Project Description: The goal of this project is to create interactive activities for elementary and intermediate Spanish language classes that are available on the WWW and are, therefore, accessible for all ACS students.
No matter what textbook a school is using, certain topics are always addressed. These include: Greetings, Class Subjects, Daily and Leisure Activities, Food, Clothes, House and Furniture, Travel, Professions, Health. For each of these topics a web site will be established which will contain three areas. The first will be a set of interactive exercises that the students can do on-line. The second will be an area in which the students can "chat." This might be a live chat room or a bulletin board where students or the teacher can post written assignments that other students would be assigned to read and comment on/react to. Since this is an elementary-intermediate level class, these "discussions" would be necessarily basic. The third will be a page of links to existing Spanish sites on related topics with accompanying exercises. For example, for the page on "Class Subjects," links to universities in Spain and Hispanic America and their on-line syllabi might be listed, along with exercises that require the students to browse these items and draw some conclusions regarding cultural differences/similarities etc. Student responses could be written up and submitted via email to the professor and/or posted on the bulletin board for further discussion.
Benefits: The benefits of this project are threefold. First, by assigning these exercises, the teacher extends the amount of time the students interact/communicate in the target language. Communication is seen as an increasingly important goal in foreign language pedagogy, but we only require our students to communicate during the 3-4 hours they are inside the classroom. Language teachers assign written exercises as homework to "keep the students working" outside the classroom with vocabulary and grammar, but these exercises rarely require the students to react to and communicate with other students. The WWW is an excellent vehicle for outside the classroom interaction. Using the on-line interactive exercises and "chat area" will give students more practice and thus increase student proficiency in the output skills (writing and speaking).
Second, the links will provide the students with up-to-date cultural information on the countries we teach. Often, foreign language teachers complain about the difficulty of finding materials and time to incorporate these materials into the class. The WWW is, again, an outstanding source of cultural information, but the students (and often the professors) need guidance to explore it. Using the links will increase student knowledge of Hispanic culture.
Third, rather than limiting our students to interacting only with students at our university, if all ACS schools have access to this material and use it, students can interact with other students in other universities. This creates a level of excitement, which can increase motivation.
Similar projects: Several textbook companies, including Heinle & Heinle and Prentice Hall, have Web Pages associated with their elementary texts. Often, access to these materials is unrestricted. Unfortunately, few of these exercises are truly interactive. More often, they amount to little more than on on-line workbook. Additionally, they are closely tied to the textbook they were created for. Thus, if a teacher does not adopt the text, s/he cannot use these materials. This project's exercises will be interactive and will be generic enough that they could be used with any text.
Technological Requirements/Institution Support: To create this project, the author must be familiar with creation of web pages, forms, etc and have server space (estimate: 3 mg) to store the web pages once completed. Rollins College provides each faculty member with 5 mg of personal space. Rollins College also provides services to faculty and students to help in the creation of web pages through the IT department.
Integration in curriculum: This project, completed over the summer, will be included as one the required out of class assignments for one 101 and one 102 class in the Fall of 1998.
Assessment: Oral and written proficiency tests (ACTFL standards) and culture exams will be administered to the classes that used the web site and those that did not. Those that did should receive higher proficiency scores. The results of these tests (and the project itself) will be available on the web site.