Are there any Web 2.0 tools suitable for helping over 60 different nationalities improve their Danish vocabulary and pronunciation? That was the challenge posed by the members of a project at a local college seeking to prepare foreigners for a standard Danish vocational course to become social care assistants. They invited me to share some suggestions and so I tried to come up with a selection of tools which could help.
Why is this newsworthy? I usually use online tools to support English teaching or teaching through the medium of English. English is the language which is best supported for language learners so when the brief is to help those learning Danish then straight away there are a good few problems which are not an issue when English is the language being taught.
Challenges include:
The user interface is English for most of the tools which are useful. When the common language is Danish and the native language ranges from Tagalog to Vietnamese through Thai, the English interface adds an unnecessary barrier to understanding. Google’s many apps are useful here since most of them can be presented in Danish even if the help files don’t follow suit.
Of course there are times when you want to use an English interface tool anyway such as Flickr for example with it’s wonderful notes facility or Voicethread for easy podcasting. I think that in this situation it means that the teacher must end up doing more of the preparation work and also producing detailed guidance about how to use the tool. Not exactly what the technophobic want to hear.
All those wonderful corpus based tools just don’t exist for Danish. So language level has to be judged almost by gut feeling rather than using the wonderful Lexical Tutor.
There has been progress though. The Acapela text to speech demo includes a Danish voice and I must say that Mette speaks very well, if a little fast. Google translate works with Danish although I’m not sure about Tagalog, Vietnamese, Thai and so on. And there are good tools you can use to get definitions of words on web pages or have the pages read out loud.
What the group were aiming to do was to get both the teachers and the students making videos. It was self-evident to the people in the room that mobile phones would be used to capture video. Their main question was about how to get these videos online. Self-hosted or use one of the tools which abound for sharing media? I’m quite partial to posterous.com because of the sheer simplicity of using it but I could see that this didn’t meet their needs since they wanted to build up some sort of A-Z for social care assistants. This means that an ordinary website or wiki would be more appropriate. It wasn’t until I got home that I realised that the new Google Sites also offers a wiki option so that could be a good solution.
The final thing we discussed was Facebook. I hesitate to press people to join Facebook in order to be part of a course. In fact this has just happened to my daughter who was adamant that she didn’t want to sign up but finally caved in when her French teacher set up a Facebook group for the class. On the other hand there are so many interesting apps which are being developed to work with Facebook that it becomes very tempting to use it as part of the armoury. I have experienced for myself a live training session in Facebook so I know that it can work. However I don’t think that it will be a major part of the solution in this case as I was told that many spouses of these foreigners see Facebook as a fast route to divorce and therefore forbid their wives to join. So Facebook may not be the ideal solution.
It was a great experience for me to work on a specific challenge like this. I hope that the small group of people I worked with experienced the day as a dialogue and got something out of it.