original article @ The MASIE Center

Language Learning by iPod: An Emerging Model

by Hank Horkoff and Jonathan M. Kayes

As podcasting becomes ubiquitous in the world of e-learning, it can bring us almost anything from investment tips, to interviews with leading authors some of which are fabulous and others have you reaching for your MP3 player to switch to The Beastie Boys. Where can you turn for best practices and perhaps even get the added value of being able to better understand a key part of the global environment? What we’ve found is a 15 minute, caffeine-like dose of Mandarin Chinese, brought to you by a high-energy team of teachers and voice actors coming to you daily direct from Shanghai, China. In a nutshell, that is what Praxis Language’s ChinesePod.com has been doing since September 2005, in the process attracting over a quarter of million students interested in learning Chinese.

What we see in these podcasts are some best practices – using social web tools to enhance online language learning and innovative approaches to utilizing podcasting for educational goals. While language learning has been around as long as human beings have spoken more than one tongue, the model here is uniquely designed for the Web 2.0 world. Static lesson content is transformed into ‘lesson events’ by focusing student attention around specific content and encouraging student involvement to further enhance the originally designed lesson. Podcasts, with their conversational nature, rapid publication cycle and modular architecture can further transform learning into an engaging, fresh and personalized experience. This actually takes steps into Learner 2.0 where the learner changes their experiences and behaviors through a collaborative process as they interact with the content, other users, and the instructors.

In addition to taking advantage of new technologies, ChinesePod has changed Chinese-language instruction by adopting many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching techniques and applying them to Chinese. Rather than teaching adults as Chinese children would be taught, the emphasis is on the relevant and practical. Lessons on how to order a cold beer, or hearing Godzilla attacking Shanghai narrated by a small band of enthusiastic teachers and voice actors, all delivered by RSS feed with accompanying texts, is simply a fresh approach to teaching Chinese. Over thirty years ago one of the co-authors took his first foray into learning Chinese. Armed with a library card, he found a textbook and accompanying LP records and tried to learn some of the language during the summer before starting college. Trying to mimic the sounds and the four tones of Mandarin Chinese on his stereo seemed like a good idea, but it simply didn’t work and certainly did not hold his interest. In the ensuing years technology supporting language learning did make some improvements. Language labs at leading schools like Middlebury allowed for taping the student’s voice to compare it to how things should really sound, but it was still mostly dry stuff. Creative approaches to multimedia in the late ’70s brought transcripts of several of the great Chinese films of the 1930s and 40s together with the classroom time for watching the films, but it wasn’t material you could bring home to review. CD-ROM programs began to proliferate by the mid-late 1990s, but for Chinese they were either geared to the beginner or were shows from Chinese television aimed at the native speaker.

The podcasting approach was born out of the experiences of the average English language student in Shanghai where one often spends more time traveling to and from class than actually sitting in the classroom! If you break down the typical language class into stages of lesson input, lesson review, practice/feedback and reinforcement, one can start to see where technology might be best applied and where valuable classroom time should be focused. If a student could listen to a lesson podcast during the day, review key vocabulary and grammar online on their own, and only then meet face-to-face with a teacher, not only would they be better prepared for class, but they could also maximize the opportunity to apply what they had learned on their own. This is in itself an approach which uses the best in adult learning theory.

The development and production team for the programs also listened to their growing customer base. Students said “We don’t want inconvenient classes, out-of-date lessons, boring teachers or any other impediments that makes learning a foreign language harder than it already is.” You can beat that constraint by answering a couple of simple questions: Instead of designing a training service around the resource constraints of an educational institution, why not design it around the needs of a student – what they want, when they want it, where they want it and on the device they want?

What does that look like in practice? Let’s look at three areas: the lessons themselves, the importance of using Web 2.0 social networking tools, and helping teachers use this new type of learning material in their classrooms.

The Podcasts
The consistent approach has been to break down the walls of a classroom and find the largest possible audience for great teachers. Each Chinese podcast uses a conversational, radio-show style. They are new, modern, hip, and funny. The listener is immediately engaged by the enthusiastically mellifluous voice of co-host Jenny Zhu who is present in every lesson from ‘newbie’ through advanced. Jenny, a Shanghai native in her mid-20s, studied in Singapore and Australia which has given her complementary skills in both Chinese and English. Irish-accented Ken Carroll, Jenny’s fellow instructor at the newbie and beginner levels, has a knack for making language real by giving a variety of English choices for a Chinese phrase so that the listener gets a strong sense of the vibrancy of the language. Even at the beginner level the language is always authentic and has a practical approach. If you’re coming to do business in China, you need to know how to give toasts at a banquet or negotiate a contract. And you can get those and more at your level of learning.

In the intermediate and upper intermediate lessons, John Pasden joins Jenny. The 50-50 split of Chinese and English words of the lower level lessons quickly becomes an 80-20 split by upper intermediate which still allows the learner to hear new vocabulary or grammar in English, but tune their ear increasingly to Chinese. Several voice actors join Jenny and John which enhances the fun and let’s the listener hear a greater variety of speakers. This is another podcast benefit over the traditional classroom where you heard one teacher and perhaps a teaching assistant — suddenly you’ve got four to six male and female voices to tune your ear to. And the lessons at this level revel in the fun which is part of each podcast. From their own version of “Lost” where some tourists suddenly disappear while touring Jizhou to a lesson featuring the habit of people fighting in order to pay the restaurant bill, as well as cultural forays into Chinese poetry, it is hard not to hear the giggles of the ChinesePod crew as they keep delivering those lessons in spoken Mandarin. Finally there are the Advanced lessons with little or no English focused on some aspect of Chinese life or conducting business in China where Jenny is joined by another native speaker for truly authentic flavor in the lesson.

Regardless of the learning level, each lesson provides inductive clues to prompt students to figure things out for themselves. This is done by the hosts, the voice actors and through sound effects. The sheer variety of topics is purposefully aimed to encourage student engagement and this is further enhanced through varied delivery formats and length of the podcast. On these latter two points, the format can be a simple grammar lesson or the ongoing diary of a college student, the ins and outs of relationships or the latest views of movies in China. The average podcast is about fifteen minutes but can vary from eleven to eighteen minutes, all well within bounds to avoid listener fatigue. At all but the advanced level the dialogs are repeated two-three times so the learner can pick up the intended points and hear them several times. The authenticity of language and of the topics shines through each podcast.

The daily publishing schedule builds anticipation in the listener and allows for contemporary topics to arrive in your MP3 player in ‘just-in-time’ fashion. Lessons become events that draw attention, create student involvement, and encourage feedback through user questions, comments and insights which take place on the ChinesePod website – all of which enhance the originally published lesson. With a new lesson being published every day, there are hundreds of lessons freely accessible putting the archive well on its way to becoming the largest corpus of Chinese learning material available on the Web.

Importance of Social Web Tools
The underlying philosophy of learning inherent in this approach is not about broadcasting from teacher to student, but is instead a series of true interactions between teacher and student, and student to student. Web 2.0 social web tools help facilitate this social interaction and help engage the student in the learning process. Lesson podcasts provide the spark to the learning experience, which is further fueled by the interactions on the website and engagements between student and teacher regardless of whether they happen online or offline, synchronously or asynchronously.

Social networking services for students help to broaden the in-class experience. Problems with classroom instruction, such as the phenomena of the “sage on the stage” where students are hesitant to consult each other for learning, but instead go through the teacher at the front of the class, can be addressed through more informal and casual leaving of posts & messages on the website. The classroom can play a critical role in the learning process, but can be made even more effective by using technology for tasks such as lesson input, student Q&A and lesson reinforcement. All of this inculcates a spirit of Learner 2.0 with the learner at the center of a collaborative process. In a recent experiment to bring additional interactivity into what should not become a staid environment, a segment called “Movie Madness” has appeared every few weeks. A well known dialog from an English language film is translated into Mandarin, voice acted with appropropriate sound effects, and then put into a podcast. The podcast teaches the grammar and vocabularly of the scene, but to add to the interactivity, listeners are invited to enter a contest in which they have to identify the original fillm. Then a winner gets a gift of podcast lessons. In the more than six months Movie Madness has been out there, over fifty listeners each week participate in the contests.

Integrating Podcasts with the Classroom
The ChinesePod service was originally designed for adult students learning on their own. As the archive grew, teachers in a number of locales started to bring the learning materials into their classrooms which in turn fueled requests for new features and customizable content. Teachers asked for Amazon.com-like ratings & reviews to help them navigate through the extensive archive and pre-packaged sets of lessons designed to compliment textbooks they were already using in class. Teachers got course management tools to take advantage of the modular nature of podcasts which helped them re-mix individual lessons to meet the specific needs of their classroom. And they asked for a private online discussion area where only they and their students could meet and discuss their lessons. This has become a DIY social network service where the teachers control who can join the group and the level of privacy. What has taken place has been an incredible evolution from podcasting to an individual student to multiple levels of both formal and informal interactive classes at all levels of language learning.

It will take decades to transition fully from institution-centered to student-centered learning. Inspired by the shift in market power in media economics from producer to consumer, learning media will undergo a similar transition pushing the learning industry to adapt to student needs. ChinesePod is using podcasting and social networking to work towards this goal. The more market-orientated adult education industry will be the first to change, but over time these student-centered changes will filter down to more formal institutional learning.

The Authors:

Hank Horkoff is CEO and co-founder of Praxis Language. He lives in Shanghai.
Jonathan Kayes is the Chief Learning Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency and has studied Chinese since 1975