LearningForward

Kent Chesnut's technology in education blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot about language learning lately.  I’m learning Spanish slowly… OK, very slowly.  One of the activities in learning a language is writing in it… in this case, writing about learning it.   I’ve pulled the following from my practice wiki.

“Estoy aprendiendo la idioma español.  Hay muchos partes aprender una idioma nueva.  Algunos de los partes inclue

• Vocabulario 
  Necesita saber palabras suficiente to tener un conversación.
• Gramática
  Necesita poder hacer las sentencias correcta.
• Práctica
  Necesita práctica genuina construir competencia in la idioma nueva.  Este práctica incluiria escuchando, hablando, leyendo, y escribiendo.

Se puede aprender vocabulario y gramática solo con las estrategias de memoria.  Tambien, se puede practica escuchando, leyendo, y escribiendo solo.  Pero no se puede practica conversacion a solo.  Necesito un amigo, un amigo que sabe la idioma nueva.  Es muy bueno si un amigo sabe la idioma con mas competencia como ti.  Es muy bueno tambien si un amigo tiene los interéses común con ti.

¿Dondé buscaria para este amigo? 

¿En la familia y los amigos?
¿En internet, posible ‘facebook’ or notesinspanish.com?
¿En el grupo (club) de española?
¿En la programa de computadora?  ¡Me gustaria hacer este programa!”

OK, so my written Spanish is pretty sad.  But the gist of the quote is that you can’t participate in conversations by yourself.  You need a partner… who is at about your level… and it’d be really great if they shared your interests.

But… can a computer be your partner?  Could it be effective in helping you practice conversations? 

Well, I found a program that claims to let you have a conversation with it.  It’s for the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop and it’s called Hablar Con Sara.  Click here to get more information on the activity (OLPC for program).  Essentially, you hold a Spanish conversation with the program.  You type in a sentence, the program responds with audio using TTS (Text To Speech).  Can I use it to help me learn Spanish?  Not really.  But, from what I’ve learned playing with Hablar Con Sara I think that I can describe a program that could be used to effectively practice conversations in a new language.

Program elements:

• Interface
  Like Hablar Con Sara, I believe an interface where the user types and the computer responds with audio can be very effective.  However, the program should encourage the user to speak his sentence and the interface should also include a repeat button (to have the computer repeat the previous spoken phrase).  Spanish subtitles of the spoken phrases could also improve usability.
• Context
  Hablar Con Sara has no apparent context for your conversation.  This is pretty open-ended for language learners.  I suggest building a program with several context-based situations.  For example, a context might be something like going to lunch at a restaurant, going to a theater, or asking for directions on the street.
• Limited Vocabulary
  Along with a context that focuses the conversation into a concrete, and usable, situation that the student might encounter, one could limit the vocabulary that the program uses and provide a vocabulary list as a learning aid for the student.
• Better TTS
  Maybe it’s because there is no context for the conversation… or maybe it’s because I don’t have a big enough vocabulary in Spanish… but I have trouble understanding what the computer is saying.  Although I can adjust the pitch and rate of the TTS voice, I still find it hard to understand.  A better TTS engine (or, if possible, recordings - assuming a very limited vocabulary - might be more understandable).
• More Platform Support
  AFAIK, Hablar Con Sara only runs on the XO laptop.  It would be nice if the program ran on PCs, Macs, and other Linux platforms, too.

 Problems with the proposed program:

• Difficulty
  How hard will it be to construct a reasonable context (pictures, …)?
  How hard will it be to construct a conversation engine (that looks for trigger words in the learner’s  input and builds responses)?
• Constructivism / Constructionism it ain’t!
  Use of the program in language learning could not be considered constructivist / constructionist learning.  One solution to this problem would be to create some sort of toolbox that allows students to create their own context-based conversations with pictures, trigger words, …

Strengths of the program:

• The major strength of the program is that it can empower a student to take more control of her learning.

Does anybody see any merit in this type of program?  Does this type of program already exist and is used in language learning (and I’m just in the dark about it)?  Any comments?

Plan: I’ll try to put together a simple prototype in the next week or 2.  Anybody interested in seeing it?