VoiceThread is a cloud-based application that allows an online instructor to upload media such as a presentation, word document, image, video, or audio recording and then facilitate an asynchronous discussion about the contents. This is an excellent tool for a foreign language class, because for us, listening and comprehension and verbal responses are not just ways to reach a wider variety of learning styles, rather, they are essential skills in and of themselves. One way that it could be used in my Spanish II class is to facilitate practice dialogues.
Traditionally, I assign each student a partner and have the partners go through a scripted dialogue while I walk around the room attempting to keep fifteen pairs of students on-task while simultaneously monitoring the grammar and pronunciation of up to thirty individuals. The practice is vital, but even if I could split my attention that many ways (which I can’t), I’m not able to offer corrections to all of the students that would benefit from instructor feedback, either because I didn’t notice the problem in the first place or because I simply run out of time before the activity is over. Until now, having all students practice at once was the only way I could think of to give all the students the practice opportunities that they need to develop their skills.
VoiceThread allows for asynchronous discussion, so now all students can still get the practice, but they don’t all have to be talking at once. Not only will this allow me as a teacher to more effectively monitor student engagement and performance, I feel that the format allows students to get more out of the same practice activity. Many adolescents are self-conscious about possibly making a mistake, so they often just rush through the exercise, because they know that their peers often won’t notice their mistakes if they just rush through the activity quickly enough. Then, other students end up feeling pressured to keep up, so they rush through as well. Allowing students to respond at their own pace would eliminate these problems and possibly make the practice even more beneficial, and yet, because it is a spoken rather than written discussion, students are still required to perform in real time, so they won’t be able to slow the activity down to the point at which the conversational applications would be entirely lost.
Let me provide a specific example. My Spanish II students learn to use indirect objects and indirect object pronouns. Then, they are given prompts such as 1) to write an email, 2) to borrow money, 3) to tell secrets, etc., and they are expected to form a question using the prompt and an indirect object. The partner then responds to the questions using a complete sentence. In order to facilitate these practice dialogues asynchronously, I could use VoiceThread.
To use VoiceThread, first I would create a presentation that defined indirect objects and indirect object pronouns and explained how to use them. The presentation is displayed like a slideshow from within VoiceThread. After the explanation, I can post the activity instructions and example. On the first slide, students are asked to use the prompts to create the questions following the model. The students can then post audio comments containing the questions that they have formed. Using the above example, the questions might be 1) To whom did you write an email?, 2) From whom did you borrow money?, 3) To whom do you tell a secret?. If a student still has trouble forming the questions after going through the explanation and viewing the model, he or she could listen to other students forming the questions and emulate the sentence structure. Rather than being cheating, learning to reproduce sentence structure is the goal of this activity, so there’s no problem there.
On the next slide, I could ask the students to respond to the questions they just asked. Using the same examples, these answers might be 1) I wrote an email to my grandma, 2) I borrowed money from my dad, 3) I told a secret to my friend, Sara. Again, the students respond by posting audio comments.
I am also excited about this Web 2.0 tool, because I think it could be applied at more advanced levels to facilitate less scripted discussions in which students actually listen and respond to one another. An advantage for the instructor is that this would allow for a more objective method of monitoring of participation. An advantage for the students is that less outgoing students might find it easier to participate if they have all the time they need to process the information and formulate a response, especially if they don’t have to worry about forcing their way into a discussion that is being commandeered by a handful of talented or outgoing students, as always seems to happen in a physical class discussion. There is a danger that rather than learn to respond in real time, students will simply type their responses into a translator and then read them into the discussion board, but since most students are not going to take extra steps if its not necessary, I think that simply making the expectations clear might be enough to largely avoid this problem. The instructor should make it known in advance that the (non-scripted) voice discussion posts are graded for expression, and that perfection isn’t expected. Then, if (when) we notice it happening anyway, we can raise the issue with the particular student. Overall, I think we stand to gain more than we stand to lose by using this excited new tool.
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