Students' perceptions of a web-based platform for

Students’ perceptions of a web-based platform for practicing Spanish Beate Luo∗

Abstract For Chinese learners of Spanish, the differences in the Spanish grammar compared to Chinese grammar are very challenging. Not just sentence structure is very different, even more difficult is the conjugation of verbs because in the Chinese language verbs do not change. To be able to cope with this problem, students need to practice. However, when doing exercises in a traditional classroom, the teacher cannot check on every student’s results, especially in large classrooms with over 40 students as we are facing them regularly at our school. To overcome this problem, the web-based platform Conjuguemos was used to give students the opportunity to practice their grammar problems in- and outside of the classroom. This paper introduces the platform and explores students’ perceptions of practicing a foreign language online using a questionnaire. Overall students’ responses to the use of the online platform to practice grammar, vocabulary, and listening was positive. However, their shyness to ask for clarification if they did not understand their problem after checking the answer key was the greatest obstacle. ∗

Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Feng Chia University.

Beate Luo

1. Introduction In the last few decades, the use of technology has widely increased in the classroom and there is now a trend to web-based learning with more and more resources being developed by teachers and other professionals. Online and blended learning are now offered at many institutions around the globe. In online learning, students can individualize their learning as they can go through the teaching material at their own pace. As Chen (2008) stated, an important factor that affects learning performance in online learning environments is the learner’s ability to self-regulate his/her learning. Blended learning combines the advantages of online learning with the advantages of brick-and-mortar classrooms where the teacher can provide scaffolding for the learning and students can receive instant feedback when encountering problems. King (1993) advocated teachers switch their roles from “the sage on the stage” to “the guide on the side”, i.e., instead of lecturing to a class of students who just listen passively, the teacher should “facilitate students’ interaction with each other in their knowledge-producing endeavor” (p 30). This form of teaching has been advocated in blended learning approaches to improve learning by accommodating different learning styles, and providing students with more control over their learning (Tenneson & McGlasson, 2006). Going online helps students to take a more active role in their learning. However, before 196

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starting a blended learning approach, the teacher should think which parts of the course would best be done online. Furthermore, the teacher should keep in mind that not all students will be willing to embrace new technology for learning. As Rogers (2003) has shown, innovativeness, i.e. “the degree to which an individual […] is relatively earlier in adopting new ideas than the other members of a system” (p. 22), is normally distributed. This means that there might be students that will be eagerly trying out the technology offered in a course while others will lag behind and might need special attention to overcome their reluctance. These findings have been confirmed by Kim et al. (2013) who used the Technology Adopter Category Index (TACI) score (Dugas, 2005) to describe students’ willingness to use mobile devices for language learning. When starting to learn Spanish, students in Taiwan are confronted with a language that has a very different grammar compared with their native language. While the Chinese language has a higher tendency to left branching or ‘head-last’, Spanish is mostly right branching or ‘head-first’. So when students want to speak Spanish and try to do so by translating from their mother tongue, sentence structure is becoming a big issue. Here is an example of the differences between Spanish and Chinese sentence structure: Spanish text:

Deseo retirar dinero de mi cuenta.

Literal translation: 我要 提出來 錢 從我的戶頭 。 Actual translation: 我要從我的戶頭裡提錢出來。

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However, the most challenging grammar problem is the use of verbs. While verbs in Chinese do not change, Spanish verbs do and they do so not only due to changes in tense (like verbs in English) but also due to the grammatical person of the subject. And because of being different for each grammatical person, pronouns are normally omitted. Thus, Spanish is a null subject language, while Chinese is a pro-drop (pronoun dropping) language, where pronouns can only be dropped if they are pragmatically inferable. Furthermore, in Spanish there are three types of verbs that differ in their endings and in the way they are conjugated. However, this is not enough; there are also numerous exceptions to the regular conjugations such as irregular first person singular forms and a number of totally irregular verbs. Just a change in word stress can give a verb a very different meaning. For example, the following forms of the Spanish verb caminar have different meanings when the word stress is on the second syllable

camino = (I) walk

or the last syllable

caminó = (he/she/[polite] you) walked

This example shows that due to incorrect word stress there is not only a change in the grammatical person but also in the tense. So mastering the verb conjugations is extremely important. It also shows another problem our students struggle with – the verb form for the polite form of ‘you’ (您) is the same as for the third person ‘he/she’. When practicing in class, especially in a large class, the author has noticed that many students do not correct their mistakes once the 198

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correct answers have been provided on the blackboard. When asking students why they still have incorrect answers written in their textbooks, they reply that they can’t see from the back of the class, they had been absent the week before and done the exercise at home without getting feedback, or they had been distracted while the answer was provided and when they paid attention again, the answer had been erased already. In addition, the exercises in a textbook are often not sufficient for students to gain automaticity in their use of verb conjugations. However, for speaking freely, automaticity in choosing the correct verb form is very important. So for giving students more opportunities to practice and providing immediate feedback we are now using the web-site Conjuguemos (https://conjuguemos.com). In the first part, the web-site will be introduced and its functionality explored. The next part will deal with the mechanisms that were incorporated to help students who struggle with problems which concern the use of the program as well as those that concern grammar problems. The remainder will explore students’ perceptions of the use of the platform and the integration of additional features with the aim of further improving the use of such an online platform in the teaching of Spanish.

2. Conjuguemos The name of the website literally means ‘let’s conjugate’. However, this web-site is not just for practicing conjugations – there are also exercises for vocabulary training and other grammar practices. 199

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In addition to Spanish, the following languages are supported: Portuguese, French, Latin, and German. The advantages of the website compared to other online websites for learning a foreign language is that the teacher can build his/her own exercises. Furthermore, the teacher can import exercises from the Conjuguemos library or from other teachers who are using the site and adapt those exercises if necessary, e.g. exchange vocabulary items the students haven’t learned, yet. This enables the teacher to tailor exercises to his/her students’ needs. With permission from the publisher, all the exercises of the textbook we use in class (Luo & Hsieh, 2012 and Luo, 2013) were uploaded to Conjuguemos so that any teacher who uses these textbooks can also use the exercises on Conjuguemos for his/her students when searching the library of the platform for the number of the exercise. However, when searching for an exercise, 0 must be added for any number below 10, e.g. exercise 9.3 in the book refers to 09.03 in the Conjuguemos library of teacher created activities. 2.1 Verb conjugations The conjugation trainer can be set for single or multiple tenses. In the single tense version, the student is given an infinitive and a pronoun and has to provide the correct form of the verb. A time limit can be given and the teacher can ask students to reach a certain amount of correct answers in a given time, e.g. fifty correct verb forms in five minutes. For students who are not very familiar with typing the Latin alphabet as, for example, our students who mostly

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type Chinese, this is a speed that does not give them much time to look up the conjugations. The feedback can be set to either only prompt ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ or to additionally provide the correct form. There are also a verb chart and a conjugation button available that can be enabled or disabled by the teacher (figure 1).

Figure 1: Verb conjugation interface

While the verb chart shows the conjugation of all verbs of the exercise, the conjugation button can be switched on only while the time is running and shows the conjugation of the verb presently given. The student has to press the ‘ok’ button to be able to resume

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the exercise and the conjugation chart disappears. So the student has to remember the form, while the conjugation chart can be opened in another window and be left open. When time is up, the student can record his/her score in the gradebook. The score will show the percentage of correct answers and the amount of correct verbs together with the amount of total verbs displayed during the time chosen. If the conjugation button is enabled, the teacher also gets a record of how often the conjugation button was pressed.

2.2 Vocabulary

Figure 2: Vocabulary activity interface

The vocabulary interface is similar to the verb conjugation as it is 202

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also a timed exercise. But different from the conjugation trainer, a word is given and the student needs to give the correct translation. A vocabulary chart is provided if enabled by the teacher. In addition, flashcards can be printed out and there are various games for vocabulary learning that use the vocabulary items from the exercise (figure 2). The vocabulary items are given in English and Chinese because the system does not accept Chinese characters alone as translation for the Spanish words. However, the Chinese can be added after the English translation. Furthermore, as we always have several foreign students in our Spanish classes who are often not very familiar with Chinese writing, this suits us very well. 2.3 Grammar exercises The grammar exercise interface resembles a cloze quiz where students have to add a word, a phrase, or a complete sentence in the provided blank (Figure 3). The system accepts multiple correct answers. In our classes this interface is also used for listening exercises. While Conjuguemos does not allow for file attachments, students can go to the publisher’s website. This website is printed on the back of the textbooks we use in class (Luo & Hsieh, 2012 and Luo, 2013). So students can listen to the recordings on the publisher’s website while doing the listening exercises in Conjuguemos.

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Figure 3: Grammar activity interface, here used for a listening exercise

3. Additional features of the course In order to provide more feedback than just the answer key, the discussion board on our school’s e-learning platform iLearn was used. A forum for each unit of the textbook was created where students could start threats on different exercises they had problems with. To give them extra incentives, students who correctly answered a question of their classmate could receive extra credit points for their semester score. As some students might be shy to ask questions in public, they were shown how to make their questions anonymously. The forum made sure that students who studied at home and encountered a problem would get feedback within 1-2 days and did not have to 204

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wait until the next class session or come to the teacher’s office for help. To help students track their progression, a table was posted on the discussion board. Students copied the table and posted it to their own thread. Every week, they filled in their result for each exercise they did on

For

Conjuguemos.

exercises

to

be

considered

‘finished

successfully’ (éxito) students had to reach 40 correct entries in five minutes for vocabulary exercises (marked green), 50 correct entries in five minutes for conjugation exercises (marked red) and 85 % correct answers in the grammar/listening exercises (unmarked). Table 1: Example of a table for tracking students’ progress Coding: green = vocabulary, red = verb conjugation, yellow = goal reached L.1 0

2 3

4

5 7

8a 8b 9

10

11 13 14a 14b 17

18 19 20 23 24 30 éxito %

43 68 74 56 46 98 87 95 100 100 97 74 100 100 100 63 48 35 L.2 0

2

3

4

5

6

7

9

10

11

12 14 15

L.3 0

2

3 6

7

8

10 11 12a 12b 13 16 17

12 71

16a 16b 17 18 19 20 21 30

18

19

20 21 22 30

4

The teacher checked their results with the gradebook in Conjuguemos and marked those exercises yellow where they had reached the goal, summing up the amount of successfully finished exercises (éxito) and the percentage of overall finished exercises (%) of each lesson on the right of the table. Table 1 gives an example of a student’s table while the student was still working on the exercises of lesson 1 (L.1). Due to the coloring, it was easy to see which exercises

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still posed difficulties to the student but that she was on time with her exercises. In addition, each time a student reached 30%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of successfully finished exercises of one lesson, s/he received a badge that appeared next to his/her table. It was hoped that this system would motivate students, if their scores were too low, to do extra work to finish the exercises successfully instead of just doing them once.

4. Materials and Methods 73 university students of two classes of beginning learners of Spanish took part in the survey. There were 23 male and 50 female students from sophomore to senior years. Participants were asked to answer the survey items using a five point Likert-type scale ranging from strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, to strongly disagree. Questions on background information included items such as gender, result of the midterm exam (3: 100-80, 2: 79-60, 1: below 60), and time using Conjuguemos outside the classroom (3: regularly, 2: sometimes, 1: seldom or never). The course, a two hours/two credits course for beginners of Spanish, was divided into two sections: the first period was in a regular classroom with multimedia access, while the second period took place in a computer classroom. During the first period, new content was introduced and pair work or group work exercises done and other activities such as games or role plays, while the second period was used to do the exercises on Conjuguemos. The questionnaire was bilingual Chinese/English as there were

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several foreign students in each of the classes for whom the Chinese questionnaire might have caused problems of understanding. The questionnaire was given two weeks before the final exam in order to discuss the results with the students in the last week of the semester. It consisted of several parts, the first one asking about computer use and learning in general. The second part considered feedback and the last one the additional features. The questionnaire had been developed by the researcher, revised by several other teachers and used in a pilot study in a class for high beginners of Spanish to test validity and reliability. For the statistical analyses SPSS was used. This included “alpha if item deleted” to test if reliability would increase if a question was deleted. The questionnaire was re-run in the pilot study class and its reliability measured calculating Cronbach’s alpha which resulted in r = 0.795 (p