Report for conference on educational technology "Building an
Education on Applications of Computer-Based Technologies" (21
November 1996, Radisson Hotel, St. Paul MN).

Title: Computer Support for Teaching Russian Language by
Internet.

I. The project under which we at the University of Minnesota have
been, for the past two and one-half years, delivering language
instruction via interactive television was funded under a grant
from the United States Department of Education which instituted
at the University of Minnesota one of six national language
resource centers. The purpose of these centers is the promotion
of research into and development of the methods and practices of
foreign language teaching and learning. The administrative home
of the various projects of the National Language Resource Center
at Minnesota is the Center for Advanced Research on Language
Acquisition, CARLA. In the period from 1993-96, during which the
project I am describing today was undertaken and completed, the
NLRC at the University of Minnesota was home to six language
education projects of various types, including ours, which was
devoted to the uses of technology in second-language acquisition.



The second language and technology project had two main
components: 1. The collection, evaluation, and dissemination of
information about various kinds of technological supplement to
language instruction; 2. The development and delivery of
beginning-level instruction in Russian and Chinese language via
the medium of interactive television simultaneously to locally
and remotely sited students of the University of Minnesota. It is
about the Russian language portion of the latter project that I
will be speaking to you this afternoon.

II. In undertaking to deliver beginning-level instruction in
Russian and Chinese language via interactive television, we
construed our task as involving four main components: Technology,
development, delivery, support.

A. The technology associated with the project can be sorted into
two main categories. There is, first, the equipment required for
the two-way real-time broadcast of the daily language classes
themselves. At the present time, the Russian class, which is now
in its third year of offering, consists of twelve students at the
originating site on the Minneapolis campus of the University and
six students at the remote site at the co-ordinate campus in the
town of Morris in western Minnesota. The class is accommodated in
a studio at each site and delivered, in either direction, by
appropriate audio and video transmission equipment and operators
over one/half of a leased T-one direct cable connection which
links all of the co-ordinate campuses of the University.

[Here is EXHIBIT #1, a transparency displaying the configuration
of the originating studio on the Minneapolis campus, showing also
the sort of equipment base required for successful interactive
transmission of a language class.]

The second category of technology includes the equipment required
for the completion of learning-related activities outside of
class. These include computer stations on both DOS/windows and
Macintosh platforms, peripheral devices for the display of audio
and video material, and both Apple Share and TCP/IP network
connections. This equipment base was already available at the
Minneapolis campus, but had to be supplied especially to the
Morris campus in the form of a small, specialized computer lab.
We consider it a particular success of our project that the
remote site, after benefitting for two years from the use of
equipment supplied to it without cost by the project, has decided
that electronic delivery of the class worked well enough to
justify the purchase of two computer stations of their own to
maintain this aspect of the course following the completion of
the project in Spring, 1996, and the withdrawal of project
computer equipment from the remote site. I will have more to say
later on in my presentation about the particular uses to which
this computer equipment is put in connection with the delivery of
the Russian course, but I would like to begin by offering a brief
account of the preparations we undertook before setting foot
either in the TV Studio or in the Computer Lab.

B. In describing for you the development of class plans and
support materials for the language classes on ITV I will confine
myself to our Russian course. This was (and is) a course which I
teach personally and is the part of the project with which I am
most familiar.

The first year of our interactive TV project was devoted to the
anticipation of difficulties associated in particular with
instruction by interactive television. We assumed that the
students at the remote site would find the class logistically and
affectively more difficult than their classmates in Minneapolis,
and we attempted to compensate for this in a variety of ways.

First, to make the order of events, the priority of required
tasks, and the identity and availability of needed materials as
clear as possible we developed a lengthy paper syllabus for the
course. This contains both complete instructions relating to the
order of events in the instructional program as well as
photocopies of all the assignments and instructional supplements
which might otherwise be distributed piecemeal as instruction
progressed. Also included are complete printed instructions for
the rationale and use of supplementary, computer-based
instructional materials. These syllabi run to approximately
125-150 typed pages for each term-three per year-of instruction.
Portions of this material are also available electronically, via
the World-Wide Web.

[Here is EXHIBIT #2, a transparency showing a WWW home page
offering a link to viewable course documents.]

Second, anticipating difficulty in connection with the need for
speedy yet private feedback to students concerning their written
work and the known slowness of surface mail we converted all of
the written assignments for the course into electronic form to
permit them to be exchanged on line using available network
connections.

Third, we gave thought to various means of enabling contact
outside of class between the instructor and the remote students.
These means included contact by toll-free telephone, arrangements
for audio/video electronic contact without the facilities of the
broadcast studio, and periodic visits by the instructor to the
remote site to meet with students and deliver a class session in
the other direction. Our surveys of student opinion uniformly
indicate that those enrolled at the remote site place a high
value on these infrequent personal contacts with their teacher.

C. Next I would like to speak briefly to the subject of the
limitations imposed on students and instructors by the exigencies
of delivering the class via interactive television.

The interactive television delivery system allows the instructor,
with varying degrees of success, to engage in almost all forms of
instructional technique commonly associated with language
teaching and learning. In what follows, I have nothing to say
about the individual, and highly variable, affective response of
students to this mode of instructional delivery. I concentrate
on instructional tactics from the instructor's point of view.

1. Passive techniques in which the teacher presents, models or
explains material relevant to the instructional goals of a
particular class session are very well accommodated by
interactive television. Except for the rare technical failures
which occur, this type of instruction is virtually equivalent to
live teaching. Here I include modeling and group repetition.

2. Active techniques in which the teacher or one of the students
provides a linguistic stimulus and another student is invited to
make an appropriate response also works well on interactive
television, thanks to the ability to isolate and project a
variety of camera angles and breadth of shot. The use of this
sort of activity to break through the glass barrier between the
local and remote students is often quite effective.

[Here is EXHIBIT #3, a transparency displaying a split screen
shot of the instructor engaged in an exercise with one of the
remote students.]

3. Interactive activities involving more than two participants
are also possible, although less effectively transmitted because
of limitations on technical flexibility and operator skill. This
has been a particular problem for us at the remote site, where
"operators" (I have this word in quotation marks) are selected
from the available pool of student-employment applicants and
receive minimal training. (A recent example: we discovered that
certain problems we had been having with audio feed from the
remote site had been caused by one of the student operators
unwittingly tapping his foot against a volume control.) With
well-trained operators, controlled interactive activities can be
handled very successfully on interactive television.

4. multiple interactive activities, that is, the technique of
setting a task for students to work on together in groups with
the teacher acting as peripatetic facilitator for their efforts
is difficult. My ingenuity has not discovered a way to involve
both local and remote students in such activities on an equal
basis. Obviously, I am unable to go through the glass to the
remote site to be with the remote students physically as they
work together, and any other strategy would seem to me to entail
some rather complex scheme of open and closed microphones.
Putting local and remote students together in the same working
group-always desirable as contributing to a reduced sense of
isolation for the remote students-is particularly difficult in
this sort of activity.

D. I turn now to some observations on technological support,
mainly computer-based, of outside-of-class learning activities.

In-class communication with remotely sited students is clear,
relatively natural, nearly always reliable, and capable of
sustaining most of the common techniques of the language
classroom. But class time is limited and, once we get past the
euphoria of initial trial and exploration, likely to be
increasingly expensive. And yet the student often needs,
especially in basic language classes, steady and continuing
support outside the classroom as well. To provide it, we have
developed an array of technology-based techniques which permit
both remote and local students of the course to deal
interactively with the learning tasks which they are required to
accomplish outside of the classroom.

1. First, we have made available in the student computer labs a
tested and reliable selection of computer-based instructional
programs--many of which were developed at the University of
Minnesota. I will not say more of these programs here than that
their function is to provide a low-pressure, yet record-keeping,
environment for student drill on the more mundane,
memory-intensive tasks associated with learning Russian:
vocabulary acquisition, patterns of morphological change, and
mastery of basic grammatical structures. These programs have two
main functions: first, to provide an outside-of class venue in
which students can practice and master basic forms and patterns
of the language, thereby freeing up class time which might
otherwise need to be devoted to these basic tasks and permitting
a greater number of higher-level communicative activities;
second, to provide a monitorable facility for the assignment of
remedial work on basic tasks when analysis of test scores or
performance on written assignments indicates that remediation is
necessary. Much more could be said on the subject of computer-assisted language learning materials, but our schedule for today
requires that I move on at this point.

2. I have already mentioned our use of electronically
submissible homework. The student-either local or remote-prepares
her/his homework on a machine in the computer lab (or at home, if
relevant equipment is available) and, on completing it, saves it
as a file and places a copy of it in an Apple Share folder which
is housed on a machine in the Russian department office on the
Minneapolis campus. Here it is opened, corrected, commented upon,
and graded, and then saved as a new file and returned to the
Share Folder. The same technique is used for evaluation of
phonetic performance of the remotely sited students. (Evaluation
of local students is done in a specially equipped audio lab.)
Students create a sound recording at the computer terminal, save
it as a file, and drop it in the Share folder, whence it is
taken, evaluated, and returned by the teacher.

[Here is EXHIBIT #4, a transparency displaying a computer screen
with the share folder "Russian--pick up written" opened on the
desktop.]

[Here is EXHIBIT #5, a transparency displaying a computer screen
with the electronic homework for Lesson 12 displayed as an MS
Word file.]

Without this mechanism, homework, even if exchanged by priority
mail, would travel too slowly to provide even an approximation of
an optimal learning environment. The sole workable alternative is
the exchange by FAX-which is used in the very early going to
check mastery of handwriting skills. This method is, however,
prohibitively expensive when long distance is involved and
subject to the degradation of quality inherent in the multiple
copying of documents.

3. Finally, the difficult question of office hours. It is my
practice to require a weekly ten-minute conference with each
student, "whether they need it or not." To enable this for the
remote students, telephone contact seemed the easiest choice, and
that is available. I prefer, however, to use the capacity of our
campus network and the Internet itself to provide electronic
office hours using available video-conferencing technology. While
still at an early stage of development and requiring a fairly
sophisticated equipment base at either end, this real-time,
bi-directional audio/video exchange works well enough, and
reliably enough, to provide a reasonable facsimile of an actual
face-to-face meeting.

[Here is EXHIBIT #6, a transparency displaying a video conference
in progress.]

This, then, was our approach to the use of technology to
supplement and facilitate the delivery of a beginning-language to
a distant site. Our experience over three years has been
relatively positive on the technological side. The technology
does function effectively and reliably. I have, however, seen
recurrent problems centering on student acceptance of the
technology. By and large, I have found that students resist the
use of technological supplements unless these are built into the
syllabus as grade-bearing entities. Students often seem to feel
that they are too busy to engage in activities that are not
directly tied to the grades they receive. If one does build a
direct connection of this sort into the class requirements, one
risks the loss of students who are unable to work periodic visits
to the computer lab into their busy schedules. I may tell you
that this is not an abstract worry; I did actually lose students
for this reason during the one term when I experimented with
requiring use of the computer lab. As you may know, accepting a
preventable reduction of student enrollment is not an attractive
option at the present time in the offering of less commonly
taught languages.

The problem of including computerized instructional and drill
materials among the course requirements is one that affects both
local and remote students. My experience has been that the
students at the remote site also face a second difficulty unique
to their own situation. This I would describe as a certain
passivity induced by their position before the TV monitor which
links them with their instructor and classmates. I have found
that it is very difficult even for lively and energetic students
to maintain with consistency the extra effort that seems required
if they are to participate as actively in the class as their
locally sited counterparts. The remote students seem to fall
victim to a sort of couch-potatoism, possibly a result of the
long hours of training they have received in proper behavior in
front of the television before ever they enter an ITV classroom.
Still, the alternative confronting the remote students in this
particular case would be the entire absence of instruction in
Russian or Chinese. None of us embarking on our project imagined
that the delivery of instruction in beginning language would be
just as good by interactive television as it would be if
delivered face to face. On the other hand, I think most of us,
both teachers and students, found that the experience was, all
the same, pretty good and that the material can be and was
delivered in a satisfactory fashion.