Thinkings about thinking

Sometimes I like to fall back on old cliches, because they give me a comfort. Yes, they are well worn, but despite their trite and often hackney tone, they do have truth to them, and that is why they survive. I want to start my reflection this way, because I am going to use one now, and also reflect on how this ties into the readings for this week. Here goes: Learning is a process.

Brandl (2002) introduces several ideas towards how learners learn, and how they think about their learning. These two ideas are connected, because we can understand a process toward greater cognition from input and thus a way to understand the output of language. He mentions three approaches towards internet teaching, and ways that language teachers can learn to use these when either building a website designed for language learning, or for finding appropriate materiel for students. These are listed as:

• Teacher determined lessons
• Teacher facilitated lessons
• Learner-determined lessons

Brandl lists the stregnths, and some weaknesses, of these, and it all boils down basically to teacher style and comfort. Teacher determined lessons, via websites, are just that: a teacher designs a program whereby the student has predetermined and pre-judged links to follow. The good point is that the teacher can control the content, and limit "link-following-fatigue" as well as provide a coherent structure, particularly for reading assignments. Teacher facilitated lessons allow students greater freedom of learning, which allows a teacher to point students in a direction, but also focuses in on the idea that, in the end, the only way a learner will learn is if they want to learn. However, here is where the danger of what Brandl calls "difficulties in navigation and cognitive overload" (6) can come into play, and where a teacher needs to be most vigilant. Learner-determined allows the most freedom, and focuses on how the student can "take full charge and responsibility for their outcomes." (7)

This overview gives us some consideration about how we can use the interweb to better teach learners who view this source as the primary destination for all things to be known. Brandl seems to favour learner-determined lessons for this medium, because the great scope of information affords one the best window on the world, and he seems to think this will truly activate self motivated learning the best, of all three options.

Following this assessment of how to use the interweb, we read about the findings of Chun (2001). Chun studies an actual case of learning language, and plots both the effectiveness of the media and the comfort level/interest level of the learners using the tool. She compares two sets of data, where the group using the site (here, where the students learn German, and are given access to an on-line glossary for certain words) and an on-line dictionary; and then the students reading a second text online, but having access only to an online dictionary. Students were asked a variety of questions, including how they compare using online dictionaries and paper form dictionaries.
She finds something interesting, and it is worth quoting at length:

The data show that, when reading two German texts of comparable length on the same topic, (1) learners looked up more words in the internal glossary than in the external dictionary; (2) learners looked up more words when an internal glossary and an external dictionary were available than when only an external dictionary was available; (3) learners did better on the measure of comprehension (recalling main propositions in the text) when they had access to both an internal glossary and an external dictionary (and looked up more words) than when they had access to only an external dictionary (and looked up fewer words). (381)

The key here is that the learners did better when they looked up more words, no matter what the medium. One question for Chun is: what would the scores be like if, instead of a glossary, there was a full on-line dictionary available as they clicked over words? Would they use that more or less often, and would they then comprehend better if they had easy access to definitions?

This makes me think that learning is, after all, a process. Using the internet as a tool is good, but, like any tool, it must be crafted well for its purpose. In my own language learning/teaching journey, I have gone to many sites for both English and Japanese, and some of them are great, some of them are not so well designed, some are better at explaining one thing than another, and so on. Some sites are just so bad, they are funny. I have been exposed to quite a few styles, and I want to be able to trust one or another of them. But how? Who is the authority with enough gravitas to trust over and over? This leads me to believe that, if the interweb is to be used as a tool, then the process of learning should not be completely learner centered, as Brandl seems to support. Rather, because of the maddening array of links, and their rabbit-warren of links away from these to places obscure and strange, that a guided tour of language still should hold sway even when a student has access to a lot of information. We have talked about this before in class: teachers need to be the final arbiter of what is good and what is bad information, and students need to learn to trust this. However, a teacher should be aware that, in order to encourage a learners sense of language owning and empowerment, that they have to let go sometimes, and let learners find resources outside of the strictures of the classroom--- whether one of four walls or one behind a screen.

What I learn, then, is that teaching is a process, too.