Graham Davies

Read these two articles too:

By Philip Hensher in The Independent, 6 Decemebr 2006:

"If only Estelle Morris had learned French"

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnist...icle2040149.ece

Just what we need to back up our views on the downward spiral of modern foreign languages in secondary education that is having a knock-on effect on higher education.

At the BBC site, 4 December 2006:

"Languages 'should be compulsory': Universities say many pupils do not have the chance to study languages. Heads of languages at dozens of top universities are calling on the government to reverse a decision allowing pupils to drop language study. University College London is even considering making it compulsory for new entrants to have a language GCSE."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6205914.stm

Is this the answer? An O-level in a foreign language, along with English and Maths or a Science subject, was a university entrance requirement when I applied for a university place in the early 1960s, regardless of the subject one intended to study. I recall a friend of mine who studied Aeronautical Engineering complaining about having to get an O-level in French - which took him several attempts. He dismissed French as a "useless" subject - until he got his first job, working on Concorde in Bristol and having to travel regularly to Toulouse to collaborate with French engineers.

Have a look at this video on Teachers' TV:

"School Matters - Lost for Words"

http://www.teachers.tv/video/3420

It's just what we need for highlighting the problems that have been caused by making modern languages an optional subject beyond age 14. The need for languages in exporting goods from the UK is mentioned and the way in which primary school languages are being handled is criticised. The idea that languages are difficult and causes headteachers to promote other subjects so that their schools' positions in the league tables doesn't suffer also features in the video, etc. In other words, everything that we have been shouting about for years!

I particularly like the bit in which a Frenchmen tries to find his way to the station in Birmingham, stopping passers-by and speaking only French. After several failed attempts he eventually finds a young woman who can give him directions in French, but he misses his train - symbolic!

This video should be compulsory viewing for headteachers, businesses, parents and, of course, students considering giving up languages after the age of 14.

You can download the video and save it locally if you register with Teachers' TV. The video is subject to a Creative Archive Licence, which gives you considerable freedom in publicising it and disseminating it. See the above URL for details.

As usual, the waffle and excuses from the Department for Education and Skills in the video fails to impress!

It's nice idea. I already manage a site containing ICT training materials for language teachers:

http://www.ict4lt.org

It's a free site, set up initially with European Commission funding. The most important thing about sharing resources is that, as site manager, you have to keep yourself in the clear regarding copyright. You have to ensure that the resources sent to you are original works that you have permission to disseminate, or that the suppliers of the resources have obtained copyright clearance, or that the resources are in the public domain, or that they are subject to Creative Commons licences, etc. I wrote the following guidelines in reaction to numerous enquiries that my site received:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_copyright.htm

There are numerous sites in my subject area that are sharing resources. Some are listed here on my Favourite Websites page:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/websites.htm

The Times Educational Supplement Staffroom site recently contained a discussion about a resources site that appears to be sailing a bit too close to the wind and managed to upset some teachers:

http://www.tes.co.uk/section/staffroom/thr...#message3218315

I agree with David Richardson. As a former language teacher, I have used many forms of computerised tests. Some aspects of language can be tested easily by computer as there is often a right or wrong answer - lots of scope for this in the language that I taught (German) - but then there are many cases, as cited by David, where different answers may be right or wrong depending on the context.

Recalling vocab is essential in language learning. Vocab can be tested fairly easily: v. the work carried out by Paul Meara and Jim Milton at the University of Wales Swansea. But much of what we test as language teachers requires a good human ear or eye, e.g. in assessing conversational skills and essay writing. There is a module on Computer Aided Assessment at the ICT for Language Teachers website, which discusses the subject in detail and includes a chart on what can and cannot be tested by computer:

http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod4-1.htm

Computerised testing of knowledge of foreign languages is OK as a "quick 'n' dirty" solution in placement testing of large numbers of students, but not reliable enough to be used in more serious assessment situations. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be think otherwise, and silly stories abound of 100% online testing. See this Education Guardian article headed "First subjects get green light for online GCSE assessment":

http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/stor...1891858,00.html

(10 October 2006))

This is typical journalistic hype, suggesting once again that there is an easy way out, i.e. don’t employ human beings, use computers. And OCR should know better too, but I guess they are touting for business and this is the reason why they fed this hype to the press. On closer examination they don't propose doing much more than offering multiple-choice testing of selected areas of knowledge.

Dear All

The experimental “Virtual Strand” of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) 2006 conference has been reviewed by Lesley Shield in the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) online newsletter:

http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/

The aim of the Virtual Strand was to enable people who were unable to travel to the conference venue in Granada, Spain, to participate in the main events of the conference. The main elements of the Virtual Strand were a blog, a wiki, a “blobber” (live text chat) and streamed videos of the keynote presentations and panel discussion. There are some interesting conclusions on how this experiment worked and proposals for its future development. It appears to have worked very well on the whole, with 126 people taking part. The blog and wiki archives and the streamed videos are still accessible:

EUROCALL 2006 blog: http://eurocall2006blog.blogspot.com/

EUROCALL 2006 wiki: http://eurocall2006.wikispaces.com/

Next year’s EUROCALL conference will take place at the University of Ulster, Coleraine:

http://www.eurocall-languages.org

I think Edward's summary is probably right. I am only aware of the situation in teaching modern foreign languages in the US. These bodies are very knowledgable about ICT provision for languages:

CALICO: http://www.calico.org

IALLT: http://www.iallt.org

I guess they have a good general overview too. Try contacting them via their websites.

Regarding the situation worldwide, there was a report, produced jointly by the Center for International Development at Harvard University and the World Economic Forum, that attempted to assess the challenges and realities of the networked world in which we live:

Kirkman et al. (2002) Global information technology report 2001-2002: readiness for the networked world, Oxford, Oxford University Press: http://www.oup-usa.org/reports

Substantial sections of the report are available in PDF format at: http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cr/gitrr_030202.html

An important chapter in the report is entitled "The Networked Readiness Index (NRI): measuring the preparedness of nations for the networked world" (Kirkman et al. 2002). The NRI ranks 75 countries according to their capacity to take advantage of ICT networks, bearing in mind key enabling factors as well as technological factors, e.g. business and economic environment, social policy, educational system, etc. Higher ranked countries have more highly developed ICT networks and greater potential to exploit the capacity of those networks.

The top 10 states were ranked as follows:

1. USA

2. Iceland

3. Finland

4. Sweden

5. Norway

6. Netherlands

7. Denmark

8. Singapore

9. Austria

10. United Kingdom

I've travelled widely in the USA and Canada. What surprised me most is the lack of digital mobile telephone facilities in many states. There are huge areas in many states that are not covered. My digital triband mobile telephone worked in Phoenix, Arizona, but not in Tucson, Arizona, and it didn't work at all in Alaska - although it did work in most of southern British Columbia, Canada. There is hardly anywhere in the UK that does not have digital mobile telephone access these days, and the services offered by British mobile telephone companies are quite sophisticated, including Web access. I have used my mobile telephone in around a dozen European countries, and it has worked OK everywhere, including a restaurant in a salt mine in Poland 300 feet underground!

As for ICT in education, a colleague who works in Pennsylvania and who trains language teachers in schools, tells me that many schools still have relatively slow Internet access and many computer labs in schools are not fully equipped with facilities for playing and recording sound and video. Most of them, she says, do not have adequate facilities for handling the media-rich facilities required for language teaching.

We bury telephone cables too in the UK. Older housing estates still have overhead lines, but the cables leading to the house in which I live, which is 35 years old, are buried under the pavement outside. The whole of our housing estate has 4Mb broadband access, soon to be upgraded to 8Mb.

Electricity supply in the UK is very stable on the whole. Houses in the UK (and in Ireland) have a 13 amp ring circuit, with every plug earthed. When I visit my wife's Canadian cousins in British Columbia we have to make sure that the electric toaster and the coffee machine are not switched on at the same time, otherwise a trip switch will be triggered. I can't remember the last time that this sort of thing happened in my house in the UK.

I've already made my main points on this issue in my previous posting.

See the article in The Independent by Janet Street-Porter on the fall in the numbers of students taking GCSEs in modern foreign languages: http://tinyurl.com/jgmy5

I normally find JS-P's writings very irritating. She's provocative, but I think she has a point when she writes:

Weird then, that about half of our young people are leaving school virtually unemployable. How can they be passing exams, but not really be fit for anything useful that would justify a minimum-wage pay packet? The simple reason is the word "choice". The moment the government decided to make modern languages optional, kids stopped learning them - hence the disastrous decline in the number of people studying French, German and Spanish. Now teenagers learn rubbish like home economics, drama, business and communication systems (whatever that is). We are so politically correct that no one really fails any more - they just get an F or G grade. The hot subjects that have really become popular are statistics and media, film and TV studies - doesn't that just tell you how secondary education these days is geared to being enjoyable and "fun" rather than useful and focused. I would never employ anyone with any qualifications in media studies: they are useless. The moment you give someone aged 14 a choice, they'll generally opt for the easy way out - and who can blame them.

Another article in The Independent is headed "Pupils can choose from 30 languages in online GCSEs": http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article1757282.ece

But when you read it in detail it's all about the online subscription service offered by Rosetta Stone and how one particular headteacher is looking for an easy way out, i.e. don’t employ language teachers but seek a ready-made online solution: http://www.therosettastone.co.uk

Rosetta Stone is hardly state-of the-art CALL. The software and pedagogy date back to the early 1990s. The pedagogy only suits a particular type of learner, i.e. someone who prefers to learn a language through images. I tried it and it just didn't work for me, and I cannot imagine anyone achieving a GCSE just by using Rosetta Stone online. An online subscription costs around 100 pounds for six months - which I think is for one individual learner, but there may be deals for schools. Can you get to GCSE level in a foreign language in six months? I doubt it. It took me, as a highly-motivated 11-16 year-old at a highly selective boys’ grammar school in the 1950s, five years to get to O level in French and three years to get to O level in German. I calculate that for French I had around 550 class-contact hours and for German (which I began learning at the age of 13) around 450 class-contact hours (we had 3 double lessons per week). I passed in both languages, respectively with B and C grades.

Then there is an Education Guardian article about OCR introducing e-assessment of modern foreign languages at GCSE level:

http://education.guardian.co.uk/gcses/stor...1891858,00.html

This is typical journalistic hype, suggesting once again that there is an easy way out, i.e. don’t employ human beings, use computers. And OCR should know better too, but I guess they are touting for business and this is the reason why they fed this hype to the press. Anyway, nothing revolutionary here! The Guardian article states:

Pupils doing the new GCSE will sit computer-based tests involving a mixture of multiple choice and short answers without any need for pens or pencils. Coursework for the new GCSE will also be submitted electronically.

In other words, the same type of tests that those of us who have been in this game for a long time were developing from the end of the 1970s onwards. The new element is that they are online. The article continues:

Marking for the multiple-choice section of exams will be done by computer but moderators will assess longer answers and coursework.

In other words, the same approach to examining that my wife Sally experienced as an Open University student in the 1970s and 1980s. At that time there were computer-marked assignments (CMAs) and tutor-marked assignments (TMAs). CMAs were completed by the student by filling in "blobs" indicating which answers in multiple-choices tests the student thought correct. These were posted to the OU and run through a computer scanner which read the marked blobs and produced a result. TMAs (mainly essays in Sally's choices of subjects) were marked by human beings, i.e. tutors. The new element is that it is done online.

The Guardian article is misleading in suggesting (citing Patrick Craven of OCR) that students can be "fully e-assessed". Some aspects of knowledge and skills in modern foreign languages cannot be tested by computer - which the article admits (see the second quotation above). For a detailed analysis of what is possible and impossible see Terry Atkinson's contribution on computer-aided assessment at the ICT for Language Teachers website, Module 4.1: http://www.ict4lt.org

We discussed this topic in detail before we began work on the DIALANG (diagnostic testing) website at http://www.dialang.org

The DIALANG project brought together experts in testing foreign languages and experts in computer-aided assessment from all over Europe. You cannot test speaking - which is why speaking does not figure in the DIALANG online tests.

In short, there’s no easy way out. Learning a foreign language is hard work and takes a long time.

I wrote this in response to an enquiry regarding the use of Moodle in language teaching in the Modern Languages section of this forum:

I agree with David Wilson about choosing the solution before the problem. Right now VLEs, along with podcasts and blogs are being hailed by the new generation of teachers as the greatest inventions since sliced bread. Think about the pedagogy first, and if it looks as if a VLE will enable you to deliver that pedagogy in a better way then experiment with it. VLEs are only as good as the materials that they contain and the way in which the materials are exploited.

Moodle has quite a strong following among teachers of modern languages. There is a Moodle for Language Teaching forum at:

http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

It contains some useful hints and tips, e.g. a tutorial on using Audacity for the creation of audio files:

http://moodle.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=3545

Recent EUROCALL conferences have also featured Moodle, including at least one Moodle workshop. Look at the EUROCALL conference archives at: http://www.eurocall-languages.org

Anita Pincas, Institute of Education, runs a course in online learning, which I think includes an introduction to Moodle:

http://www.ioe.ac.uk/english/OET.htm

The Open University is introducing Moodle for the delivery of online tuition, including modern languages. Currently it uses its own in-house system, Lyceum. See:

http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=7354

Bear in mind, however, that the Open University’s modern languages departments have no intention of delivering 100% online. Moodle, like Lyceum, is considered only as an add-on (currently audio-graphic conferencing) to the media that it currently uses, e.g. printed materials and recorded audio and video materials, as well as face-to-face tutorials delivered at local colleges. The Open University is a success because of this “blend” and its comprehensive tutor support network. See:

Hampel R. & Hauck M. (2004) "Towards an effective use of audio conferencing in distance language courses", Language Learning and Technology 8, 1: 66-82. Available at: http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num1/hampel/default.html

Like all other VLEs, Moodle is still incapable of delivering the one facility that I regard as the sine qua non of language learning, especially in the beginner stages: namely offering interactive exercises in which the learner can record and playback his/her own voice and hear what he/she sounds like. I have been doing this as a language learner since the 1950s and as a language teacher since the 1960s, beginning with the humble reel-to-reel tape recorder and, more recently, using a variety of CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMs that offer this facility. I picked up a bit of Polish with the EuroTalk series of CD-ROMs in anticipation of a visit to Poland in 2005, having searched in vain for anything on the Web that offered me a listen / respond / playback facility that allowed me to practise getting my tongue round those horrendous Polish consonant clusters.

Try addressing your question to the EUROCALL discussion list at:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

I agree with David about choosing the solution before the problem. Right now VLEs, along with podcasts and blogs, are being hailed by the new generation of teachers as the greatest inventions since sliced bread. Think about the pedagogy first, and if it looks as if a VLE will enable you to deliver that pedagogy in a better way then experiment with it. VLEs are only as good as the materials that they contain, and the way in which the materials are exploited. See my "Lessons from the past, lessons for the future" article:

http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/coegdd1.htm

Moodle has quite a strong following among teachers of modern languages. There is a Moodle for Language Teaching forum at:

http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

It contains some useful hints and tips, e.g. a tutorial on using Audacity for the creation of audio files:

http://moodle.org/mod/resource/view.php?id=3545

Recent EUROCALL conferences have also featured Moodle, including at least one Moodle workshop. Look at the EUROCALL conference archives at: http://www.eurocall-languages.org

Anita Pincas, Institute of Education, runs a course in online learning, which I think includes an introduction to Moodle:

http://www.ioe.ac.uk/english/OET.htm

The Open University is introducing Moodle for the delivery of online tuition, including modern languages. Currently it uses its own in-house system, Lyceum. See:

http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=7354

Bear in mind, however, that the Open University’s modern languages departments have no intention of delivering 100% online. Moodle, like Lyceum, is considered only as an add-on (currently audio-graphic conferencing) to the media that it currently uses, e.g. printed materials and recorded audio and video materials, as well as face-to-face tutorials delivered at local colleges. The Open University is a success because of this “blend” and its comprehensive tutor support network. See:

Hampel R. & Hauck M. (2004) "Towards an effective use of audio conferencing in distance language courses", Language Learning and Technology 8, 1: 66-82. Available at: http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num1/hampel/default.html

Like all other VLEs, Moodle is still incapable of delivering the one facility that I regard as the sine qua non of language learning, especially in the beginner stages: namely offering interactive exercises in which the learner can record and playback his/her own voice and hear what he/she sounds like. I have been doing this as a language learner since the 1950s and as a language teacher since the 1960s, beginning with the humble reel-to-reel tape recorder and, more recently, using a variety of CD-ROMS and DVD-ROMs that offer this facility. I picked up a bit of Polish with the EuroTalk series of CD-ROMs in anticipation of a visit to Poland in 2005, having searched in vain for anything on the Web that offered me a listen / respond / playback facility that allowed me to practise getting my tongue round those horrendous Polish consonant clusters.

Try addressing your question to the EUROCALL discussion list at:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/eurocall-members.html

I agree with David Wilson. The government should have seen this coming. We (teachers of modern foreign languages) gave them enough warnings. But the government's volte face may have come too late. MFL teachers in secondary education have been made redundant, university languages departments have cut down the number of languages that they offer or even closed down, and suppliers of MFL materials have decided to concentrate on other curriculum areas or gone out of business. I just received an email from Granada Learning. They have phased out three of their own interactive multimedia CD-ROMs: En Route, Unterwegs, French Grammar Studio. They are offering new electronic resources but these appear to emanate from other producers and are intended for whole-class teaching with an interactive whiteboard.

Elsewhere in this forum I wrote. I'll repeat it here:

I detest the top-down, control freak mentality that currently pervades all aspects of education. For example, Becta has just issued new guidelines to suppliers of registered electronic resources under the Curriculum Online initiative. The phrase that caught my eye in the new guidelines was: “Becta does not anticipate that any registration products will require removal but please note the stronger requirements for products to be designed for schools and linked to the curriculum”.

I doubt that teachers of my subject area, namely Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), will be particularly impressed by this requirement. Many electronic resources - probably "most" in the case of gifted students who need to be stretched beyond Common European Framework Threshold Level B1 = Higher GCSE - are not specifically designed for schools and linked to the National Curriculum. MFL teachers require a vast amount of authentic sources, as used by mother tongue speakers of the languages that they teach, e.g. text extracts from the national press, and audio and video clips from radio and TV, possibly supplied "live" via websites, in the form of blogs and podcasts and also on CD-ROM or DVD.

In other words, MFL teachers often seek materials that are not necessarily linked to the National Curriculum but those materials which accurately and authentically reflect the languages that they teach and the cultures of the countries in which the languages are spoken. There used to be a large number of suppliers of educational materials of this sort in the UK, and there were also suppliers in Continental Europe and elsewhere, e.g. French-speaking Canada. UK suppliers now tend to concentrate on producing a more limited - and less richer - range of electronic resources which are specifically linked to the National Curriculum, and overseas suppliers are effectively cut out. Is this what was intended by the DfES? Maybe it was part of the government's Grand Plan in killing off Modern Foreign Languages in state schools - which it has effectively achieved by making the study of a foreign language optional beyond KS3. As a result, Modern Foreign Languages as a subject area is increasingly becoming the pursuit of an academic élite. We appear to be returning to the situation that I remember in my schooldays in the 1940s to early 1960s, where only "posh" kids studied foreign languages in order to prepare themselves for careers in the diplomatic corps and international business and just swanning around Europe for pleasure. As a partner in a business that supplies MFL software to schools, I can see a clear trend in our latest sales figures, where most of our trade now comes from independent secondary and prep schools and from specialist state schools, i.e. language colleges and technology colleges.

I think that the new requirement reflects Becta's poor state of knowledge about the ways in which Modern Foreign Languages as a subject area is "different" and underlines the blinkered approach to education that affects this fog-ridden island.

Could it be a combination of these factors? Namely:

1. Teaching demands a lot of energy. Maybe older teachers just "burn out". Even though I switched to higher education in my late 20s - which was a lot less exhausting than secondary education, where my career started - I began to feel very tired at the end of each day in my late 40s and I took early retirement at 51. However, the most decisive factor in persuading me to take early retirement was increasing senior management and government interference and increasing bureaucracy. I was spending less and less time teaching and more and more time on filling in forms, reporting on what I was doing and writing future plans.

2. Younger teachers are probably more up-to-date with National Curriculum and exam requirements and probably make these their main focus. Older teachers probably want to get away from this straitjacket and concentrate on educating their students rather than just getting them to pass exams. When I talk to younger colleagues I often find they they lack a breadth of knowledge about their subject and, sadly, a lack of interest about anything relating to their subject that does not fall within the National Curriculum requirements.

I detest the top-down, control freak mentality that currently pervades all aspects of education. For example, Becta has just issued new guidelines to suppliers of registered electronic resources under the Curriculum Online initiative. The phrase that caught my eye in the new guidelines was: “Becta does not anticipate that any registration products will require removal but please note the stronger requirements for products to be designed for schools and linked to the curriculum”.

I doubt that teachers of my subject area, namely Modern Foreign Languages (MFL), will be particularly impressed by this requirement. Many electronic resources - probably "most" in the case of gifted students who need to be stretched beyond Common European Framework Threshold Level B1 = Higher GCSE - are not specifically designed for schools and linked to the National Curriculum. MFL teachers require a vast amount of authentic sources, as used by mother tongue speakers of the languages that they teach, e.g. text extracts from the national press, and audio and video clips from radio and TV, supplied "live" via websites, in the form of blogs and podcasts and also on CD-ROM or DVD.

In other words, MFL teachers often seek materials that are not necessarily linked to the National Curriculum but those materials which accurately and authentically reflect the languages that they teach and the cultures of the countries in which the languages are spoken. There used to be a large number of suppliers of materials of this sort in the UK, and there were also suppliers in Continental Europe and elsewhere, e.g. French-speaking Canada. UK suppliers now tend to concentrate on producing a more limited - and less richer - range of electronic resources which are specifically linked to the National Curriculum, and overseas suppliers are effectively cut out. Is this what was intended by the DfES? Maybe it was part of the government's Grand Plan in killing off Modern Foreign Languages in state schools - which it has effectively achieved by making the study of a foreign language optional beyond KS3. As a result, Modern Foreign Languages as a subject area is increasingly becoming the pursuit of an academic élite. We appear to be returning to the situation that I remember in my schooldays in the 1940s to early 1960s, where only "posh" kids studied foreign languages in order to prepare themselves for careers in the diplomatic corps and international business and just swanning around Europe for pleasure. As a partner in a business that supplies MFL software to schools, I can see a clear trend in our latest sales figures, where most of our trade now comes from independent secondary and prep schools and from specialist state schools, i.e. language colleges and technology colleges.

I think that the new requirement reflects Becta's poor state of knowledge about the ways in which Modern Foreign Languages as a subject area is "different" and underlines the blinkered approach to education that affects this fog-ridden island.

The EUROCALL 2006 Conference Wiki is now active. Join in the fun at:

http://eurocall2006.wikispaces.com/

The Virtual Strand will become active from noon, 4 September 2006. Further information is posted in the above wiki.

Johne writes:

I wonder if some MFL teachers want it to become an élitist subject. I read one report that one of the consequences of the decline in MFL at GCSE is that it has improved the quality of the people studying it at A level.

There is no question that the decline in numbers at GCSE level is turning modern languages into the élitist subject that it was when I was at secondary school (1953-1961). As a partner in a business that sells software for modern languages I can see clearly from our sales figures over the last two years that it is mainly specialist language colleges and independent schools (prep and secondary) that buy such software. The decline in modern languages in secondary schools is also leading to university languages departments cutting down the number of languages that they offer or closing down completely. My former university's languages department closed.

As for languages being an élitist subject, maybe this will result in better students at A level, but the rest of Europe seems to be able to come to terms with a languages-for-all policy in schools.

Andy writes:

Fair point David but I think it is probably best if I separate out the distinct areas of this forum in the future. I find it more than a little difficult to push the use of it amongst teachers given its current contents.

I've recommended the Education Forum to a number of friends and colleagues but many of them have got back to me saying that it just seems to consist of a mass of never-ending exchanges on conspiracy theories, especially JFK, and then they decide that it's not for them. I think we need to make a clear distinction between those parts of the Forum that focus on teaching and learning issues and educational practice and management and those that focus on conspiracy theories etc. I often have a quick look at the Forum to see what current topics are under discussion and I don't even bother to log in when all I can see is JFK etc.

Coming back to education, I share David's view:

I'm no *great* fan of LMSs myself, but, at first reading, Blackboard's claims do seem a bit absurd

EUROCALL 2006 will take place at the University of Granada, Spain, 4-7 September:

http://www.eurocall2006.com/

But if you cannot attend in person why not join the Virtual Strand? See the following forwarded message from David Barr, University of Ulster at Coleraine. I'll certainly be joining the Virtual Strand as, due to illness, I cannot fly to Granada.

From David Barr:

Cannot come to EuroCALL in Granada this year but would like to get the

"conference experience"?

Why not take part in the VIRTUAL STRAND? It's for people like you who can't

come to Granada or who'd like to know more about the EuroCALL conference.

Can come to EuroCALL in Granada but would like to communicate with people

who can't make it?

The VIRTUAL STRAND is for you, too. You can log in from the conference site

to read and comment on the conference blog as well as to chat to or to

exchange

messages with colleagues who are logging in from anywhere in the world.

This is the first time you'll be able to join the conference from wherever

you are. Since we're still finding out about the best way to give you the

'virtual conference experience', the virtual strand this year will be

limited to the following activities:

The PLENARY SESSIONS are going to be video-recorded and you'll be able to

watch them online at any time during the conference. If you're a member of

EuroCALL, you'll also be able to watch them after the conference because

they'll be archived.

There'll be a CONFERENCE BLOG written by people who are at the conference.

They'll be telling you about the presentations they've been to, the social

activities and even about the venue itself, and you'll be able to join in

the discussion by posting comments and questions to the conference blog.

As well as this, there'll be a BLOBBER that will allow you to talk (in real

time text and probably also in voice) with people at the conference and

others who are attending virtually.

Want to know more? Why not come to the PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP for the

virtual strand? You'll have the opportunity to find out how to use blogs and

the blobber and you'll be able to try out some activities using them. You

may even get some ideas about how you could use this sort of tool in your

own classes!

The workshop is FREE! That's right, you don't have to pay anything to take

part in this workshop.

Because it's all online, you can join the workshop from wherever you are in

the world. Anyone who's in Granada can come to a computer room for the

workshop, but if you login from home or work while the workshop's running,

you'll get exactly the same information and practice AND you'll be able to

chat with people who are experiencing the face-to-face conference and find

out more about what it's like.

We WILL need to know if you're going to join us, so that we can make sure

you get all the information you need in time for the pre-conference

workshop. We’d therefore like you to let us know by filling in the form at

http://www.eurocall2006.com/virtual.htm.

The virtual strand promises to be an exciting and fun experience - do join

us! We're looking forward to meeting you!!

Best wishes

David Barr

___________________________________________

Dr David Barr

D042C, School of Languages & Literature

University of Ulster

Cromore Road

COLERAINE

BT52 1SA

Tel: 028 7032 3085

Fax: 028 7032 4962

Re: "self censorship":

I tend to restrict what I say on the Internet because it is too public. It's too easy these days for a nutter who disagrees with you to find out who you are, your telephone number, email address and street and house number. I have read warnings on various school and university websites, for example, about the dangers of setting your email system to send "out of office" replies while you are away. If you subscribe to mailing lists the "out of office replies" can hit the whole list. This is happening right now in one teachers' list to which I subscribe as it is the holiday period in the UK. It is then possible for a criminal to identify roughly where someone lives from some email addresses, e.g. those used by school teachers and university lecturers, which indicate the name of the institution: thus "soton.ac.uk" is clearly Southampton University and it's probable that anyone who uses this address lives within a 30-mile radius of the institution. All you need to do is look up their name in an online telephone directory for the UK (which is organised geographically) and you stand a good chance of finding out their telephone number and address and then you can go round to their house and nick their new plasma screen TV. Search on the Web under keywords such as "out of office burglary" and you'll find that this activity is on the increase.

I can also point to the true story conveyed to me by a friend who told me that she was overlooked for promotion because her head of department disagreed with the controversial views she had expressed in an online forum and which were considered to have painted the school in a poor light. I found references to similar stories on the Web, including one in which a teacher got her own back by reporting the school to a "copyright bounty hunter". The school had installed a number of software packages on its network without purchasing the appropriate licences and was whacked with a substantial fine.

Cruel world, eh?

David writes:

As you can imagine, this style of course design only works if you are willing to trust the teachers and Internet tutors to rely on their professional judgement in doing the job of teaching and examining - the whole pedagogical environment just doesn't lend itself to the more mechanical, centrally-controlled systems that have been the only permitted norm in the UK for the last 22 or so years. Or, to put it another way, if you try to replace teacher and examiner professionalism with central micro-management, it's no wonder you run into problems with coursework.

A very good point. And I would home in on the word "trust". Back in the good old days we language teachers were trusted - after the disappearance of the peripatetic oral examiner - to conduct oral examinations ourselves with the students we had taught and to grade them appropriately. On the whole I think this system worked OK. I never gave an unfairly low or high mark, and I know all my colleagues tried to be as fair as possible to the candidates. Now it's all centralised, and there's an alarming trend to try and mechanise the whole teaching and examining process. It won't work...

I have never had a very high opinion of coursework, mainly because there is always the possibility that students can get someone else to do the work for them or lift stuff from the Web and paste it in. Over the past 12 years I have worked as an external examiner for four different UK universities. In recent years I have noticed an increasing trend for there to be a mismatch between coursework marks and examination marks, and several students have been caught by JISC's Turnitin plagiarism detection service. Cheating and plagiarism are not new phenomena, of course. The Internet has just made it easier to cheat and plagiarise. In my subject area, modern foreign languages, we rely heavily on oral examinations. GCSE oral examinations used to be face-to-face, but now the oral work is often recorded - not a good way of examining in my opinion.

I am a great believer in the face-to-face interview. When I was a teacher in higher education we used to interview most of our prospective students in the languages that they intended to study. It was worth the effort. I could grade a student's oral performance in German in around 10 minutes maximum. There was often a mismatch between the grades we awarded in the face-to-face interview, schools' projected A-level grades for their students and/or the actual A-level grades achieved. I have also examined many MPhil and PhD students. It is usually clear in the first 10 minutes of the viva whether or not the candidate knows his/her stuff.

The BBC's "Excuse my French" series makes fascinating viewing. Last night's broadcast showed the celebrity students trying to achieve different tasks that had been set for them, namely tasks reflecting their interests and careers. You can tell immediately who is succeeding and who is failing. I guess that what I am saying is that coursework, task-based learning etc is good if the tasks are thought out sensibly and if the possibilities of cheating or plagiarising are minimised. Cheating in a face-to-face oral examination in a foreign language is well nigh impossible. "Parroting" is a possibility, but it's easy to spot.

My wife did an OU degree in the 1970s/80s. Cheating was not unknown but I think it was relatively rare. The OU could, of course, never guarantee 100% that Computer Marked Assignments and Tutor Marked Assignments were the work of their registered students. However, there were also regular group sessions at the local FE college, telephone interviews with tutors, summer schools and traditional examinations - and then mismatches could be spotted. I believe the OU was rather good at this.

Some chat rooms should be banned. My younger daughter had a bad experience when she was studying Spanish at university. She logged into a Spanish language chat room under an alias in order to practise her Spanish. It went OK for a while and then a cyberstalker started to harrass her, continually asking her to reveal her real name and email address, but of course she refused. Then the cyberstalker began to threaten to commit suicide if she did not respond. I didn't know this was going on. When she finally told me and asked for my advice, I said: "Get out of the chat room and let him top himself". She never joined a chat room again.

I can't see that this forum falls into the category of fora that might be banned - although it's had its unpleasant moments, I guess. I know that chat rooms are already banned in many UK schools and a block has been put on blogs and podcasts in some schools, especially those with RSS feed facilities. It's a pity that a few nasty people are spoiling the use of the Internet for education.

One of my elder daughter's (female) friends joined the police and rose to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector. She worked for a while for a department investigating paedophile websites and chat rooms in which paedophiles were known to operate. She would often log in, posing as a child and attempting to trap sexual predators. It was an unpleasant period in her life and she's now glad to be working in a different unit.

There is an active group of teachers of foreign languages who use Moodle - although it should be emphasised that most of them are EFL/ESOL teachers rather than teachers of French, German Spanish, Japanese, Chinese etc.

EUROCALL conferences in recent years have featured Moodle presentations and workshops. There will will be Moodle presentations at this year's EUROCALL conference in Granada, Spain.

http://www.eurocall-languages.org

There is an active Moodle for Language Teaching forum is at

http://moodle.org/course/view.php?id=31

However, I must say that I am disappointed with what I have seen so far in VLEs, especially for foreign languages. A good deal of the learning materials are hardly an advance on the multiple-choice and gap-filling quizzes that we were producing on the BBC Micro in the 1980s. But just because these quizzes are on the Web they are greeted with more enthusiasm than they deserve. Creating good learning materials in a VLE is just as difficult as creating good materials in an offline environment, using established authoring tools, with the added problem that we (as teachers of foreign languages) still haven't cracked the problem of setting up interactive pronunciation and oral role-play exercises (e.g. as found in the EuroTalk and Auralog series of CD-ROMs), i.e. listen / respond / playback activities. Read the Moodle forum correspondence on the above page and you'll see that this topic keeps coming up and no one appears to have offered a foolproof solution.

The Open University has it's own VLE, Lyceum, which is used for audio conferencing with registered OU students. It seems to work well. See:

Hampel R. & Hauck M. (2004) "Towards an effective use of audio conferencing in distance language courses", Language Learning and Technology 8, 1: 66-82. Available at: http://llt.msu.edu/vol8num1/hampel/default.html

The OU, of course, uses online deilvery only as a backup to the materials it delivers by other means - which is probably the most sensible approach.

But you must treat Wikipedia with caution - as you should treat any source of information. There was an article in The Daily Telegraph of 19 June 2006, in which the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, was reported as warning students not to rely on it as a reference source. Apparently, he receives around 10 emails per week from students complaining that they got low grades for citing inaccurate information that they found in Wikipedia. As he put it succinctly: "For God's sake you're in college - don't cite the encyclopedia."

I edited the Wikipedia entry on Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) some months ago as it was hopelessly inaccurate and incomplete. A few weeks later, part of my edited text was removed, so I edited it back again. Since then, my text has been left more or less untouched, the article has been added to by other people (unknown) and it's in reasonable shape now. I include links to other sources of information on CALL, so at least people can make comparisons.

As a retailer of educational software, I am not impressed by city academies so far. Few appear to be spending their money on educational software and we have recently had to take one city academy to the small claims court for failing to pay a trivial £30 bill that was overdue by many months. It cost them over £100 pounds in the end, which is not exactly a model of good financial management.

In Northern Ireland it used to be customary for "God save the Queen" to be sung at closing time in pubs in protestant areas of the city and "The Soldier's Song" (the Irish national anthem, Amhrán na bhFiann) to be sung in pubs in catholic areas of the city. In the city centre, which is mixed, no anthem was sung - the bouncers just ushered you politely to the door. I have not heard either anthem being sung at closing time in pubs in recent years.

Anyway, isn't "God save the Queen" the anthem of the UK and not the anthem of England? Scotland sings "Flower of Scotland", Wales sings "Land of my Fathers" ("Mae hen wlad fy nhadau") and Scottish and Welsh football supporters boo when "God save the Queen" is sung. Northern Ireland is schizophrenic. What is England's national anthem?

I think "God save the Queen" is a boring song. The French national anthem is an inspiring piece by comparison - remember the scene in the night club in the film "Casablanca" when the band plays "La Marsellaise" in response to the German soldiers singing "Die Wacht am Rhein"? Great stuff! "Die Wacht am Rhein", however, was not and is not the national anthem of Germany. It's an old patriotic piece. Should we not adopt "I vow to thee my country" (written by Gustav Holst, a German), which was sung at the wedding of Charles and Diana and at Diana's funeral? It's also the hymn of the rugby World Cup.

Did you know that the Irish rugby team sings two different national anthems, depending on where they are playing? Rugby, unlike football, has an all-Ireland team. The protestant members of the team from the six counties have a problem singing "The Soldier's Song", although it is sung when Ireland plays in the 26 counties. Elsewhere the team sings another anthem, "Ireland's Call", written in 1995 by Phil Coulter - which keeps the protestants happy.

My wife, a protestant from the six counties, was hesitant on one occasion when we were visiting Dublin about standing for "The Soldier's Song" in a pub at closing time. Being half-Welsh and a pragmatist, I had no such hesitation. As I said to her at the time: "Do you want to stand up and walk out or remain sitting and get thrown out?" (The bouncers were big lads.)

By the way, you may hear Welsh rugby supporters singing "God save the Queen" in Welsh. The words, repeated over and over again, are: "Twll din pob bloody Sais", which means "Arseholes to all bloody Englishmen".

Final note: The Sun attempted to translate our national anthem into German for the benefit of England supporters visiting Germany for the World Cup. Their version read "Gott speichern unsere liebenswürdige Königin". For the non-Germanists amongst you, "speichern" means "to save" in the sense of saving a file or program on hard disk, CD-ROM, etc. Babel Fish triumphs again!

See: http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006180295,00.html

I agree 100% with David: Start with the pedagogy and then ask yourself how the technology can improve it.

I hate sites that incorporate irritating Flash animations. The BBC Jam site is one of these:

https://jam.bbc.co.uk

If this is a "skip intro" button I hit it straight away. If not, I exit the site.

When I downloaded and installed Flash 8.0 in order to access BBC Jam it made a mess of my browser. I couldn't access any site that incorporated Flash, and the browser just crashed. It turned out to be an obscure problem associated with running Flash 8.0 on certain kinds of DELL computers. I solved the problem by uninstalling Flash 8.0 and downloading and installing a different version from a French site!