67 VIGNETTE 4: JENNIFER CHOW THE “THINK ALOUD” METHOD: TECHNOLOGY-ASSISTED LANGUAGE SKILLS ENHANCEMENT Précis The Idea When Jennifer Chow began teaching English as Another Language (EAL) at Vancouver Community College (VCC) in 2007, giving students effective feedback on self-paced spoken assignments was a challenge. When students learn to write, the mistakes they make are recorded on paper, making it easy to point out errors and assign remedial practice. Not so with speaking. If there is no way to record self-paced spoken exercises, errors are gone as soon as they are spoken. The search for a solution led Jennifer on a quest for a technology-assisted way to record, review, annotate, and help students reflect on spoken assignments. After trying several potential solutions over the years, she now uses a Think Aloud method – a software-based multimodal feedback-reflection loop to improve speaking skills. The Learners Jennifer’s most recent blended learning class of 24 CLB-4/5 students ranged in age from 20 to 55, with the majority between 35 and 50. Class composition was diverse, with students from Ukraine, Turkey, Japan, Korea, Syria, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Afghanistan, and China. Coming from across the greater Vancouver area, the majority of daytime learners are female. Evening classes have a larger proportion of men. Unlike LINC, the VCC’s Pathways EAL program is open to Canadian citizens as well as newcomers. In the class of 24, three learners were citizens who had been in Canada for more than five years. The Approach The Pathways program for CLB 5-8 learners is divided into two courses – Speaking and Listening and Reading and Writing. About 70% of students take both courses at the same time, devoting 3 hours in the morning to one course and 3 hours in the afternoon to the other. During a 13-week course, students attend face-to-face classes two days a week. On the remaining three days, learning is asynchronous. In the Think Aloud method, which is used mainly in the Speaking and Listening course, students record a speaking assignment as either a voice or video file, then upload it to Kaltura Media Assignment in their own protected folder on VCC’s Moodle-based learning management system. Kaltura automatically creates captions of what the student said. Jennifer then listens to the assignment and adds notations to the video using screen casting technology. Students listen to the feedback and make their own notes, enabling Jennifer to see what they have understood from the feedback. Students use their notes to devise a plan for improvement, perhaps committing to several self-paced homework sessions to improve their use of, for instance, verb tenses.and develop a short presentation using Google Slides software. The course in which the WebQuest Interested in Learning More? Instructor Profile Context In Jennifer’s Own Words Application of Technology Standards CC-BY-NC-SA 2025 New Language Solutions Avenue Instructor Standards for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning, version 1.2
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