This is the way I want to teach, the software I want to develop

I am a software developer with a Masters in TESOL.

This document is a description of language learning software and methodologies which I am currently developing. I am looking for others who are working on similar projects and would like to exchange ideas and brainstorm in this area. I’m particularly interested in implementing these ideas for learners of English in businesses in the Berlin area.

I’m interested in the concept of “professional streaming”: not in the sense of recording everything that you do, but in the sense of being able to record and socially share in an effective way specific items in your personal and professional life, so instead of just generic tweets and blog posts and pictures,

you can easily record

…as you teach:

• students’ grammar errors
• students’ pronunciation errors
• vocabulary words

…as you learn languages:

• phrases you want to remember
• grammar rules you want to learn
• questions you have

…as you prepare class material:

• a screen cast explanation of a grammar rule
• an article you write about teacher training
• a grammar explanation as text and graphic
• an audio recording

…as you read:

• quotes, i.e. what you underline, making it available to others
• thoughts on the text
• book references
• software/tool/service references
• vocabulary
• flashcards (things you not only want to be able to find again but you want to be regularly tested on until you know them)
• books you read about and want to buy

…as you go about your day:

• events that you know are happening in your area
• language schools, businesses, contacts that you have
• ideas you have about lesson activities

The idea is that these items exist online in the form of Lego blocks that you and others can use to build: class lessons, articles, how-to articles, etc. Other people can subscribe to all or some of your published items, e.g. someone might want to subscribe to only events in the Berlin area that you publish, or they subscribe to all grammar flashcards that you publish.

You and others can later optionally tag each item with meta information to make it more discoverable and useful.

You and others can vote each item up and down so that it’s relative importance in a group becomes apparent.

You also have the ability to control access to each item, so you could assign certain contacts or events to a group, and then let contacts you know into that group so they have access to those items.

This is generally the idea of the semantic web, e.g. don’t just tweet a text link about a book or event or blog entry or article, but post it as a book recommendation or as an event or as a flashcard in a way that other people can subscribe to only your book reviews, or only events you post that take place in Berlin, or only the French flashcards you want to remember, or students can subscribe to all the errors you record while teaching their class.

I’m interested in the idea of language learning networks, groups of people are interested in both teaching and learning languages comprised of both teachers and students and people who are both teachers and learners perhaps of different or the same languages. The line between learner and teacher becomes blurred as learners become responsible (and graded on) how many phrases they record to remember and then actually learn within a certain amount of time. Students can subscribe to other students phrases and notes as they learn. Discussions, voting, and corrections can form on any item posted, the best items recorded float to the top. There are still teachers and students and students still pay for instruction, but the kind of instruction teachers give is more in the form of coaching and the information is saved as items which are accessible online (see “virtual role plays” below).

Technically these items are not saved in one central place or database, but each person saves his items where he wants and has full control over access to them. They can be:

• text files on a web server
• published Google Docs
• output of a web tool which allows e.g. a teacher to log in and type in items (in the same way that WordPress allows you to log in and type in blog posts)

You simply point your semantic reader to other people’s URLs which contain items that you are interested in.

Students, teachers and other learners interested in your items can subscribe to your feed in a similar way that they subscribe to an RSS feed with an RSS reader, but this “semantic reader” would understand and know how to display specific items such as book reviews, grammar errors, flash cards, vocabulary, etc. so that you could easily display a list of “vocabulary words all teachers in my language school made this week” which would be in an easy-to-read dictionary format, or perhaps in flashcard format for you to test yourself. The idea is that as soon as you subscribe to someone’s English grammar flashcards (say they have 10 at the time), your semantic reader would tell you that you have 10 flashcards to take that day. You test yourself on them indicating that you know 2 of them but mark the other 8 as to be tested tomorrow. Meanwhile, that person adds 5 more flashcards, so the next day you have 8 + 5, or 13 flashcards to take. And since you subscribed to that person’s book reviews as well, his newest book review pops up in your reader and since your reader knows it is a book review and has the ISBN number, it reads in the top 10 Amazon reviews of that book for you to read. In addition, other people who have subscribed to the flashcards are discussing them and you can read and participate in these discussions.

It’s important that this system remain flexible and perhaps even a bit messy like the web itself. The web has become popular for having these characteristics. The semantic web has failed to become popular for failing to have these characteristics.

Therefore it is important to:

• make it simple as possible to publish items
• make it simple and optional to add meta-information to them

it should be as flexible as web publishing, e.g. if you have an HTML file that just has the word “hello” in it without any markup tags, then “hello” will be appropriately displayed in the browser in a default font — you don’t receive a blank page or an error. In a similar way, if you just write the text “book: linchpin” the software will be smart enough to go find a recent book named “Linchpin” and save it as a full book item for you.

Or if you simply record a student error: “I go to bank today“, it allows you (or someone else) later to add meta-information that identifies it further, e.g.:

• omission-of-article error
• incorrect-expression-of-future-tense error
• english-grammar error
• belongs to class 58-213B
• made by Florian Winkler
• context: brother said he needed money and speaker wants to indicate that he already has on his schedule to go to the bank so he can pick some money up for him
• correct: “I’m going to the bank today”
• correct: “I’ll be going to the bank today”

As soon as this meta information gets added to this grammar error item, it is immediately linked to a growing corpus of grammar exercises teaching students about how not to omit articles and the future tense. It is also grouped together with all other errors that were made by the student Florian Winkler and all those made in class 58-213B.

Students can post questions about the item which turn into a discussion and act as further helpful information for others who perhaps have subscribed to errors from this particular class or errors that this particular teacher records.

The idea of recording errors and other information to learn as flashcards could be extended so that students could play individually or together in an online game. In order to play the game, each person plugs in their own stack of flashcards. In order to advance or score points in the game, each player has to answer his own flashcards correctly. Result: the more you play, the more you learn, and two people can play together and learn completely different topics.

Virtual Role Plays:

In the 90s when I taught English classes, particularly groups made up of a variety of language proficiency levels, I would use the following approach:

• first day: ask the students to describe to me situations in which they will be using English skills, e.g. “phone calls from America at work” or “small talk at conferences” or “need to give a presentation at a conference” or “my new boss is from Britain” or “an exchange student will be staying with us next week” or “need to be able to read and understand computer books” or “want to be able to carry on a conversation in English” or “want to improve my English” etc.
• I would then write a “virtual role play” which was usually a morning-to-evening description of someone’s day (or perhaps a complete trip to a conference and back) in which the main character and the people in the story encountered the situations which the students mentioned they want to practice.
• At the beginning of the next class, we would read through the virtual role play and I would assign roles in the story to each of the students, one person had the main role and some students would have many different roles, e.g. be strangers sitting on the plane or taxi drivers, etc. It would take about an hour for them to work through the role play, I would remain quiet the whole time and simply write down errors.
• When they finished the role play, we would spend the last 30 minutes reviewing and correcting the errors they made as a group.
• Most classes I taught consisted exclusively of: virtual role plays, targeted grammar/pronunciation explanations, and for some classes reading and discussing articles together.

Advantages of virtual role plays:

• I quickly noticed areas in which the students were making the majority of their errors and could target explanations and homework to improve those areas, almost always it was: English verb tenses and issues of pronunciation.
• The context that gets built up throughout the hour-long role play enabled us to discuss nuances of language which shorter role plays may not allow, e.g. different ways to start and end conversations and phone calls, how to politely interrupt in various situations, when to call people by their first and last names, and issues of linguistic register (this was particularly helpful for business learners who had learned a more colloquial manner of talking which was appropriate for casual conversation but seemed out of place in a business presentation).
• It was fun for me and fun for the students: the virtual role plays were long enough and loosely structured enough so that the students had room to “work on their personalities in the target language“.
• It enabled students with different fluency levels to all participate: students who were very fluent got demanding roles, shy students with low fluency would get easy roles until they gained more confidence. In any case, all students were either listening to or speaking English in situational context for an hour each class.
• It enabled me to incorporate otherwise problem-causing students into the class, e.g. in a Arbeitsamt course of 20 students there was a man who was quite fluent but disruptive, so I gave him special “bad guy” roles in the roleplay e.g. taxi driver who charges too much, rude cashier, would have someone run into his car, or he would be a heckler during a speech, or an unpleasant boss, etc. He poured his personality into the roles and often had the whole class laughing, all in English, and he took my corrections of his English quite seriously afterward.
• I rarely if ever helped or corrected the students during the role play so that they would feel the same pressures of speaking as they would in real situations. I did, however, take notes and during the correction period at the end addressed e.g. phrases they were looking for or provided better ways to express what they wanted to express.
• The irony of many English classes is that the people who need to practice their English the most (students) are the ones who speak the least percentage of class time, and the person who needs to practice his English the least (the teacher) speaks the highest percentage of class time. Virtual Role plays turn that around so that classroom time is spent by students speaking English.
• Virtual Role Plays are pragmatic: they may not allow you to practice a certain skill on a certain day since no two classes will play any one role play out the same way, but they emulate real speaking situations and help (force) students to use the English skills they have in situations they know they will encounter.

Extending virtual role plays:

So I want to begin teaching English again using virtual role plays and develop and incorporate them into a larger methodology of semantically recording errors, questions, vocabulary, cultural tips. Aspects of this methodology that would emerge are:

• within hours after a role play, students have access to the errors in the form of flashcards on both their computers and mobile devices
• people outside the class can subscribe to the classes published items and discuss them, giving wider feedback (e.g. “this is an appropriate American response but in Britain people say …”)
• since each error is marked as a certain type of error, e.g. “incorrect expression of future tense”, when the error is displayed there are links to explanations and exercises which teach the student more about that grammatical issue
• grading for a class is based on particular flashcards and items learned throughout the class
• I can imagine role plays becoming a type of “linguistic sports theater” in which people in a language learning network find a time to meet, over time create a role play online based on situations they each want to practice, make sure a native speaker of the target language is coming as well who will record errors, and then meet. I can imagine native speakers, perhaps actors, taking part in them as well just as they meet for impromptu theater groups.

I see potential in combining these more traditional skills:

• pedagogically sound teaching methods (e.g. virtual role plays)
• software development skills (e.g. creating flash, Silverlight, Ajax, WPF applications)

…with technological developments that have arisen in the last ten years:

• the wide acceptance and use of social media
• ease of mobile access to video, audio and text
• the blurring of demarcations between student and teacher and the ability of a student to use online tools and connect to other people online to learn and improve their language
• the general acceptance of Skype
• the improvement of translation tools and text-to-speech tools
• the improvement of APIs, web services, etc. which allow software tools to programatically retrieve e.g. word definitions, grammar explanations, and incorporate them in custom ways
• the growing ease of creating information mashups from different sources
• the growing level acceptance and proficiency in the language teaching and learning community for using online tools for not only teaching and learning but general productivity
• the growing number of people who are proficient at publishing their own content, e.g. teachers and students with blogs
• the growing awareness and adoption of semantic web as a new way to pull and re-mashup precisely the information you want, instead of having large amounts of generally interesting information and ads pushed at you

Sites such as StackOverflow.com have shown that at least in the developer community, if you build a system that allows people to easily contribute, allow them to vote on good content, they will donate large amounts of time and effort building reputations for themselves and helping others in the process. I envision a similar kind of system for language learners and teachers, but which allows them in a more decentralized way to publish their “items of teaching and learning” so that other people can easily interact with and use these items to learn and teach languages.