Teacher andlearner roles: Same or different in a 24/7 real-time audio-conferencingenvironment?

MarkusKötter & Lesley Shield

1. Introduction

Language learners at the British OpenUniversity [OU], the United Kingdom's biggest distance learning provider, haverelatively few chances to practise their speaking and listening skills. Asdistance learners, they spend majority of their studies working with print,video, and audio materials at home, at a distance from each other and fromtheir tutors. OU students receive only up to 21 hoursper year of face-to-face tuition. To increase the amount ofstudent-student and student-tutor interaction, then, the Centre for ModernLanguages [CML] has conducted a number of pilot studies to investigatealternative models of course tuition.

This paper describes these investigationswith a particular focus on the most recent of them; learners of French andGerman took part in pilot studies which used synchronous voice-over-Internetconferencing and Lyceum,an in-house OU application which can be described as an "integrated audiographics package". We discuss the role of thetutor in these virtual learning environments [VLEs], the design of the learningactivities and summarise learner responses and learning outcomes with referenceto the fuller integration of VLEs into 'mainstreamed' language provision at theOU. Data analysed and described include copies of student e-mail, audiorecordings of individual sessions, tutor observations and learner feedbackobtained through a series of questionnaires.

2. Thedistance learning model: addressing the issues

The model of distance learning adopted for OU language courses isone where learners work mainly at home, on their own. They have fewopportunities to practise their speaking and listening skills in real timeinteraction with other learners. To address this situation, in 1995,researchers at the CML began to pilot telephone conferencing with students whowere unable or unwilling to attend their regular, face-to-face tutorials. In1997, this learning environment was expanded to include e-mail as well astelephone conferencing. In other words, learners could now use an additionaltool which allowed them to work with each other between scheduled telephoneconferences. Learnersparticipated in activities which required them to collaborate in order to reacha joint outcome. Each activity comprised an introductory telephone conferenceduring which students received details of their task and concluded with asecond telephone conference in which the learning outcomes were presented. Inthe interim period, learners were asked to communicate with each other and withtheir tutors via e-mail to prepare their final session.

It was found that, compared to telephone conferencing without e-mail support, the rehearsal of contributions via e-mail improved the output in the final session in terms of students' fluency and confidence as well as with regard to their ability to ask questions, to request clarification and to express disagreement (Stevens & Hewer 1998).

3. Real-timeaudio-conferencing

By 1997, the increased robustness ofInternet audio technology allowed more flexibility in terms of synchronouscollaboration than does telephone conferencing (facilities are available on a24/7 basis and need not be booked in advance), and two pilot studies were setup in 1998 and 1999 using voice-over-Internet applications. It was hypothesisedthat factors affecting learner behaviour in telephone conferencing such asavailability of contextual cues or frequency of meetings would resurface in thenew, Internet-based environment. However, we anticipated that the increasedflexibility and 24/7 availability offered by Internet-based tools would reducestudents' reluctance to take risks during scheduled learning events, since theywould be able to practise their speaking skills at any time they and theirpeers could arrange to be online together between those events. Moreover, weassumed that the richer learning environment (see Section 3.1) would not onlyfoster learners' fluency and their re-cycling of previously acquired vocabularyand structures in new settings, but that it would further improve the learningexperience. Unlike the learning environments previously offered, students couldmeet online at times complying with their own needs or even establish self-helpgroups. In other words, learners had more control over their learning processand more choice as to how they would achieve their objectives.

From October 1998 to January1999 and from March to June 1999, a total of seventy-five students met once aweek with their tutors in one of nine groups in order to collaborate onspecially-developed learning activities. The first phase of this study tookplace in between the OU's academic years (October-January) while the secondphase ran alongside learners' regular course work (February-March). Studentswere recruited from the first-level German course [L130] and from the finalFrench course [L210]. L130 requires an intermediate target language competence(roughly equivalent to British O-levels or GCSEs). L210 students, on the otherhand, will generally have reached a level of proficiency at the end of their OUstudies which corresponds to what they would have achieved after two years oflanguage studies at a campus university in the UK.

3.1 Thelearning environment

Learnersparticipating in the audio-conferencing project had access to VoxChat, an Internet-based audio-conferencingclient with a text chat facility, a dedicated website and e-mail. The websitewas used to provide learners with information about activities, partners'e-mail addresses and technical help whilst e-mail was included to enable tutorsand learners to arrange meetings and to exchange drafts, notes or otherinformation. Finally, as shown in Figure 1, VoxChat was chosen because it offers addedfunctionality to what is possible in telephone conferencing. Learners could:

subdivide into smaller groups and move into new "rooms";
"see" who was talking and who else was in the same virtual room;
exchange brief text chat messages with each other;
call for help or assistance by inviting other users to join them in their room.

Figure 1: The VoxChat client

3.2 Audioconferencing:the learner experience

Questionnaires about the experience of using this VLEwere distributed to participants in the pilot studies at the end of eachactivity. Analysis of data gathered in this way reveals that participantsparticularly liked VoxChat's speaker icon. Severallearners stated that this feature enabled them "to see who it is who isspeaking", adding that it was thus easier to respond to individual membersof their group. On the other hand, they also noted that the reduced availability of visual cues (such as facialexpressions and gestures) in this VLE made it difficult for them to determineif another student had finished speaking. They asserted that the use of thevoice-over-Internet client forced them to concentrate much harder on what wasbeing said than in a face-to-face setting. A knock-on effect of this focusingof learners' attention was, as one learner phrased it, that there was"possibly less chance of being side tracked". Students were dividedin their opinion as concerns the desirability of this effect, some believingthat the implicit anonymity of the medium made it easier to contribute to groupdiscussion, others claiming that their oral performance was better in a face toface setting. No assessment had been made of learners’ interactivecompetence before the pilot tests. However, research in other VLEs suggeststhat anonymity allows shyer or less-confident learners to contribute using theforeign language in a way they might not in a face-to-face situation (Turbee1996).

Tools such as VoxChat require differentturn-taking routines from those which apply in face-to-face exchanges. Theturn-taking protocols used by voice-over-Internet tools like this differ evenfrom those used by participation in telephone conversations. Users of VoxChat thisInternet-based tool are obliged to click on a "Talk" button beforetheir speech can be transmitted. Students therefore had to make an additionalstep before they could make themselves heard. As this made it more difficult touse oral back channel cues such as "uhm" or "yeah" tosignal agreement or disagreement without interrupting the flow of theconversation (although the technology actually supports this type ofinterjection), learners received less and less complex feedback from theirpeers than in face-to-face or telephone conferencing situations. However, oncelearners had become used to these specifics of VoxChat, debates becamemore lively and animated and by the final activity had almost reached the paceof face-to-face interaction.

3.3 Using e-mail

Most of thelearning activities developed for the pilot studies required students to meetat least once per week between their tutorials in order to collaborate furtheron a task. For example, they might be required, as a group, to providesolutions for traffic problems in a German town or to prepare a feature for afictitious radio programme. It was anticipated that students would communicateextensively via e-mail between their scheduled online sessions and that theywould also hold additional audio conferences.

Project data confirm that more than 60% of the participants collaboratedwith each other in writing. This figure rose to 100% for two tasks during thesecond set of pilot studies. Learners utilised e-mail to:

circulate drafts of project-related written work amongst members of their group;
arrange and remind each other of on-line meetings;
apologise for absences;
exchange personal information.

But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of learner e-mail was theirchoice of language. Although students did not receive instructions about whichlanguage to use in their e-mail, about two thirds of the e-mail messagesexchanged among French students, as well as among the linguistically lessadvanced learners of German, were written in the target language. In addition,those students who used English in their messages even acknowledged this:

I'm sorry this is in English but I'm short oftime and want my message to be clear.

If Martha couldgive us the benefit of her experience, initially in English, it may make therest of the task easier. …

(excerptsfrom student e-mail)

As well as acknowledging the importance of using the target language,even when writing in English, there is also evidence that students wereprepared to take risks, acknowledging that it was more important on occasion topractise its use rather than to compose an error-free message. For example, theauthor of the extract from student e-mail below signals his uncertainty aboutthe correct article for "e-mail" by inserting a "(?)" after"das".

Ich danke Ihnenfuer das (?) e-mail.

(excerpt fromstudent e-mail)

3.4 Usingvoice-over-Internet

Learners from each phase of the pilot studies held between ten and twelve weekly tutored online sessions. They were invited to organise as many additional meetings between themselves as they wished in order to prepare for the scheduled events. Tutored events usually began with a brief 'sound check' to ensure that all participants were properly connected to the server. While learners continued to arrive, students and their tutor engaged in both social maintenance conversation (Murray 1991) and discussed matters concerning the actual project work. After five to ten minutes, learners then went to different "rooms" and either continued to work in groups for the rest of the session or reconvened - being called back to plenary by their tutor - for a short de-briefing. In a final session for an activity, however, students and their tutor would stay together in one room for the whole meeting, while the learning outcomes of the entire learning activity were presented to the plenary group by individual small groups of learners.

A preliminaryexamination of recordings of students' conversations, both in the presence ofand without their tutor, shows that, like e-mail, learners almostexclusively used the foreign language. Moreover, despite the initial obstaclescited above, learners from both ends of the proficiency spectrum managed tohold meaningful conversations in German and French respectively with andwithout their tutors.

The qualitativeanalysis of the data also revealed that learners' engagement as well as theirindividual success varied depending on factors such as group size, task type,learners' previous language learning experiences, their existing proficiency inthe target language and their expectations of the online learning experience.

Students across languages and pilot study phases reported that their confidence in their ability to communicate in the target language had received a massive boost. But not only did learners' confidence increase, they also demonstrated a sense of responsibility to the group of the type referred to by Little (1996) as being important for the development of learner autonomy. In the following example, the writer expresses that she felt obliged to take part because of group expectations.This suggests that, left to her own devices, she may have dropped out of thepilot study. However, she continued to participate and so gained the benefit ofincreased confidence in the use of the target language.

I felt obliged to participate and the practice boosted my confidenceI was amazed how much I could keep going off the cuff so to speak when I feltother members of the group were expecting my input.

(Student questionnaire response)

This effect was not one which we predicted, but it is,nevertheless, interesting and worthy of further investigation.

Students respondedin different ways to individual tasks and to the group sizes they regarded asmost favourable to their learning styles. Thus, although there is a host ofevidence to show that the"output brought about through [...] collaborative dialogue may allowlearners the necessary support to outperform their competence and in theprocess develop their interlanguage" (Swain 1995:137), the mere provisionof learners with options to practise a language is not in itself a panacea forlanguage learning (Ortega 1997).

3.5 Tutorrole

The nature of distance education requires that students involved in thistype of learning command a distinct set of strategies that allows them to copewith the specific demands of their studies. It takes time to develop theseskills, and learning at a distance is at first a rather unfamiliar and possiblyeven alienating experience for many adult learners. Although "[a]ll of usare autonomous as a result of developmental and experimental learning"(Little 1996:25), successful online provision must account for learners'individual preferences as well as their past experience.

Appreciating the gap between the participants' ideal level of strategiccompetence and their present concurrent needs, an approach was chosen thatcombined the availability and the guidance of a tutor with a set of tasks whichwere specifically designed increasingly to liberate the learner from overttutor dependence (Hauck & Haezewindt 1999). Tutors matched their behaviourto the perceived needs of their students in different ways. Tutors of the linguistically less advancedstudents of German often 'dropped in' to check on learners' progress and tookon a very active role in the management of the discussion. Dealing with moreadvanced learners, their French counterparts, on the other hand, remainedincreasingly in the background and expected learners to invite them to join thegroup if they needed advice. In addition, while the German tutorials wereusually framed with plenary meetings at the beginning and at the end of eachscheduled session, learners of French mostly did not come back together as agroup before the final plenary session.

Data from thequestionnaires suggest that most students were satisfied with the role theirtutors played in facilitating the interactions. The less advanced learnersappreciated tutors:

being patient;
pulling conversational threads together;
not damaging the little confidence you might have".

In contrast, the Frenchlearners were particularly pleased that theywere given time to prepare their responses and that theirtutors "added little bits of new vocabulary, extended the subject matterof the discussion or brought others in to it".

3.6. Correcting errors

Learners from either end of the proficiency scalecommented that they had hoped for more individual tuition and more correctivefeedback than they received during the course of the pilot studies with audioconferencing.

No tutor offered asignificant amount of error correction but each of them intervened verbally orby using VoxChat's textchat facility to suggest more idiomatic or appropriate alternatives to what astudent had produced at some stages. Furthermore, some tutors noted downstudents' errors and e-mailed generalised feedback to all learners in theirgroup on the day after a given session. Although each of these approachesworked to a degree, every option also posed new problems: E-mailed feedbackoften arrived too late to be of use, instant written corrections occasionallywent unnoticed if they were not supplemented by verbal explanations and oralfeedback eo ipso meantan interruption to the flow of the conversation. More research is thereforeneeded to identify other suitable ways for corrective feedback. This probablyalso requires the use of a different set or combination of media and furtherlearner and tutor training and expectation management.

4. UsingLyceum

A tool whichpromised even more flexibility than the combination of audioconferencing ande-mail became available to tutors in the spring of 1999 with the Lyceum software, a revised version of the earlierOU-built KMi Stadium(Scott & Eisenstadt 1998). The audio component of Lyceum provides much thesame functionality as VoxChat in that users can interact in real time, have equal access to the floor and that a 'rooms' metaphor is employed, allowing users to subdivide into small groups in different "rooms", But Lyceum also offers users a whiteboard where learners can broadcast andmanipulate graphic information. This tool, unlike many shared whiteboards, hasboth a foreground and background component. Users can thus draw on or annotatethe foreground without altering the content of the background layer of thewhiteboard. This is particularly valuable when learners need to erase what theyhave produced, since the background remains the same no matter how many changesare made tot he foreground. Finally, Lyceum offers a concept map facilitywhich users can employ to exchange or to collaborate on written data in realtime (see Figure 2 below). Every "room" contains its own version ofeach of these tools, thus offering users the opportunity to share and editgraphics and text in small groups or in plenary session. Whiteboards andconcept maps can be saved and brought to plenary by their designers, thusenabling each small group to present its own interpretation of a task to thewhole group.

Figure 2: Lyceum

To date, the CML has conducted trials with Lyceum with students of second-levelOU German and French courses and many issues that were prominent in earlierpilot studies have reappeared. For example, students and tutors have neededtime and help to familiarise themselves with the VLE. Similarly, they onlygradually developed the confidence to produce longer oral contributions and tochallenge others' views in this environment. Lyceum, with itsgraphical capabilities, also allowed tutors to develop more flexible tasks. Forexample, Figure 2 illustrates how students used the concept map to collectideas and keywords they would use later for a radio programme about the 10thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Students took full advantage of being provided with a graphics-enhancedVLE and met frequently between scheduled sessions to prepare annotations to thegraphics provided by tutors, as well as to discuss the task with which theywere involved. Furthermore, learners used Lyceum as a tool to socialise witheach other. An aspect of online conferencing which has been identified as beingimportant to the success of a learning activity involving conferencing tools(Lamy & Goodfellow 1999) was frequently referred to by participants in the Lyceum pilot studies; inresponse to questions about the application’s use learners usuallyincluded a reference to socialisation, and this is an area which is currentlybeing investigated further;

[Lyceum provides an]… opportunity to meetother students while removing the rush / stress of trying to get to tutorials.The combination of audio, graphics and e-mails also make it more possible forpeople to stay in touch. The difficulty of finding some common time when somestudents work and others havefamilies who need their time in the evening would be more easily overcome.

(learner feedback)

5. Conclusion

Our studies have shown that distance language learners benefit from andenjoy using the VLEs detailed above to communicate with each other. Learnersgrew in confidence and this, in turn, encouraged them to take more risks inusing the target language than has previously been the case. Furthermore, manyof them used the tools provided between scheduled sessions and emphasised theimportance of social contact with other learners.

The role of the tutor, too, changed from that of the traditional'teacher' to one of administrator, event manager and, occasionally,co-learner. Much tutor time wasspent not in overtly dealing with language learning points, but in ensuringthat learners were in the correct "room" at the correct time or thatthey understood what was required of them for a particular activity. Peersincreasingly tutored each other, rather than calling for the help of the"official" tutor and, as activities progressed, learners increasinglydecided how they wished to run their scheduled sessions.

To summarise,although teacher and learner roles in VLEs do, indeed, appear to differ fromthose in face-to-face tuition, we suggest that this the pedagogic use of a VLEcan support and encourage learners to take increasing responsibility for theirown learning. Finally, bringing students together in a VLE can make asignificant contribution towards "removing the distance from distancelearning".

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