When I first read about MOST, I was very glad to see a method that is used for at-risk students. So far, none of my graduate courses have discussed students with learning disabilities or those who are at-risk. I believe that literacy is important and this method is useful as a way to meaningfully engage at-risk students in learning. It is very necessary to capture the attention of these students at an early age so that they can have a bright future.
The only limitation I see is that, if the videos are poorly planned and produced, they will only be a source of entertainment for the students rather than a content-rich resource. The instructor must ensure that the videos support the content and instruction.
I like this method, but don’t think I will use it because I don’t have any at-risk students. If I ever need to use MOST, I will not hesitate to do so and I am glad that I know of its existence.
I could see this method being used to teach language. I lived in Germany for six years and attempted to speak the language in three ways.
1) Immersing myself in the environment-didn’t work so well. The Germans didn’t seem to understand me, though I do speak fluent restaurant German.
2) Taking conversation courses-Was good for learning basic grammar and how to structure a sentence. Some of the practice conversations were kind of contrived. For example, “My name is Karen. I come from the USA.” does not come up in many conversations.
3) Watching German TV-I learned a great deal the few times we were on tour and I got to watch German tv, especially one particular show with a lot of drama. I could understand even more by turning on the closed captioning.
The point of all of this is that I believe meaningful video with text works for language acquisition and basic literacy. MOST is the equivalent of me watching German TV with the closed captioning turned on so that I can learn to speak the language.
There are many ways to use MOST with technology. I imagine that schools with at-risk students generally don’t have good budgets so low-budget or free might be the best plan. If the students need to create their own online book to tell a story, Bookbuilder is something they can use. I have managed to do a lot of things with Microsoft products as well. For example, I can take clip Art in a Power Point saved as a JPEG and turn it into a movie with Windows MovieMaker. For the narration you can either use Audacity, a free audio recorder, or a text to speech program. I have found some free text to speech programs, although the voices don’t sound as natural as the paid programs. You can always upgrade and they have voices in different languages. Here is a link to one I used last week.
http://www.spokentext.net/login.php
Karen, it's interesting to hear of your experience learning German through TV programs as it is very similar to my own experience. Establishing a goal, like learning language, is a great way to turn passive viewing of television into an active process.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up good points about the situation with at-risk students such as budgets and resources available to help them. If government entities cannot manage, perhaps it's possible to leverage aid from non-profit orgs. Fortuntately there are free online tools available, like you mentioned, which helps.
I would like to look into your text to speech idea. I've been trying to think of ways to expose my Chinese language students to more listening and reading practice. Even though text to speech is not perfect, it could assist students with recalling pronunciation of characters that are less memorable to them.
Ginny,
ReplyDeleteI don't know why watching tv with the closed captioning worked for me, but it did. I guess it was because the language was used in context. I wasn't studying grammar or sentence construction, but I was hearing how the sentences are put together in everyday conversation. I believe that is the way children learn to talk so why not learn a foreign language that way?
I see that the text to speech program has different languages, I just didn't want to pay money to use them. I wonder how they sound.
Karen -
ReplyDeleteI started laughing when I read "For example, “My name is Karen. I come from the USA.” does not come up in many conversations". I remember being in the car with my daughters, listening to either Spanish or French language tapes with the contrived language. We kept cracking up with laughter over similar contrived situations. But I think this ties into your comment about poorly produced videos being a source of amusement rather than learning if they are not done well.
We have to come up with methods that engage students and make them want to explore further. I found a great collaborative story program through a colleague - Storyboard.com. Have you seen this one?
Barb
I agree with many of your comments and insights. I also liked how the MOST model was the first of all the models to address not only SWD and ESL but also literacy in general - as mentioned in my post. Again, good blog post this week.
ReplyDelete