Using Social Media to teach Asian Languages in Primary School

BACKGROUND

 

Many students from monolinguistic cultures find learning a second language difficult, particularly an Asian language. Many drop their language learning before they complete Year 12 in the subject because of this.

 

Yet, language is the foundation of all communication. Understanding another person’s language and culture encourages acceptance. It tears down walls of racism and xenophobia. All this underlines the need to find new and creative ways to bring language fluency to young people.

 

When we started this project, we wanted to research how broadband technologies could meet this need – and do so in a way that would scale.

 

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in the US State Department estimates it takes about 600 class hours to achieve proficiency in French or Spanish, but 2200 hours for Mandarin.

 

How can students get anywhere near this number of hours before they graduate Year 12? One solution is to start language earlier, in primary school and to do it more intensely. Another is to encourage peer-to-peer language learning outside school hours, in a symbiotic relationship where the incentive structures are driven by friendship as much as ‘the next classroom quiz’. Technology – and particularly social media – can enable all these things, if it is adapted well. That is exactly what we have aimed to do in this project.

 

 

OUR PROJECT

 

This research project uses a social media platform to encourage learning a second language. The platform is closed to people outside the class to ensure student privacy, but it is supervised on line by the teacher. It allows students to type to each other in their own or their target language, to upload audio files and videos as well as to link to sites.

 

We selected Year 5 students, aged about 10 to 11, at a local Victorian primary school as the test site. Each student has been paired with a partner at the primary school’s sister school in China. The students were paired through personal preferences and descriptions via a unique avatar exhibited on software developed by the Department of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne (information about projects using this software at http://ifish.io). All the students learned to use the social media platform and customized their avatars on the matching software.

 

The project has developed experimental teaching modules that are designed to make the paired children complete tasks together that practise both English and Chinese language skills and expand vocabulary.  These teaching modules are being refined as they are introduced and tested in the classroom. Topics the students consider to be ‘boring’ are dropped, while ‘fun’ activities are expanded.

 

As part of the project, the students must learn the multi-media capabilities of the social media platform in order to communicate. In this way their learning of ICTs and language are intertwined, and they can clearly see the benefits of mastering the computer use skills in order to achieve the language communication. The students have particularly commented on how they have noticed the two sets of skills learning occurring at the same time.

 

The teacher encourages the students to form friendships in the partner pairs, to chat informally about everything from their favorite pop songs to their pet rabbits – but it needs to be done in their target language.  The children are allowed to draw from whatever support mechanisms they need online, so when they reach for a word that they do not have in the target language, they are not frustrated. However, they have to retype the word into the social media platform each time.

 

Some of the assignments require constructing spoken essays, or listening to a partner’s short video speech in the target language in order to achieve the next step.

 

The aim is to improve language skills in the target language. The way this pilot project gets there is:

 

• To encourage out of classroom communication in the target language, for extra practice hours
• To motivate the students to reach for new vocabulary as they try to build a personal friendship with their sister school partner
• To be comfortable communicating in the language in an online setting, including typing
• To create cultural context for the language learning, through interacting with a peer in real time at the other end of the social media platform

 

We are working to develop the small pilot into a larger scale project that is scalable, and are actively looking for grant funding to do this.  Please contact the lead researcher, Dr Dreyfus.

 

University of Melbourne Department of Computing and Information Systems Research Team Members: Dr Suelette Dreyfus, Assoc. Prof. Shanton Chang, Dr Jon Pearce, Dr Lee Naish.

 

This project gratefully acknowledges support from The Telematics Trust, IBES, Clifton Hill Primary School, Huaibei School #1.