and ended with Gagnepain�s Th�orie de la m�diation. He indicated how the four levels of mediation could provide a framework for examination of questions about technophobia and gender differences in the use of technology.

Another paper which showed a rigorous research approach often lacking at CALL conferences was Development of a Computer-Assisted Learning System for Japanese Speech Perception by Tsuneo Yamada (National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan) and Reiko Akahane-Yamada

(ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories, Japan). The time allocated for the presentation did not allow the level of detail of the project to be properly explored, but this major undertaking will be relevant to anyone interested in pronunciation tutoring at a highly theoretical as well as practical level.

Exhibition

The conference Exhibition was split between two areas this year, which tended to lessen its impact. Exhibition �prime time� slots were timetabled when no papers took place, with free refreshments to encourage participants to attend. There were about 20 exhibitors, with many hardware vendors amongst the software publishers. The only exhibitor from the UK was the TELL Consortium, whose range of language learning software attracted much interest from teachers in the USA and Canada.

Thanks go to Steve La Rocca and his staff at USMA for a well organised event, to the everpresent energetic and competent technical director, David Herren and his team, and to Eleanor Johnson and Laura Rhodes of CALICO for the administrative arrangements. Finally, thanks are due to the large scholarly figure, who has helped build CALICO into a prominent CALL organisation, Frank Borchardt.

STOP PRESS: The University of South West Texas has just been announced as the new CALICO Host Institution and Robert Fischer as the new CALICO Executive Director.

We all wish CALICO well and look forward to returning in the not too distant future.