DEVELOPING

DIGITAL
LANGUAGE
LEARNING
MATERIALS
 ▪ The use of digital technology in language teaching has an
extensive and increasingly diverse history, often divided by
commentators into three phases, or approaches.
▪ 1. RESTRICTED – learners integration with the computer,
largely through the keyboard, with predetermined feedback on
right and wrong answers.
▪ 2. OPEN – greater interactions with the peers and using the
computer for simulations, game-play and extended writing.
▪ 3. INTEGRATED – involving computer mediated
communication, early internet and email use, multimedia
developments and frequent interaction with other students.

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 ▪ The current age is generally referred to as
Information Technologies (ICT) in language
Teaching, and will perhaps be viewed as the
Boarder crossing between the ages of Web 2.0
and Web 3.0 in the wider internet world.

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 ▪ Discussions on ICT in ELT have the
power to divide teachers around the world
As much as the potential to unite them, with
Some movements such as DOGME ELT
(Thornburry and Meddings, 2009) challenging
a perceived increasing side the web is awash
With teachers’ technology blogs and websites
declaring the daily arrival of the new must-use
Tool, site or application.

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 ▪ The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle. Others (e.g. Jenkins, 2006)
with a more constructive approach talk of the
‘cultural competencies and social skills’ needed
to be fully involved in the digital participatory
culture.

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 ▪ Competencies and skills such as
▫ Play – the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings
as a form of problem-solving.
▫ Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities
for the purpose of improvisations and discovery.
▫ Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct
dynamic models of real-world processes
▫ Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and
remix media content.
▫ Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and
shift focus as needed salient details,
▫ Collective intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge
and compare notes with others toward a common goal

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 ▫ Navigation – the ability to follow the flow of
stories and information across multiple
modalities
▫ Networking – the ability to search for,
synthesize, and disseminate information
▫ Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse
communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and
following alternative norms

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 The earliest reported sighting of the adage
‘technology will not replace teachers, but teachers
who use technology will replace those who don’t is
over 30 years ago, yet profound misgivings and
open resistance to technology are still
commonplace among language learners, their
students and institutions which provide learning
opportunities.

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 The reasons for this are complex and go
deeper than binary mud-slinging contrasts
between ‘luddites’ and ‘early adopters’ , or
references to the ‘digital divide’.

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 The key reasons why teachers don’t adopt
technology:

- Extent of the curriculum that needs to be covered during

the year
- Time constraints
- Time required for preparing ICT-based activities
- Availability of quality content
- Lack of in-classroom teacher support
- Lack of participation of teachers in decision making
- Need for professional development

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 We are still some way from the state of
‘normalization’ of technology in language
education, where ‘….the technology is so
integrated into our lives that it becomes invisible’
predicted by Bax (2003, p25)

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 - Individual self-study outside the classroom (e.g.
on a computer at home or in a library
- Group study with a near one-to-one ratio of
students and computers (e.g. in a school’s
computer lab)
- Group study in a classroom with a single
computer and a projected image.

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 The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement (originally
a corporate IT solution, which has filtered into educational
establishments, largely pioneered by US higher educational
institutions), the One Student, One laptop schemes (led by US
educational districts with mass purchasing of laptop
computers), the offers of free ipads or other tablets to
enrolling university students from China to Australia and the
United States, and the increasingly commonplace use of
digital and internet-enabled devices outside the home or
institution all mean that digital language learning tools
location.

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 Another feature of the development of digital
educational (and non-educational approaches in
recent years, is a shift from the concept of creation
of ‘materials’ (as in content created for learners’
use) to harnessing and exploitation of ‘tools’, both
those initially designed for language learning and
teaching, those adopted and adapted from an
alternative intended use.

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 Examples of things which embrace and exploit
the digital delivery mode:

- [Link] (allows users to add content on

an ever-expanding single page.
(based on the idea of an infinite canvas)

- www/.[Link]/hole – the reader

follows the story by descending farther and
farther down the page.
(materials which capitalize on the scrolling
15 page)
 -[Link] – for touchscreen devices on
which users draw unbroken lines across qwerty
keyboard to write words.
(tools which introduce new forms working text)

- Materials and tools which are designed for

interaction via touchscreen (e.g. an interactive
whiteboard, a smartphone, or a tablet device), or
via another form of interaction which does not
involve a keyboard, mouse or digital pen (e.g.
gesture-based computing).

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 ▫ Materials which are based on the ability for hyperlinking
across content l or application, with the users creating
their own pathways through the material, and in some
cases creating their own material – for example interactive
textbooks and content curator tools.
▫ Materials which exploit the potential for layering of
content within a page, l allowing the user to selectively
reveal or hide content – for example interactive
whiteboard software.
▫ Materials and tools which allow embedding of multimedia
l content within a single area – for example blogs, glogs
(www. [Link]), websites and apps.

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 ▪ Materials and tools which allow the user choice over type and l time
of content – for example the use of QR codes in print material to
introduce other media, using for example, www. [Link]
▪ However, the above list is absolutely not intended as a statement of
the inherent effectiveness of such digital language learning and
materials merely because they exploit their digital nature in some
way that ‘traditional’ materials may not be able to.

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 Three key principles are outlined by Twiner et al.
(2010) in relation to effective use of interactive
whiteboards
1. multimodality – ‘The facility afforded by the “new media” for
the easy production and use of a multiplicity of modes of
representation – sound, image, writing, moving image, speech – in
the messageentities that populate the screen’.
2. Second, orchestration – ‘The role of the teacher in encouraging
pupil participation involves the teacher’s “shaping”, or
orchestration, of the numerous modes and resources used to
support learning of planned objectives and unplanned
explorations.’

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 3. Participation – direct participation – the physical
interaction with the resource or material through
touch, typing, mouse, movement or gesture;
‘vicarious participation’ – processing and reacting
to or responding to one of the previous two types of
participation.

FEEDBACK – has a positive impact on student

achievement

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 The art of teaching, and its major , relate to
‘what happens next’ – the manner in which the
teacher reacts how the student interprets,
accommodates, rejects and/or reinvents the content
and skills, how the student relates and applies the
content to other tasks, and how the student reacts
in light of success and failure apropos the content
and methods that the teacher taught.

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 Teacher-created
digital materials
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 - The Networked Teacher – an educational
facilitator, or activator, who has digital
competence and awareness in all areas of
their personal and professional life, from
podcasting to microblogging, from IWB
‘flipchart’ design to digital animation, and
much more besides.

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 -[Link] – incorporated the
practice of ‘flipped classroom’ in mainstream
education , helpful in mathematics teaching and
other content subjects.
- The basic premise is that content knowledge can
be watched, interacted with, and processed by
learner’s before a face-to-face class, in the form of
engaging video presentations and animations,
leaving the class time for hands on practice and
clarification of the principles and procedures.

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 - The challenge for the flipped classroom approach in ELT
then, is engagement of learners with meaningful content
and exposure to language which can feed into effective
discussion, practice and extension in the classroom.
- The effective engagement of learners for common aims
outside the classroom is one of the central educational
principles underpinning the interest in hybrid (or blended
learning).

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 -Some form of Virtual learning environment (VLE)
Moogle, blackboard, video, audio, presentation,
documents, animated content created externally
- There is a need for familiarity among teachers and
learners with the structure, forms and norms of
interaction, and ways of accessing and adding content
but with careful staging of tasks and instruction,
learners can quickly acquire the skills needed to
participate fully in teacher-created activities.

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 - An alternative to teacher content creation
comes in the form of content curation on
platforms such as Curatr, which are
designed for teachers and institutions to
source their content from the internet and
make the engagement wit it interactional,
social and entertaining.

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 - Virtual learning environment (VLE)
1. Creation of class facebook page
However there is also a question of whether
teachers can expect learners to use personal social
networks in this way, or whether users should be
encouraged to set up a different account for
educational involvement, which tends to go against
the idea of tapping into a space where learners are
already using outside the classroom.

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 ▫ Doubts over issues of privacy and exposure to
‘uninvited others’ from outside the class are also
prevalent in the use of virtual worlds for
language learning.
▫ Some teacher practice and experimental
research
- [Link] run by
Nergiz Kern
- Languagelab
- [Link]/wiki/Main_page

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 Another major area of interest for teachers
in creation of digital materials for language
learning is the rise of interactive whiteboard
in classrooms, or as is unfortunately the
case in some schools, as a ‘show pony’ in a
bookable ‘multimedia room’.

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 Three stages of progress in effective integration of
interactive whiteboards in a language classroom
1. Infusion – the spread of the use of technology
into existing pedagogical practice, with learners
as passive observers of the tool.
2. Integration – the technology embedded in the
curriculum and attention paid to how it can
enhance learning goals. Learners are more
active participants.

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 3. Transformation – the spread of the use of
Transformation – the technology adds value to the
learning process. Learners are centrally involved in
an enquiry-based construction of knowledge.

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 One thing the presence of an IWB or any
internet-computer with a projector, opens up
to the teacher is the possibility of bringing
web-based resources into the classroom
either as the main focal point of interaction
or as a demonstration of focus and
procedure for individual or small-group
interaction.

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 Examples of sites
of Teacher-creation
of content

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 1. [Link] – allow the teacher to identify
uses of lexical and grammatical structures within the
texts and create exercises based around them.
2. [Link] – permit the teacher to simply create a
website by dragging, dropping and uploading content
and making it live and accessible within minutes
3. [Link] – guide the teacher through creation
of apps from smartphone and tablet use.
4. Youtube and Vimeo – provide a multitude of options for
developing materials around video clips.

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 5. [Link] – features talking heads interviews with
young people on issues of contemporary importance
6. [Link] – provides short clips from popular
movies organized according to the central theme in each clip.
7. [Link] – has a great collection of classic comedy
clips, all ideal material for prediction, narration, dialogue and
story re-construction activities as well as discussions on how
cinematic comedy has changed.
8. [Link] –inspiring educational
creativity showcased in many TED talks.
9. [Link],com/[Link] - videos with audio commentary
of what is happening on the creator’s screen

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 Student – centered
Digital materials

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 ▪ This has opened up thousands of distinct
possibilities for student-created digital
materials to be used in language learning
and teaching.
▪ The use of individually created,
community-shared writing environments –
blogs, through collaborative writing
environments ([Link]) or wikis.

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 ▪ Newspaper clipping generator ([Link]) – allows
copy-paste of students’ text to create newspaper clippings,
▪ Word-cloud generators ([Link]) – allow learners
to create word pictures and groupings organized by
frequency or to design calligrams and sites which invite
poetical composition from chosen words relating to
emotive pictures ([Link])
▪ [Link], xtranormal, makebelliefscomix –digital
animation (student-centered digital language learning
materials where the area is animation, voice tools and
digital story telling

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 LOOKING TO THE
FUTURE.

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 ▪ The importance of web 3.0 features in language.
▪ Increased use of augmented reality (AR) in language
learning. AR is layering of digital content over real world
content as seen through a digital device such as smartphone
or tablet.
▪ Increased availability to teachers and smaller-scale
publishers of software which allows valid and reliable
automated processing of student-produced speech and text.
▪ Natural user interfaces and gesture-based learning

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