This contribution focuses on an introduction to a virtual resource center which was developed as part of a task-based, blended language learning and teaching program for Business English courses at the University of Nantes, France. The resource center is a self-access training space providing students with various types of focus on form exercises relating to the themes studied in the Business language curriculum.
Trang 1GIỚI THIỆU TRUNG TÂM HỌC LIỆU ẢO THUỘC CHƯƠNG TRÌNH HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ KẾT HỢP THEO NHIỆM VỤ
DÀNH CHO CHƯƠNG TRÌNH TIẾNG ANH THƯƠNG MẠI
TẠI MỘT TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC THUỘC CỘNG HOÀ PHÁP
Ngô Th Phơng Lê, Rebecca Starkey-Perret
Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ, Đại học Quốc gia Hà Nội
trung tâm học liệu ảo ñược thiết kế như một phần của
chương trình dạy và học kết hợp theo nhiệm vụ
(Task-based, blended language learning) dành cho khóa học
Tiếng Anh thương mại tại Đại học Nantes, Cộng hòa
Pháp Trung tâm học liệu là một không gian tự học
nhằm cung cấp các hình thức bài tập tập trung vào
hình thức (focus on form) liên quan tới các chủ ñề trong
chương trình giảng dạy Tiếng Anh thương mại Những
bài tập này tạo ñiều kiện cho sinh viên tiếp xúc với
những phản ánh siêu ngôn ngữ và bài tập thực hành
dựa trên ngữ cảnh, cũng như ñáp ứng những nhu cầu
khác nhau của sinh viên Những thay ñổi sẽ ñược thực
hiện ñối với trung tâm học liệu dựa trên phương pháp
học hướng dữ liệu (data-driven learning approach)
nhằm ñiều chỉnh phần hướng dẫn ngữ pháp cũng như
cung cấp thêm các tiểu nhiệm vụ liên quan giúp sinh
viên cải thiện thực sự chính xác khi sử dụng ngôn ngữ
Abstract: This contribution focuses on an
introduction to a virtual resource center which was developed as part of a task-based, blended language learning and teaching program for Business English courses at the University of Nantes, France The resource center is a self-access training space providing students with various types of focus on form exercises relating to the themes studied in the Business language curriculum These micro-tasks offer students necessary opportunities for meta-linguistic reflection and contextualized language practice, as well
as cater for individual differences Further developments will be made to the resource center by modify the grammar explanations part based on the data-driven learning approach as well as uploading more related micro-tasks with the hope to help students improve their language accuracy
AN INTRODUCTION TO A VIRTUAL RESOURCE CENTER IN A
BLENDED LANGUAGE LEARNING PROGRAM FOR BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSES
AT A FRENCH UNIVERSITY Introduction
The virtual resource center (VRC) was
developed as part of a task-based, blended
language learning and teaching program (Ellis,
2008; Willis & Willis, 2007) for Business English
courses at the University of Nantes which was
implemented in 2008 to deal with overcrowded
and mixed-ability classes as well as to reduce
student drop-out rates The VRC is a self-access
training space that currently provides nearly 200
micro-tasks supporting individual meta-linguistic
reflection and contextualized language practice
(Bertin & Narcy-Combes, J.-P, 2012; Bertin, Gravé & Narcy-Combes, J.-P., 2010) Teachers gave students individual feedback on their productions and sent them to the virtual resource center in order to facilitate noticing (Schmidt, 2001) and practice
The Context
Languages and International Trade at the University of Nantes is a three-year undergraduate program that combines the learning of up to 2 or 3 languages, of which Business English is compulsory Although the number of students’
Trang 2enrollment increased by 29% between 2008 and
2010, the drop-out rate is at the end of the first
year is relatively high, at more than 40%
Another problem of the Business English
courses is that teachers have to deal with large
size classes of from 45 to 60 students per class
Moreover, the students’ language levels are
heterogeneous, with only 25% students acquire B2
level as required on entering university,
(McAllister, Narcy-Combes M.F, Starkey-Perret,
2012) The large size, heterogeneous class is
believed to be a contributing factor that leads to
increasing drop-out rate, because individual
feedback, student interaction and practice are not
adequate in these conditions
With the hope to tackle the problems, a
task-based blended language learning and teaching
program including a virtual resource center was
developed The program is aimed at increasing
students’ engagements in class and helping them
to improve their language proficiency based on
their individual needs In this paper, we only focus
on the advantages and limits of the virtual
resource center, which is an integral part of the
task-based blended language learning program
The design of the virtual resource center
In general, the task-based blended language
learning program is developed based on the
socio-constructivist and cognitivist approaches,
according to which learners are active constructers
of their learning through social interaction and
individual involvement and reflection (Kintsch,
2009; Lantolf, 2000; Little, 2007 as cited in
McAllister et.al., 2012); and human learning
happens through mental processes such as
attention and perception, learning and memory,
thinking and reasoning, decision making and
problem solving, (Eysenck, 2001) The processing
of information that occurs in human mind is similar to that in computers –information gets into the brain, going through a sequential series of processing stages; and through practice, the information can be maintained in the short-term memory or transferred to the long-term memory to
be retrieved in the future, (Eysenck, 2001; Ellis, 2008; Bertin et.al, 2010)
With that respect, throughout the Business English course, students are provided with macro social tasks, which are designed in the form of real-life business scenarios and allows students to interact and collaborate to solve problems without any direct inference from the teacher After producing the language through the macro-tasks, students receive individual feedback from teachers and they can log on to the VRC to work on their own problems (which might be pointed out by their teacher)
The VRC, which contains interactive grammar, vocabulary, and listening exercises to help students work on the morpho-syntactic, phonetic, and lexical areas they have most difficulty with These are contextualized exercises (micro-tasks) relating to the themes studied in the Business language curriculum In total, there are approximately 200 micro-tasks in different categories uploaded on the center Students can use search function to find exercises that they need Besides, there is a section for grammar explanations in alphabetical order from which students can find clear explanations (which is a focus on form approach) for their grammatical problems These grammar points are linked with grammar exercises so as students can practice right after they are exposed with the declarative metalinguistic knowledge
Trang 3Coherent with cognitive accounts of second
language acquisition, the VRC provides necessary
opportunities for meta-reflection and individual
practice (Bertin and Narcy-Combes, J.-P., 2012;
Bertin, Gravé, & Narcy-Combes, 2010) by
offering students various types of focus on form
exercises after having had their attention drawn to
their problem areas (by their teacher) through the
production of a socially and communicatively
meaningful task
The benefits and limits of the VRC
The VRC offers students with various opportunities to practice; with a connected computer, they can log on to the center at any time
to work on their language problems Micro-tasks are linked together so that students can practice the language input they learn again and again Let’s take a look at a listening task below:
This particular example of an exercise was
made using hot-potatoes There's an easy html
code to use to integrate a listening document This
exercise is aimed at bringing students' attention to
specific collocations such as 'to pay attention' ' to
learn a lesson', 'to lay blame', to lay down
guidelines' so that they will learn them as fixed
chunks The noticing is done when students fill in those gaps while listening to the auditory input Then they have another exercise to practice using those expressions again
In short, by completing micro-tasks, students can enhance their attention to salient features of
Trang 4L2 input and memorize them Gradually, learners’
declarative knowledge will become more
automatic and begin to be incorporated into
procedural knowledge, which can be retrieved in
the future, (Ellis, 2008; Bertin et.al, 2010) The
noticing process is important as “attention is
necessary for all aspects of L2 learning”, Schmidt
(2001:3), and it is believed that “little learning of
new linguistics material from input is possible
without attended processing.” (Ellis, 2008:266)
The VRC allows teachers to draw students’
attention to particular language problems that they
have During the course, students have to upload
their written work on Moodle, the
computer-mediated platform for correction and individual
feedback, through which students’ specific
problems are pointed out By doing so, students’
attention is focused on specific language
structures when they log on to the center for
practice This process of learning enables the
effective language acquisition as Schmidt
(2001:13) claims that “only those features of
target structure that are noticed will be learnt” and
that “attention must be specifically focused”
The VRC also caters for individual differences
in language learning Students can log on to the
center for individual training based on individual
needs Students differ in language aptitude,
cognitive and learning style, language learning
strategies, and motivation, which are predictors to
second language learning success, (Dornyei and
Skehan, 2008) The center allows students to
adapt the language practice to their cognition
process, which will facilitate the acquisition of L2
However, despite its advantages, the VRC
remains underdeveloped compared to the
recommendations provided by cognitive accounts
of language acquisition The most important thing
is that the center has not yet comprised a very
large number of exercises for each exemplar in
order to make language associations become
automatic This is due to limitations found in less
well-resourced universities: lack of funding to hire
full-time developers, lack of time due to high
teaching loads and increased administrative tasks for associate professors and full-time teachers Besides, as the center is built based on the platform Moodle, providing sufficient, appropriate feedback and interactions is the biggest challenge for the teachers
Future developments
In the future, the researchers will take further actions to develop the VRC by following the corpus-based learning approach
Corpus-based learning is an approach in which learners can use corpus data to further their language learning, (Boulton, 2010) The key pedagogical approach in corpus-based learning is data-driven learning (DDL), a term coined by Tim Johns, who describes DDL as “the attempt to cut out the middleman as far as possible and to give direct access to the data”, (1991:30) In this approach, learners are exposed to large quantities
of authentic data, through which they play an active role in acquiring the language by observing, classifying and generalizing the language patterns This approach is chosen to develop the center for three main reasons: The DDL approach helps learners to acquire a language by discovering the patterns of the language use Learners are provided with a concordance of language items from which they are presented with multiple samples of the same items This helps learners to identify the patterns, analyze them so as to generalize the language use In this approach, learners are confronted with authentic resources of language input, which allows learners to observe what is written in a given circumstance Moreover,
it is believed that as learners learn to observe and make generalizations, they develop more autonomy; and this process promotes noticing and grammar-consciousness raising
The overall goal is to provide learners with concordance lines of language items in which key words appear in contexts; they will need to observe, classify, then identify and finally make generalizations to account for the patterns
Trang 5Below is an example of concordances lines
retrieved from the British National Corpus These
lines present the whole set of formulaic sequences
in which the word “increase” appears The
repetition of those chunks in the language input not only helps students to easily figure out the formulaic patterns of language but also remember them better
Boulton (2010) suggests a variety of activities
based on authentic data in the form of individual
or multiple concordances, including:
• identifying and underlining target items
• cloze and other forms of completion
exercises
• choosing the right form in context; putting
bare items in the appropriate form (e.g tense,
aspect, countability)
• correcting inappropriate forms
• matching split sentences
• re-arranging items
• word-formation
• question/answer (e.g what’s the difference
between X and Y? or what do X and Y have in
common?)
• grouping lines according to meaning, usage,
etc
• writing sentences or inventing new
examples
In the future, we will exploit the available
corpora data such as BYU-BNC
[http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/] from University of
[http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk] from Lancaster University, or COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English The corpora of these resources contain written texts such as newspaper and magazine articles, works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as writing from scholarly journals They also have a small portion of spoken transcripts from informal conversations, government proceedings, and business meetings
Conclusions
The VRC has been in use as an integral part of the task-based, blended learning program for Business English courses for nearly 6 years and it has received positive feedback from students, (Starkey-Perret and Ngo, 2014) Following cognitivist approach to second language learning, the VRC offers students with various opportunities for meta-reflection and practice as well as cater for individual differences By engaging in the virtual resource center for practicing, students will be able to focus their attention to specific problems and better memorize salient features of L2 The center is now
Trang 6undergoing further developments with the
application of corpus linguistics approach so as to
help students improve their language accuracy
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