Many of us know the benefits of listening to foreign language radio and TV broadcasts for improving language skills but we can probably also recall the frustration of listening to them for the first time. I remember back in college as a first year German student buying my first Grundig short wave radio and expecting that it would quickly transform me into a native speaker. My expectations were largely due to an acquaintance of mine in an advanced German class. His German sounded to the ears of any beginning student not only grammatically correct but also native. He attributed his degree of proficiency in part to the short wave radio that he had been listening to for several years.=20 After I listened to the news broadcasts and documentaries of the Deutsche Welle on my new radio, I noticed to my dismay very few improvements in my language skills. In fact, as far as listening was concerned, I understood almost nothing save for a few proper names and familiar verbs. Despite these early disappointments, I considered my first attempts at mastering these radio broadcasts courageous ones and persevered at listening to the Deutsche Welle as a peripheral part of my language training through college and graduate school. Today, I am to able enjoy these broadcasts without having to decipher sounds and labor over dictionaries. Furthermore, I am able to reflect on diverse cultural topics and to gain an international perspective of world news, history, and literature.
The purpose of the preceding anecdote is to illustrate the motivational value of foreign language broadcasts and their potential use in the foreign language curriculum for improving language skills and cultural awareness. The problem facing many language teachers is that very few of their students proceed beyond the basic requirements and attain the proficiency levels of advanced students who are able to understand the content and rapid speech of foreign language broadcasts. In this paper, I intend to explain the Libra authoring system, hypertext, and digital video as valuable instructional aids for developing the kind of listening comprehension skills that are necessary for understanding foreign language broadcasts. An explanation of these aids will hopefully show some of the pedagogical advantages of multimedia over analog video, vocabulary hand-outs, and traditional dictionaries.
The following section examines a sample stack from my project: After the Wall: A Multimedia Bridge to Germany in the Year 2000. The first card of the main stack is an advance organizer that briefly prepares students for upcoming comprehension and listening tasks. Students are required to complete the tasks as they appear in the order of the list on Card 1. Each task helps the students to process both specific and general information from a digitized video recording of the TV broadcast. The bi-directional processing of the video constitutes an important part of the learning environment which the Libra authoring system adds to the viewing activity. In this environment students engage in numerous listening comprehension tasks that help them understand the relationship between the individual parts and the overall thematic structure of the video. The purpose of bi-directional processing is to prevent students from getting stuck on individual words and phrases and to advance them with each new activity towards a more holistic understanding of the video's content. Instead of watching the video with vcrs and work sheets, students are supplied with sophisticated computer tools that are specifically designed to help them develop a more in-depth and complete representation of the video's subject matter.
The top button in the list of activities on Card 1 enables students to play the entire video clip. The students view the clip in this activity without annotations. The only instructional aid that the first button provides is the control bar below the window of the digitized version of the video clip. With this control bar, students can pause, quickly rewind, forward, and replay any series of frames from the video. At this stage of the students' interaction with the video, they are not expected to understand every detail but rather to gain an impression of the principal topic.
The main stack continues with comprehension checks created from preconstructed templates. These templates facilitate macro- and micro-level learning with four basic question formats: multiple choice, checklist, binary checklist, and icon sorting questions. Each multiple choice card asks a question regarding a specific consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall that was reported in the video. Although each multiple choice card focuses on a particular aspect of German re-unification, the entire set of multiple choice questions combine to give students a general picture of modern German society and politics. In each multiple choice question, the correct answer is embedded among issues or events related to German re-unification. For example, on Card 3, the question "What happened one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall?" are the choices: 1. Germany was divided into East and West Germany. 2. Germany received a permanent seat in the UN. 3. East and West Germany were united. 4. Germany became a member of NATO. The correct answer from the preceding translation to the above multiple choice question is of course obvious but the other choices can serve a purpose. Each of them can supply topics for in-class discussions that relate to German re-unification. Using the choices from these questions as the basis for discussion topics facilitates the integration of an activity originally designed for individual study into a classroom or group activity. It also helps to reinforce information that students first learned in the lab.
With computer-based instructional materials, students become actively involved in the lesson as they listen to, read, and answer the various comprehension checks. The lesson from this stack offers interactivity in the form of immediate feedback to students' answers. Libra has the flexibility to vary and individualize the feedback for each student response. Individualized feedback has the advantage over simple true/false responses in that it stimulates greater consideration of the reasons for wrong answers and guides students in the direction of the right ones. Moreover, students have the opportunity to learn new expressions and vocabulary from the feedback. The feedback to the binary check question on Card 4 "Was ist mit Ihnen los? Etwas entscheidungsfreudiger bitte" (What's the matter? Be a little more decisive) refers to the situation when students look for feedback to questions for which they have not yet provided an answer. Other examples of feedback that appear on this question card are:
Another form of feedback in this stack is the automatic replay of the video clip when the student answers the question incorrectly. Such feedback discourages guessing and instead encourages the student to base his or her answer on the clues contained in the video clip.
Icon sorting questions are especially useful for obtaining responses to individual video segments. Card 6 utilizes the icon sorting format to check comprehension with regards to the students' understanding of selected vocabulary items that they have heard in the video. The exercise requires students to click on the verbs in the icon boxes on the left and then drag them to a correct space in the sentences on the right. Text feedback informs the students on the appropriateness of their responses.
Binary checklists are particularly well suited for soliciting students' understanding of the main ideas in the video clip. In the binary checklist question on Card 4, students are asked to choose between opposing ideas and to select the best adjectives and nouns associated with German re-unification. Upon answering the question correctly, students have a list of keywords that help them to summarize all previously acquired information from earlier questions. Binary checklists are a good example of questions that can stimulate bi-directional text processing. On the one hand, they confront students with micro-level=20 details while on the other hand they advance a macro-level perception of the individual scenes and questions.
My project utilizes Libra's text building tools for not only writing comprehension exercises but also for developing written transcripts and glossaries to the TV broadcasts. The videoscript card provides instantaneous random access to definitions, synonyms, and the video clip. With this card, students can easily learn new words by clicking with the mouse on unfamiliar vocabulary items and quickly read the meanings in the text field directly below the transcript. From this card students can also summon the video selection, which allows them to read the transcript as they simultaneously listen to the spoken text. The combination of text and video gives students the opportunity to hear the pronunciation of new words and to see words that they missed or did not previously understand without the transcript.=20
During one study at Swarthmore College in 1995, I observed students from my beginning German classes interacting with the Deutsche Welle TV broadcasts using the videoscript tool. A few students not only listened to the audio selection from the broadcast but read the transcript aloud as it was spoken by the news commentator. The students' imitation of the commentator's speech as they read the transcript aloud demonstrated the power of multimedia to create the kind of multisensory environment that is conducive for assimilating the rhythms and gestures of a language. It is precisely this process of assimilation that some researchers view as one of the effects of multimedia, whereby simple words and grammar begin to emerge as a medium of human communication.
The videoscript card is also useful for reducing the tedious mechanical process of learning a foreign language with traditional dictionaries and for directing the students' attention to the more cognitive task of comprehending=20 vocabulary and meaning in contextual situations. Students learning with hypertext quickly become aware that definitions appear and immediately disappear with each new click of the mouse. This disappearance act encourages a stronger association between words and their meanings than is less likely to occur in linear environments using dictionaries, vocabulary lists, and translations in the margins of textbooks. The videoscript tool is easy enough for students to learn so that they can be assigned class projects to develop their own hypertext glossaries. Such an assignment would help prevent students from entering translations above words or between the lines of a reading selection. The teacher can later check and evaluate the glossaries for grading purposes. The glossaries can also be saved for guided reading assignments in future classes.
The final activities of the lesson consist of two separate stacks from preconstructed HyperCard templates developed for testing listening comprehension and grammar. Both these templates support cloze exercises in which students are obliged to fill in the spaces of each sentence with a correct response. The grammar exercise provides students with a list of infinitives from the transcript which appear on the left-hand side of the card. From this list, students are expected to choose the most appropriate infinitive whose meaning best fits the sentence. In all cases, students are required to write the verb in the simple past. Incorrect responses are followed by negative feedback whereas correct answers are followed by positive feedback and students are instantly rewarded with the next example. In this particular exercise there are eight.
The listening comprehension exercise requires students to fill in the blanks with words that they can identify by listening to short segments from the video clip. Each segment consists of approximately one or two sentences. If the student answers incorrectly the video segment automatically replays; however, if the student answers correctly the exercise continues with the next example. The students also have the option of replaying the video segment as often as it is necessary for them to hear the words and sounds correctly. In this exercise as in the preceding one, students are required to type in their responses.
As I have tried to indicate, teachers can devise from a short video clip of one or two minutes in length several activities to engage students both in the lab and in the classroom. Besides preparing the material for students in the lab, teachers can also use the material for classroom testing. After students from my advanced German course at Catholic University in Fall '96 worked individually with several annotated videos in the computer lab, I frequently played in class the original unannotated analog videos on a vcr, while they completed comprehension quizzes consisting of cloze exercises and general content questions. In more formal tests and assignments, students responded to essay questions with their personal opinions on the issues presented in the Libra lesson, such as on Germany's future role in NATO and the UN. These questions often stimulated a cross-cultural comparison of German and American involvement in international affairs. On several occasions, students deepened their understanding of a particular topic by seeking additional information on the Internet and in newspapers and magazines. As a follow-up exercise, I would like to have found opportunities for my students to converse or "chat" on the Internet with both native and non-native speakers on some of the topics that were contained in the Libra lesson.
The Libra authoring system, hypertext, and digital video allow teachers to introduce students to complex and authentic language materials such as foreign language TV broadcasts at earlier levels of language study. In the discussion of my project involving computer-enhanced instructional materials for Deutsche Welle broadcasts, I have attempted to show that students need only a thorough understanding of the language's grammatical structures in order to take advantage of television news and documentaries for improving vocabulary and listening comprehension. The degree of comprehension will of course depend on the choice of instructional aids. After some training with the authoring tools described here or with similar ones, teachers can quite easily create transcripts, glossaries, comprehension checks, and feedback that will improve their student's understanding of the social issues and cultural topics presented by the media. Ultimately, students with these tools should expect to sooner reach that point in the learning curve where they no longer require annotated learning to enjoy the wealth of programming offered by foreign language TV broadcasts and in particular those of the Deutsche Welle.