ICT in English Language Education: Bridging the Teaching-Learning Divide in South Asia (SpringerBriefs in Education) 9811690049, 9789811690044

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN EDUC ATION

Preet Hiradhar Atanu Bhattacharya

ICT in English Language Education Bridging the Teaching-Learning Divide in South Asia

SpringerBriefs in Education

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Preet Hiradhar · Atanu Bhattacharya

ICT in English Language Education Bridging the Teaching-Learning Divide in South Asia

Preet Hiradhar Department of English Lingnan University Tuen Mun, New Territories, Hong Kong

Atanu Bhattacharya Centre for English Studies Central University of Gujarat Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

ISSN 2211-1921 ISSN 2211-193X (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Education ISBN 978-981-16-9004-4 ISBN 978-981-16-9005-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

Advances in the use of technology in language education over the last few decades have steered language educators towards assessing various language learning opportunities inside and outside classrooms. With the shift in the role of the language teacher from instructor to facilitator of students’ learning, the incorporation of technology in language learning has also brought about a readjustment of existing teaching practices across the globe. ICT in English Language Education is a paradigmatic book written for English language education in the South Asian context to help language educators better understand the shift in pedagogic practices by incorporating technology in language learning programmes. With ICT at its core, the book demonstrates the different ways in which technology can be integrated with ongoing teaching and learning practices in language education by bridging the gap between theory and practice within a given context. The book sets off with the theoretical underpinnings of ICT in education and later moves on to the pragmatic considerations and subsequent implementation of ICT within and beyond language learning classrooms. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the frameworks within which ICT can be placed vis-à-vis teaching and learning in the Digital Age, the role of ICT for collaborative and co-operative language learning practices and its potential for practical implementation for language education. Furthermore, by examining the role of ICT tools in improving the relationship between teaching and learning in the classroom, the book illustrates how ICT can be incorporated for both receptive and productive language learning skills, such as listening, reading, speaking and writing within different pedagogic frameworks. As an attempt to make language learning ubiquitous, the book investigates the affordances of various technologies and how teachers can make them an integral part of the teaching–learning experience. By offering pedagogic strategies and practical guidance for selecting relevant platforms or software tools, the book considers various Web 2.0 tools for students to leverage their practices with new media technologies to provide a meaningful learning experience. The book also presents a larger perspective with regard to evaluating ICT with specific reference to institutional and governmental policy to guide language educators on managing ICT frameworks v

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within their institutions. Finally, as an attempt to prepare language educators for the future, the book provides a sneak peek into the short-, mid- and long-term horizons for ICT in language education. Tuen Mun, Hong Kong Gandhinagar, India

Preet Hiradhar Atanu Bhattacharya

Contents

1 ICT and the World Around Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 The Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1.1 Learning to Learn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 What and Why of ICT? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 Exploring the Potential of ICT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3.1 The Potential to PREPARE: Participants of the Twenty-First Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.3.2 The Potential to EXTEND: Access to Education—Equalizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.3.3 The Potential to REDESIGN: Learning Environment Redesigned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.3.4 The Potential to IMPROVE: Quality of Learning . . . . . . . . . . 13 1.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2 ICT, Communication, and the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 ICT and Its Use in Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 ICT as a Tool for Teaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 ICT for a Specific Subject . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.3 ICT for Preparing Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.4 ICT for Professional Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.5 ICT for Personal Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 ICT in the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Curricular Frameworks and ICT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 ICT for Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17 17 18 19 19 19 20 20 20 24 27 31 31

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3 ICT in the Classroom: Active Listening and Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Active Listening: Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 ICT and Listening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Teacher Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Teaching Skills and Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Active Listening and Integrated Skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.4 Active Reflection on Listening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.5 The Variety in Listening Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.6 Designing Listening Activities and Publishing on the Net . . . 3.4 ICT and Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Reading: Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Teaching Approaches in Second Language Reading . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Reading Today . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Using ICT Tools for Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.1 Forming Reading ‘Communities’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.2 Linking Reading and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.3 Using the Multilingual Potential of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 33 34 35 36 36 36 37 37 37 38 40 40 40 42 42 43 43 44 44

4 ICT in the Classroom: Speaking and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Spoken Skills: Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 ICT and Speaking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Teaching Writing: Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 ICT and Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.1 Writing as Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.2 Writing as Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.3 Writing as Situated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 47 48 50 53 55 55 56 58 60 61

5 ICT Beyond the Classroom: New Media and Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Functions of Technology Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Discussion Boards and Forums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Electronic Portfolios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 E-portfolio Creation Processes and Considerations . . . . . . . . . 5.4.2 E-portfolio Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Levels of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63 63 64 64 67 68 70 71 74 74

Contents

6 Managing ICT: Administration, Evaluation, and Policymaking . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Managing ICT: General Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 Mode of Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.2 Choosing the ICT Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Integration Within the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Evaluating ICT Tools Designed for Language Learning . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 The Developer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 The Learner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.3 The Product . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.4 Language Learning Potential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.5 Learner Fit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.6 The Focus on Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.7 The Authenticity of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.8 Assessing the Impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.9 Practicality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Designing an ICT Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 The Question of Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 Internet Safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 Reflection and Feedback Mechanisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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75 75 76 76 77 78 79 79 80 80 80 81 81 82 82 82 83 83 84 85 87 88

7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

Chapter 1

ICT and the World Around Us

Abstract This chapter provides the context within which Information and Communications Technology (ICT) can be placed vis-à-vis teaching and learning in the Digital or Information Age. The chapter describes how technological devices have become a part of our everyday lives and are yet to find an adequate place in our educational system. It specifically describes how ICT can be seen as an enabling factor in our teaching–learning practices and how contemporary web-based technology can provide a platform for enhancing and empowering these practices since it often shares some of the features of such practices. By doing so, it shows how in the new digital age, new ways of teaching and learning can be integrated within ongoing practices in schools and beyond. Keywords Everyday technologies · ICT · ICT potential · Twenty-first century skills · New age literacies · Design and access · Learning environments

1.1 The Beginnings A typical 24-h day in our lives today involves using a wide range of technologies directly or indirectly. We watch our favourite shows on the television or on a digital platform or listen to our favourite music on the radio or a podcast on an online streaming service to relax. We use mobile phones to get in touch with friends; we pay our bills online, and sometimes, we just look up some information on the internet. It is also true that many of the technologies that we take for granted today, such as being in constant touch with a close member of a family or receiving the latest news at the touch of a button, were not even thought of two decades ago! In a way, the beginning of the twenty-first century brought in a massive change in our use of technologies. This use of technology in every aspect of our daily lives has been commonly termed, the Digital Revolution. We live in an age where the massive growth of technology is part and parcel of a rapidly changing global world. The age, thus, is often referred to as the Information Age—an age of technology, information exchange, knowledge sharing, and communication. Above all, it is an age where technology is everywhere. The question, therefore, facing all of us teachers is this: how is this digital revolution or the Information Age relevant to our professional © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_1

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activities? How do we, as teachers, situate the role of learning or education within these networks of flow of information, often referred to as ‘information exchange’?

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • What is a 24-h day like for you? What kinds of technology do you use during a typical day? • How long have you been using these technologies? How frequently? • Are there any specific ways that you use technology in your professional life? • Make a list and see if the rest of the chapter addresses some of these issues. The current system of education which we all have been part of has been based on four major skills: reading, writing, counting, and memorizing. In a sense, our present-day education is often based on a one-way learning process. If we go back to our own school days, we will remember that the teacher was seen as someone who was supposed to ‘hand down’ knowledge to students, over a fixed period, in a prescribed format. In a similar manner, we were supposed to develop the ability to read, write, count, and memorize information. We were supposed to develop these skills in a manner dictated to us by our teachers. It would not be an exaggeration to say that this basic model has not changed greatly today across most educational settings. This is because our present education system still assumes that skills such as reading, writing, counting, and recalling information, will prepare students for a job that expects them to do precisely the same things, i.e., read, write, count, and memorize. However, with the emergence of the Information Age, these skills are not enough in themselves. There are many more skills that the students need to learn. The internet and computers have made learning much more exciting, and so, rote learning or memorizing may not be enough to prepare our students for this new Age. For one, the nature, the types, and the demands of participating in the Information Age are very different from the ones, let us say, twenty years ago. Jobs today do not require people to read and write only, but they also need people to read and write well, keeping in mind the various technologies they are using. Jobs do not require people to perform calculations or memorize given information repeatedly (since the available technologies can do them much faster and repeatedly without ‘getting tired’) but require them to use those calculations for analysis or other applications later. A large number of jobs today require people to possess and apply the necessary skills, by using a suitable form of technology to do so. We are so surrounded by technology nowadays that almost no job gets done without it. In today’s world of rapid changes, these skills may not be applicable to conditions that the students are going to face when they pass from their respective institutions. As a result, we as teachers need to address some of these new skills that the Information Age poses. We might need to think of redesigning our education system, bearing in mind the fast-changing world of the present and the future. We might also need to address the basic processes of

1.1 The Beginnings

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teaching and learning that need to be reformed to fit the requirements of the Age we live. But what exactly are these new skills, and how are we going to deal with them?

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Think of an answer to a question based on a lesson that you have taught in your class. • Imagine that you are now sending the answer as an email response to someone. Write the answer in an email format and send it to one of your friends. • Imagine now that you are going to post the answer on Twitter (there is a 280-character limit on messages on Twitter). Convert the answer into a 280-character Twitter message. The different formats of the answers can then be collected and shared with the class. Ask the class to reflect on the differences between the different messages. You can also encourage your students to make changes to the answers!

1.1.1 Learning to Learn As teachers, we know that learning is a life-long process. We need to equip students with skills that can enable continuous lifelong learning. What we require, therefore, is to encourage “learning to learn”. We need to show our students how to learn so that their process of constant learning can enable them to apply their skills relevantly given that they are more likely to face a different world after school. It is here that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) comes into play. ICT has the potential of introducing a much desirable transformation in education. It provides an opportunity to support new ways of imparting education. It can be used to extend educational abilities and opportunities by offering a range of learning experiences. ICT offers education to become relevant in a world which increasingly uses digital technology. ICT, thus, can successfully supplement our classroom teaching and can support what we are doing. As teachers, we can successfully make use of this to shape the educational futures of our students. Let us see what ICT can offer and how, by first understanding what ICT means.

1.2 What and Why of ICT? As teachers, we often come across the term ‘ICT’ and are compelled to think of ways in which it can be used in the classroom. Mainstream media, newspapers, television,

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and the internet are full of such ideas. However, what exactly do we understand by ICT is a question that most teachers are faced with. A fundamental understanding of the term ICT, that is, Information and Communications Technology, involves various technologies that are used to access, collect, process, and share information. According to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), ICTs are defined as, “a diverse set of technological tools and resources used to communicate, and to create, disseminate, store, and manage information” (Tinio, 2003). If we were to elaborate on each element in the definition of ICT, we would need to look at them individually and closely. So, let’s take a look at the elements embedded in this definition of ICT, namely, the resources used to ‘communicate’, ‘create’, ‘disseminate’, ‘store’ and ‘manage’ information. Today, we often use technology to ‘communicate’. Mobile phones are a very good example of this ‘anytime, anywhere’ technology. Further, we also use technology to ‘create’. We can create images, audio files, and video files. We can even ‘re-create’ many of the freely available things that are available on the internet. Think of all the jokes, images, videos, and memes that circulate on the internet and subsequently make way into our mobile phones. In a sense, this ‘creation’ also leads to some forms of ‘communication’. Also, since the term ICT contains the word ‘information’, we can ‘share’, ‘store’ and ‘manage’ different kinds of information. At times, this information may be small, for example, the messages or the photographs that we save or share on our phones. But sometimes, the size may be quite large, especially when they are stored on other devices, so much so, that we often forget that we have stored them! It is the combination and use of these technologies that help us to perform diverse things that is encompassed in the term ICT. Technologies that entail ICT, range from audio-visual aids such as voice recorders, compact discs or digital video disc players, radio, television, film, and transparency slides, as well as the latest computer and Internet-based technologies, such as desktops, laptops, mobile phones, mp3 players, smart recorders, high-definition projectors, interactive whiteboards, and a variety of touch-screen devices. The term ICT also includes various software and network-based connectivity applications (often called apps, in short) that run on these devices. In the initial days of ICT, these technologies were often separate. Thus, for example, if a school wanted to buy an audio device for listening practice, it would buy a tape recorder or an mp3 player. Today, more importantly, ICT is the ‘convergence’ or coming together of various networked, multimedia and telecommunications technologies. In other words, the ICT today brings together various physical as well as digital forms of technologies. For instance, an internet-based mobile phone will make it possible for us to talk, text, use email and engage with social media, as well as help us to use several other applications. All these functions are available in one small handheld device. This coming together of several functions on a single device or platform is known as ‘convergence’. The possibility of convergence of various technologies can

1.2 What and Why of ICT?

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be extremely helpful for us teachers to effectively incorporate ICT into our teaching. This brings us to the understanding of the range of features offered by ICT. Let us look at the various ICT features that are possible to incorporate into our teaching.

1.3 Exploring the Potential of ICT If we want to use the potential of ICT, we must carefully look at what it offers. We can explore the varied features of ICT based on its potential. These features can be broadly categorized into the potential to ‘prepare’, ‘extend’, ‘redesign’, and ‘improve’ learning in our classrooms. Table 1.1 summarizes the potential of ICT. Let us now examine the potential of ICT in relation to each of these features in detail. Table 1.1 Potential of ICT Potential of ICT Prepares

→

Twenty-first century participation New literacy skills Critical thinking skills Effective communication skills

Extends

→

Access to education Ease of access Equal opportunities

Redesigns

→

Learning environments Active Collaborative Integrative Evaluative

Improves

→

Quality of learning Motivation Facilitation Enhancement

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1.3.1 The Potential to PREPARE: Participants of the Twenty-First Century As we have said earlier, our students need a different set of skills in addition to what they have been conventionally trained to do within our schools. ICT can support this much-needed knowledge and skillset. Its potential can be seen in the features that enable effective participation and learning for our present and future generations. Let us look at these essential skills needed for students as participants in the digital age.

1.3.1.1

New Age Literacies

The ability to use ICT efficiently and effectively can prove advantageous in a fastgrowing connected world. This ability can be developed, if we recognize and pay attention to the new age literacies or twenty-first century skills. What, then, are these new-age literacies? Briefly, ‘literacy’ as a term has traditionally included reading, writing, and numeracy (or ability to deal with numbers). However, as discussed earlier, these literacies do not seem to be enough for the Information Age. The literacies of the digital age go beyond traditional literacy skills. In addition to the ability to be competent in the use of ICT, the new age literacies include the ability to find, evaluate, and make appropriate use of the sought information, work out meaning/s, and understand and present ideas creatively. For example, as teachers we often complain of the ‘Google syndrome’. The search engine ‘Google’ has become so popular with students (and teachers) these days, that we as teachers are often faced with the dilemma of deciding between what is students’ own writing and what has been directly lifted off Google. This is because information is so easily available on the internet today that a home assignment is often copied and pasted from Google or other internet sources. This is primarily because the amount of information available today at the touch of a key is overwhelming. Thus, though collecting, sifting, and presenting information have been a part of traditional classroom teaching, new age literacies demand a slightly modified set of skills. For example, a student who uses Google to find information also needs to be told what kind of information to collect, how to make a judgement about that information as well as how to put all that information together in a coherent whole. Thus, the new age demands a whole new set of skills of using the internet with its massive storehouse of information. This is what we can understand as new age literacies. As teachers, we, therefore, need to bring these skills to the classroom. We also need to remember that ICT alone cannot reform learning on its own. However, the ability to implement ICT effectively can transform learning processes. So, if incorporated into the education system, ICT most certainly has the potential to develop these new literacies of the Information Age.

1.3 Exploring the Potential of ICT

1.3.1.2

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Critical Thinking

As new-age literacies require learners to find, evaluate, and use information wisely, critical thinking becomes important for the twenty-first century learner. Let us think of a writing assignment based on comparing life in a city to life in a village. As a teacher, let us assume that we want to encourage skills such as curiosity, creativity, and higher-order problem-solving abilities, as well as using the language of comparison. We can ask learners to search the internet for images, stories, and newspaper reports on the given topic. We can also ask them to make a list of words that can be used for the required comparison. However, we know that the internet will give us all these pieces of information, but simply putting all the information together may not lead to critical thinking. We, as teachers, will also need to help students to categorize information, get rid of information that may not be relevant, connect the different pieces of information, and creatively analyse the information that they have collected. It is only through these processes that students will be able to develop critical thinking skills. If we as teachers can enable learners to adapt and manage themselves in this complex information environment, as well as create a desire to know more about a given topic; if we as teachers can help students in using their imagination as well as logical thinking effectively, then we will have successfully used ICT to facilitate the development of these critical thinking skills among students. We will further discuss this possibility of ICT in Chaps. 3 and 4 where we discuss the specific skills in relation to language learning with respect to listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Type a key word related to a lesson that you are teaching in the Google search box. For instance, ‘the use of a gerund’. • Make a list of the sites that Google opens. • Make a list of the decisions that you take to search the sites for ‘relevance to your lesson’, ‘usefulness for the class’ and ‘appropriateness to your own context’. • Which decisions determine your choices of the sites and how do you judge the ‘authenticity’ of the sites? In other words, how do you decide how reliable these sites are?

1.3.1.3

Effective Communication

Effective communication skills can be seen as the key to successful participation in the digital age. When we talk about effective communication, we cannot restrict ourselves to the ability to speak or write well alone. The term includes various other interpersonal and social skills needed for functioning well in the twenty-first century. These

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skills include the ability to collaborate with others and work in teams effectively. The increase in the number of workplaces as well as their corresponding productive outputs are now more reliant on successful collaborations among employees as well as organizations. This collaboration is often dependent on ICT. In schools too, ICT can become a boon for collaborative reading and writing activities. The ability to interact effortlessly by accessing, understanding and then, transmitting and conveying information competently, is also considered desirable for effective communication to take place. ICT, within a single platform, can combine diverse information, images, and videos and help us to collaborate across time and place. In other words, ICT can present information in multiple modes, in different formats, and can also change by taking into consideration the audience needs. We can thus, say that the implementation of ICT into learning can offer great potential for promoting the much-needed collaborative communication skills in the digital age. As we can see, the participants of the twenty-first century will need to possess new age literacy skills, critical thinking skills, and effective communication skills, all of which can be fostered by the integration of ICT into the education system.

1.3.2 The Potential to EXTEND: Access to Education—Equalizing A defining potential of ICT is its ability to expand and extend educational opportunities. With the help of ICT, education can be made accessible to inaccessible places, times, and people. In a sense, ICT provides an opportunity for everyone to equally participate in a digital world. Let us look at these opportunities in detail with examples.

1.3.2.1

Ease of Access: Anytime, Anywhere, Everywhere

ICT can go beyond the constraints of time and physical space, as it can be accessed anytime and anywhere, and practically everywhere, if the basic infrastructure works well. For instance, when teaching phonics or sounds systems of language in an English language class, the teacher may record the required sounds and give copies of her recordings on a compact disc to her students to practice at home. Alternatively, if internet connectivity is not a problem, she may upload her recorded sounds into a shared online space such as YouTube, or Google Drive and give her students access to those files. She can also provide her students with links to sites that have similar phonics exercises. Students in turn, can access the files on their compact discs or the Internet 24 h a day, 7 days a week, at home, in transit, or anywhere. To take it further, students can practice their skills in real time by getting online and connecting to learners or teachers beyond their geographical regions. This presents students with a sense of relevance to their learning, as they can practice and apply their skills beyond

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the classroom out in the real world. It is this potential ease of access that makes ICT a powerful tool of learning.

1.3.2.2

Diversity and Equal Opportunities

ICT not only transcends time and geographical boundaries but also economic and cultural boundaries. As the Information Age is turning the world into a globalized village, ICT is seen as a potential contributor to this phenomenon. ICT can be used by persons of any race, gender, caste, economic or social background. In a way, ICT could help promote equality and diversity. ICT has the potential to act as a bridge between the developed and developing world, the mainstream and the marginalized. Today, a wealth of educational resources can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. Resources not only in the form of learning materials, but human resources such as teachers, mentors, and peers are available with the help of ICT. These resources can travel across geographical, economic, and cultural zones. ICT makes it possible for any number of people to access all kinds of resources from remote and inaccessible locations. This is a remarkable potential offered by ICT.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Make a list of students who have access to computers at home/near their home and those who do not. • Think of an activity based on a lesson. This could be a simple search activity, for example, where the students need to find some information from the internet. • Ask students who have access to the internet at home to do the activity at home. Ask them to bring it to the classroom next day. • In the class, ask students to share the information with the class. Ask students, who do not have access, to feed the information on to a computer (if possible, in a computer in the classroom or in the computer lab) and create a presentation. Help them in this activity. • Share the presentation with the class. • Reflect on what this activity will be able to achieve.

1.3.3 The Potential to REDESIGN: Learning Environment Redesigned A valuable potential of ICT is the ability to bring about a major shift in the teaching– learning process. Introducing ICT to education does not simply mean doing things

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better than before. It also means recognizing the potential capability of ICT in transforming the way in which learning takes place. ICT eases and supports the shift of focus from teaching to a focus on learning. In other words, ICT can support a shift from teacher-centred classrooms to learner-centred classrooms. Let us first try to understand how a teacher-centred classroom is different from a learner-centred environment. There is a noticeable difference between the teachercentred and learner-centred environments across various aspects of teaching and learning. In a teacher-centred environment, the teacher takes the role of an expert and thus, conducts the class in an instructive manner. In these classrooms, knowledge is transferred from the teacher to the students without any scope for interaction and collaboration. The teacher generally becomes the final word for all learning that happens in the classroom. Concepts are taught as a collection of facts and memorizing those facts is given utmost importance. This is further emphasized in the assessments (for example, in the year-end examinations) which test students’ understanding purely on their capacity to remember what is taught to them in class. Finally, if technology is used in the class at all, it is often confined to mechanical uses where the teacher completely controls what the students do with the technology. An example of such mechanical activity is when students simply copy what is written on a blackboard by the teacher for a PowerPoint presentation. There is no learning taking place here since the activity is still teacher-centred. On the other hand, learner-centred environments offer more interactive and engaging experiences. The teacher here assumes the role of a facilitator and sometimes even a learner to participate in an interactive and collaborative session. The emphasis of the instruction is on inquiry, and concepts are taught not simply for themselves but as something that can be transformed through application within a context. For example, instead of asking students to copy things onto PowerPoint slides, if the teacher sets a task of visualising what is written and adding an image to what the students are writing, it goes a long way in transforming the concept to an application of the same. The teacher, then, can ask students to share in groups why they have chosen certain images for their task. Similarly, in the assessment, students are not simply tested for their memory but are asked to create computerbased portfolios over a period. It is the quality of understanding that is emphasized in these assessments (We discuss e-portfolios at length in Chap. 5). Finally, in a learner-centred environment, technology is used for communication, collaboration, and sharing, and this is where the shift lies. We can thus, see that learner-centred environments encourage learners to be active participants in the learning process. Students are presented with opportunities to find, integrate, apply, and share their knowledge with others. ICT provides the possibilities of such a dynamic learning environment to flourish. ICT helps redesign the learning environment to make it more learner centred. Let us now turn our attention to how ICT lends itself to effectively support learnercentred environments.

1.3 Exploring the Potential of ICT

1.3.3.1

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Active Learning

Learning is an active process and not a passive one. A traditional classroom often requires students to reproduce knowledge by memory. This involves the teacher dictating notes or handing out class notes which students are supposed to memorize and then write in the exams. However, it is not the repetition, but the production of knowledge that is more important for learning. Instead of rote-learning or memorization, students need to actively engage in learning with activities such as solving real problems, working on projects, and creating new information for the real world. For this kind of in-depth learning, learners need to be able to work on several different activities, where they can choose what to learn, and do it at a pace that is determined by them. This process involves the students to actively engage in the activities that they are doing. ICT can provide the necessary tools that promote learner engagement for this kind of active learning to take place.

1.3.3.2

Collaborative Learning

Learning is a social process and not an individual or solitary process. As knowledge in the real-world context is produced with collaboration, it is important for us to recognize sharing and collaboration as parts of learning. To actively engage in meaningful and interesting tasks, learners need to collaborate. They need to work in teams where every individual has varying capabilities. They need to extend their help and support to each other. ICT makes it possible for teachers and students to support this collaborative learning in the classroom and online. It also enables interaction and cooperation among students, teachers, peers, and experts across the region, country, or globe. For example, quite a few ICT applications like wikis, blogs, and groups can help create collaborative environments. We will discuss these applications in greater detail in our later chapters. Thus, by expanding learning spaces with varied opportunities, ICT encourages meaningful and collaborative learning.

1.3.3.3

Integrative Learning

Learning is integrative and contextualized. This means learners are able to absorb information when it is presented to them as an integrated whole, instead of information being presented to them as separate elements. This way, learners can see relations between concepts better and make connections through a creative act known as ‘unifying’ (Bronowski, 1990). Learners cannot be taught to make the connections in their minds, especially if the information is repeatedly presented in separate units. Students “learn” by extending, combining, and rearranging concepts which are interconnected. There are many ways learners acquire and process information and assimilate it into their existing knowledge. Hence, we as teachers need to provide the necessary learning conditions to help the learners make connections to integrate their knowledge. ICT can integrate theory and practice by providing opportunities to

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analyse, synthesize, and apply knowledge within a context. ICT can offer a learning environment in which it can reduce the separation between concepts, subjects, or even disciplines. A good example of this would include the well-known ‘learning across the curriculum’, where a topic in English can be extended to Social Studies and Environmental Sciences, and even to the Sciences. ICT can connect learning thematically, and support integrative learning.

1.3.3.4

Evaluative Learning

Learning varies across abilities, interests, and cultures. While learning may be a natural process, not everyone learns in the same way. A standardized concept of instruction, which means “one size fits all” cannot be applied to learning. For example, it is often quite common in classrooms that we may find some students are more visually oriented, i.e., they respond well to pictures and images. Similarly, a student might be a good listener, and another student might be a good speaker or communicator. A classroom, therefore, is a diverse place, and we need to think of learning processes based on the strengths and assets of varied types of learners. ICT, we can say, caters to varying needs and types of learners. In a way, ICT can be student-directed. ICT offers many different learning pathways and many different ways of acquiring knowledge. For example, imagine a teacher who has taught the simple past continuous tense in the class and wants to revise it with the help of ICT. One way of doing it could be showing students animations where the figures are performing certain actions (short video clips with dialogues could also be used). The teacher, then, can go on to asking a question like: “What was she doing?” This simple integration of ICT in the classroom will not only cater to the diverse set of learners in the classroom but also allow the learners to choose their own pathways. Thus, the students who respond well to visual information will respond to the visuals, the student who is a good listener will respond to the dialogues, and the student who is a good speaker or communicator will be the vocal one in answering the questions! So, teachers can use ICT to allow learners to explore and discover their learning routes. ICT, thus, provides the space for learning to be exploratory, thereby catering to a learner-centred environment.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Which of the ‘new literacy skills’ do you practice in your classroom? What can you do to integrate them within your teaching and your syllabus? • Visit this British Council site. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teacher-development/continuing-pro fessional-development/integrating-ict

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• The site has a lot of articles, videos, and lesson plans on how to integrate ICT within the classroom. Browse through some of them and think about the activities that might fit your context.

1.3.4 The Potential to IMPROVE: Quality of Learning We have seen that ICT has the potential to redesign learning since it promotes learnercentred environments. If a learning environment is redesigned by ICT, then it is only natural to ask how ICT can bring an overall improvement in the quality of learning. This potential of ICT is evident through its three main characteristics of motivation, facilitation, and enhancement. Let’s look at each of these features in detail.

1.3.4.1

ICT Motivates

ICT can make learning attractive and fun. By combining text, images, sound, video and animation through different multimedia platforms, learning can become more interesting. For instance, an English teacher who teaches a poem may use a dictionary or a thesaurus to explain the meanings of words in the poem. However, if the same poem is taught with the help of ICT, words can be explained through visuals, and the processes involved with a specific word can be explained through animations. Further, the teacher can replace specific words with images and add a short voice clip for certain lines in the poem which the students need to guess. This makes the class much more interactive and exciting. Similarly, a Biology teacher can explain the function of the human heart with the help of a textual description, an image or diagram of the heart, as well as an animated version of how the heart operates and pumps blood. The integrated resources used for the topic can engage students through the learning process and, as a result, motivate them to learn. ICT not only can make learning fun but also can make learning real and meaningful. By using different forms of ICT, the teacher can extend students’ learning into a collaborative group project for presentation. As we have seen, ICT can provide opportunities for collaboration and sharing. For instance, let’s imagine students working on a Civic Education group project on road safety. For this, students can find pictures of traffic signs and roads from the Internet. They can also click pictures of the traffic signs themselves on their mobile devices and look up for the relevant information related to the traffic signs on the Internet. They can communicate and interact with each other about the progress they make on their project by using email or text messaging services. Finally, they can share their project on the class network or social media network with their family and friends. As students engage, interact, and share with the help of ICT, we can see that ICT motivates students to participate in a meaningful and relevant learning process.

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ICT Facilitates

In addition to making learning fun and meaningful, ICT can facilitate learning by making it easy. ICT provides students with opportunities for the repeated practice of learning basic concepts. For instance, multimedia educational games and computerbased software offer lots of practice for reinforcing the ideas that have been learnt. Concepts such as spelling or counting can be practised through these programs. As the programs provide instant feedback, students can repeat and proceed with their learning in a structured manner. The greatest advantage of ICT is that it never tires and will repeat as many times as the student wants it to. Through reinforcement thus, ICT supports the learning of basic skills, which can be used as the foundation for acquiring higher skills. Thus, ICT facilitates the learning process efficiently.

1.3.4.3

ICT Enhances

Above all, ICT can enhance learning experiences through ‘self-directed learning’: learning by the students at their own pace. As ICT facilitates the acquiring of basic skills through practice, ICT also offers the potential of enriching the learning experience. This means that ICT provides learners with the ability to take charge of their own learning. With guidance from the teacher, students can work on various multimedia resources entirely on their own. They can practice at their own pace and can also access these learning resources whenever and wherever they want. ICT can help learners to take an active approach towards the use of various resources made available to them. It can help learners exercise responsibility for their own learning. In other words, ICT can provide varied learning experiences to students, which in turn enhances student learning. We can now understand how ICT offers the potential to provide an interesting, engaging, meaningful, and enriching learning experience. Through motivation, facilitation, and enhancement, ICT thus, has the potential to improve the quality of learning.

1.4 Summary In an increasingly globalized digital age, the role of teaching and learning needs a rethink. ICT opens possibilities for innovative and effective teaching and learning processes. The promise that ICT brings for the required transformation of education can be seen in its varied potential. ICT offers the potential of preparing participation in the twenty-first-century information age society, extending ease of access to

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education across the globe, redesigning learning by shifting the focus from teachercentred to learner-centred environments, and improving the overall quality of education. Thus, ICT, when implemented effectively, can serve as a significant tool for a meaningful teaching–learning experience in our lives.

References Bronowski, J. (1990). Science and human values. Harper Collins. Tinio, V. L. (2003). ICT in Education. United Nations Development Programme-Asia Pacific Development Information Programme

Chapter 2

ICT, Communication, and the Curriculum

Abstract This chapter specifically focuses on the role of ICT in our communicative practices. Our day-to-day use of ICT, for example, mobile phones, are meant for particular communicative purposes. If we take these communicative practices to our classrooms, we realise that many of these strategies could be employed in our teaching and learning. These include ‘communication and collaboration’, ‘exploring ideas and exploring information’, ‘critical evaluation’, ‘developing ideas’, and ‘organizing diverse information into presentable modes’. This chapter focuses on how these strategies can be successfully used by employing the resources of ICT. Keywords Communicative practices · Curricular frameworks · Rethinking language learning skills · ICT integration · Learning context · Teacher role

2.1 Introduction As we begin to focus on the relationship between ICT and communication and how it can be integrated within the school curriculum, let us try to look at what we understand by the relation between ICT and communication first. As teachers who teach various subjects (and sometimes more than one subject), we are often simultaneously engaged in communicating with others. We need to complete the syllabus as well as fulfil the various demands that students, colleagues, and the school administration make on us. For each of these, we need to communicate. More importantly, for any teaching to take place, the act of communication is the first and foremost. However, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, in the twenty-first century, this communication may not be restricted to just classroom teaching of the syllabus. Our communication repertoire has increased; we have now access to various modes of communication like the mobile phone, emails, social networking services and many other web-based tools that can be used for communicating within the classroom. Communication, thus, can happen in various ways, and the use of ICT can help us ease into different communicative processes. A good point to start, therefore, will be what we mean by ‘communication’. Communication, generally speaking, involves a two-or-more way process of understanding each other mutually. More importantly, in today’s world, it is a process in which the participants not only express and interpret information, news, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_2

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ideas and feelings but also create and share meaning. This possibility of creating and sharing meaning makes the possibilities of ICT really exciting. The very fact that ICT can enable communication across different times and different spaces makes it an important aspect of any teaching and learning situation.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • What kind of ICT activities do you use in your school? Are they part of the school activities? • Are there any specific ways that you use ICT in your teaching? • What are the problems/barriers that you face while using ICT in your school? • Make a list and see if the rest of the chapter addresses some of these issues. The integration of ICT within the teaching–learning environment, however, is simple to achieve. For instance, let us first take the use of ICT in different subjects like English, Science, Mathematics, and Social Studies. The use of ICT for communication in these subjects may vary due to various factors. It may depend on the kind of students we have, the way the subjects are taught (known as subject ‘subculture’), the resources available in the school, the motivation involved on the part of the administrators, the support offered for ICT-enabled communication, and many others. As we can see, the list is quite long. However, it is also true that ICT can offer some common principles that can unite communicative activities across the subjects in the school. For example, recent developments in ICT stress on promoting communication and collaboration, exploring varied ideas and information sources, evaluating information critically, developing ideas, and organizing diverse information into presentable modes. What we intend to do during the course of this chapter is to bring all these ideas together and point out ways in which ICT, when used judiciously, can be successfully integrated within the school curriculum as a facilitator of communication. For this, we will look at the curriculum in schools and various aspects of communication that are related to the curriculum like Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing and how they need to be re-thought in today’s age of digital communication.

2.2 ICT and Its Use in Schools As we have seen in Chap. 1, the world of ICT is all around us. We constantly use ICT in our daily lives, be it our mobile phones, computers, laptops, tablets or our music devices. The students also use ICT in different ways in their daily lives— surfing the internet, playing online games, or just checking something out on their family members’ mobile phones! Let us now turn our attention to specific uses of ICT that teachers often engage in. These could roughly be divided into five major and

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often-related categories: (i) using it as a tool for teaching, (ii) using it for a specific subject requirement, (iii) using it for preparing/presenting a lesson, (iv) using it for professional purposes, and (v) using it for personal use (Ward & Parr, 2010) [Also see the table in Chap. 1]. Let us discuss each of these categories separately.

2.2.1 ICT as a Tool for Teaching It may so happen that a school introduces some software or a freely available internet tool for teaching purposes. The teachers are often encouraged (and sometimes directed) to use this tool. When this tool is used by the teachers at the school for general purposes, it produces results such as the learning of vocabulary or grammar. A good example of this is a CD-ROM (for example, an Encarta CD-ROM) that is often available free of cost and is made available by school authorities. Another example of this is the digital laboratory (commonly called the ‘computer lab’ or the ‘language lab’) which is set up in a school so that teachers can use it for teaching– learning purposes. This is what we will call general use of ICT as a communication tool for teaching.

2.2.2 ICT for a Specific Subject It, however, may be possible that a specific subject requires a specific use of ICT that is relevant for only that subject. In English, for example, the Word programme may be used in teaching writing to make students aware of correct spellings and grammar. Similarly, the internet can be used to develop collaborative and communicative activities. Webheads, a community-based Yahoo Group, helps teachers to integrate technology in the teaching of English. It also provides opportunities for teachers to attend online training programmes on the use of technology. Another example of this in the teaching of science subjects is Blender which can be used to simulate experiments in Physics. This kind of ICT use thus can be called subject-specific.

2.2.3 ICT for Preparing Lessons We can also use ICT to prepare our lessons or present them to the class. For example, for teaching the simple past tense, a teacher may surf the internet, collect examples, organise this information, and present it in an attractive mode through PowerPoint or (if one is more tech-savvy) Prezi. This, in contrast to the subject-specific nature of the previous type of use, can be used by any teacher at the school and is not subject-specific.

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2.2.4 ICT for Professional Activities Moreover, teachers are often involved in administrative and professional activities at their schools. This would involve reporting, preparing minutes, drafting speeches, or even editing and publishing reports or school newsletters and magazines. These activities often require the use of ICT for communicating (email), putting together information (Word or Excel), and desktop editing. These professional activities too, require the extensive use of ICT nowadays.

2.2.5 ICT for Personal Use Finally, we are often engaged in using ICT tools for purely personal reasons. Facebooking, Twittering, Emailing, chatting, or video calling are some of the applications that we may use at home, or at times, at work. These activities may require the use of desktop computers, but recently, with the ready access to cheap and smart mobile devices, these activities are often carried out on our phones. As is evident, all these activities involve some form of communication or the other either in the classroom, or for professional or personal reasons. One thing to remember, however, is though these uses of ICT have been discussed separately here, they often tend to overlap. For example, it is quite common to ‘multitask’, that is, do different things at the same time. When working on a computer, we may have different ‘windows’ open at the same time—checking our Facebook status, reading our personal emails, looking for materials for the classroom lesson, and editing the annual report of the school—all at the same time! In a sense, we are also engaged in ‘multi-communication’. What we mean is that, there is no strict rule for the use of ICT for communication since we can and do use it as an integrated activity. However, there are certain features of ICT that makes it the ideal candidate for communicative use across the school. In the next section, we will look at some of those specific features that ICT brings to the table.

2.3 ICT in the Curriculum As we have seen in the previous section, ICT can be used in the school for specific purposes that include its use as a tool since the school administrators acquired it, its use for specific subjects, and its use for lesson planning and presentation. This is primarily because ICT shares some features of our teaching. ICT can enhance our teaching of the school curriculum. But what do we mean by the school ‘curriculum’? There are many definitions of ‘curriculum’ available, but one of the simplest yet most comprehensive definition was given by David Pratt. Pratt (1980) defines curriculum as, “a written document that systematically describes goals planned, objectives,

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content, learning activities, evaluation procedures and so forth”. Thus, our understanding of curriculum in this chapter would include teaching–learning activities and related aspects that directly or indirectly affect the teaching–learning process. This will then be seen through the lens of ICT and how and where ICT can be used during these processes. The specific ICT tools that can be used to integrate ICT in the school will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters. In this chapter, we will concentrate on the general principles that underlie such use. One of the first things that we would like to emphasize is that the integration of ICT in a school curriculum is dependent first and foremost on “what teachers do and think—it’s as simple and complex as that” (Fullan, 2007). It is, therefore, simply not sufficient that the school management acquires an ICT tool, or a single teacher who is IT-savvy implements ICT to teach a particular subject, or that ICT is used only for its ‘glamour’ value in the school. For a successful integration of ICT to take place uniformly within the school, we propose four principles. These include: • • • •

individualisation at the level of teaching, collaboration across teachers and management, sharing of control between teachers and students, and a sense of responsibility in using ICT.

(Adapted from Jedeskog & Nissen, 2004). All these principles, we suggest, are dependent on the teacher as well as the learner. Let us explore these four principles individually. The principle of individualisation is part and parcel of ICT. For example, we frequently make changes to our Facebook page. It is also quite common that we make our email account suit our own tastes in terms of the background themes or what is visible on the page. The current availability of web-based ICT tools allows us to do this to create our own individual spaces. Web-based tools give us opportunities to individualise and at the same time collaborate. Further, as teachers, we are all individuals and bring our own individual approaches to teaching a particular subject. For instance, a teacher of Social Studies or Environmental Studies might adopt a more hands-on approach to her subject that could include field trips, practical lessons, and project-based assignments. However, it is possible that a teacher of English may adopt an approach that is more text-based with a focus on actual language learning taking place in the classroom. As an individual, therefore, a teacher will explore ideas and information depending on what her teaching goal and her teaching practice is. The teacher will similarly develop ideas, communicate, collaborate, and present her ideas as an individual. Since ICT has this intrinsic quality to be able to help this individualisation, it can fulfil many of the necessities of the school. The second principle of collaboration is equally important. What we mean by ‘collaboration’ here is not simply sharing notes (which can surely be an excellent collaborative activity!) but also, problem-solving and critical evaluation. In real life, we constantly collaborate to solve our difficulties. For instance, if some feature on our mobile phone does not work, we will try to solve it individually first using our knowledge about it. If this does not solve the problem, we might approach a friend

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or a relative whom we consider a little more knowledgeable than us. The problem often gets solved at this level. It is only when this fails that we will take the phone to the expert in a mobile outlet. The logic works similarly in the school context. The ‘newness’ of ICT often requires collaboration. This could be at the level of technical collaboration but also can be at the level of subject collaboration. There are often concepts/ideas that run across subjects. These ideas can be usefully taught if different subject teachers collaborate (a sample activity is given at the end of this section). But it may also be possible for a teacher to collaborate with people online. For example, in the teaching of English, there are quite a few ‘online communities’ that can help a teacher solve a particular problem. ICT can provide an excellent platform for such collaborations and varied ICT tools can be used efficiently to foster such collaborations. The third principle of sharing of control is essential in the integration of ICT in the teaching–learning process. This principle often involves the kinds of software applications or platforms the school uses for its ICT activities. The software or platform could either be subject-specific (e.g., for the teaching of English various language learning software are available) or generic (for use across the school, independent of the subject). It has been seen, and as research suggests, one-way software programmes—where the software or platform does not allow flexibility or interactivity—have not been very successful in most schools. The reason for the failure of such applications is that teachers and students often lack a sense of ownership and control in such cases. What we mean by this is, that all uses of ICT within the school should allow some sense of control and independence on the part of the teachers and the students. If teachers and students have a sense of control and independence, they feel a sense of ownership which is essential for any teaching–learning activity to take place. This is because we often do not like being instructed on how we communicate. This is especially true of ICT. We watch a video on YouTube or go to a particular site not because someone has instructed us to do so, but because we want to. A similar argument is true of integrating ICT in the curriculum. If teachers and students do not have a sense of control over the use of ICT, it is likely to fail in being integrated within the school. The fourth and final principle of responsibility is more about ethics of using ICT. The use of ICT can be time-consuming. It also depends on other factors like the resources available in schools, the support for ICT activities, as well as the motivation provided by the school administrators. A sense of responsibility can develop only when these factors combine harmoniously. However, this is an ideal situation and, as teachers, we know that they seldom work like that. Coupled with these, are the curricular pressures (of completing a syllabus, for example) and the evaluation patterns adopted by the school. In such a situation, it will not be surprising that students start drifting towards, what are popularly known as ‘shortcuts’. These ‘shortcuts’ may include copying from the internet or claiming work that does not belong to us. These ‘shortcuts’, thus, generally involve unethical practices. For any successful integration of ICT within the school curriculum, a sense of ethical responsibility is a must. This is a part of the larger ICT policy of a school where ethics must play an important role.

2.3 ICT in the Curriculum

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Finally, we would like to point out that the four principles outlined above are, in a sense, related to each other. This can be represented in the Fig. 2.1:

Fig. 2.1 Integrating ICT into the curriculum

As Fig. 2.1 points out, any integration of ICT within the curriculum would depend on the level of individualisation that ICT can provide. This can then lead to collaboration, both between teachers, as well as teachers and students. This can be achieved more fruitfully if the control and ownership are shared. We must remember here that this is not a one-way process and works both ways. For example, individualisation, collaboration and a sense of control and ownership can determine the nature of teaching and the use of ICT in the school. Beneath the three principles of individualisation, collaboration and control lies the sense of responsibility. However, all these depend not only on the uses of ICT at the individual school level but also on curriculum frameworks that are followed by the schools. In other words, whether the school is affiliated to the State Board or to other Boards, such as the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education (ICSE) or the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the curricular framework of the affiliation plays an important role in designing activities in the classroom. These larger policy frameworks lay the outline for how a school adopts and often adapts to these policies. An example of such a framework is the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) framework used for assessment and evaluation in CBSE schools in India. In the next section, we will quickly discuss a major framework that is available in India and its implications for integrating ICT within the curriculum. But before that, let us look at an activity as an example of ICT across the curriculum.

ACTIVITY [This is an activity meant to travel across the curriculum. It can be done in the English class exclusively, but the activity becomes more fun when worked out in collaboration along with a Science colleague]. Read the following poem: Sea Fever by John Masefield I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

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And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a gray dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over. [Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242552]. The poem can be explained in the class (for focussing on the language aspect) and activities done. However, the poem has various references to tides; the fauna (“sea gulls”, “whales”), and the mechanics of a ship (“wheel’s kick”, “white sails”). The lesson plan can thus, include the following which includes other curricular aspects (you could collaborate with a Science colleague on this): • Ask the students to listen to the song “Oh a sailor’s life is the life for me” from Alice in Wonderland (1951). The song and the video are available on YouTube. Some language activities can now be based on the song and the poem. There could be an extended discussion on a ‘sailor’s life’. • Go to the Encarta entry on http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/ 365256/marine-ecosystem. This is an article on marine/ocean ecosystem. Ask students to make a list of different types of marine life from this page. In groups, discuss in the class. • Finally, students can be introduced to a Webquest on sailing. The webquest could be on “How to build a sailboat”. A webquest is a fun, enquiry-oriented lesson where the information in the lesson needs to be found from the web (that is why the ‘quest’). • *You can find more about webquest at http://webquest.org/.

2.4 Curricular Frameworks and ICT Many countries have a national curriculum framework that proposes the use of ICT in the school curriculum. In India, we have quite a few policy documents that guide the way that curriculum and teaching needs to be integrated with ICT. As a reference, we will study one of them briefly—the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education (NCFTE). But before that, let us first understand what these curricular frameworks do. The major features of such curricular frameworks include:

2.4 Curricular Frameworks and ICT

a. b. c. d.

25

a provision of a model guideline for teaching, an outline of a model school curriculum (this can be for various subjects), an overview of the assessment methods, and an integration of ICT within the curriculum.

In this section, we will look at one such framework, along with the ICT vision within the framework, and how it can be successfully translated into actual teaching of communication in the school. An example of a National Policy Framework in India. One of the major documents that was prepared for teacher education in India was the National Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education [NCFTE] in 2005. This framework was aimed at developing a uniform curriculum for teacher education. The framework also raised a few issues, among which ICT played an important role. The NCFTE was later revised in 2009 and then presented as a Draft for Discussion. We will explore the major issues this document discusses and its relevance to ICT and the curriculum. We have summarized the key points here:

Key Points ICT tools are to be used to • develop proficiency in teachers and students; • pose and solve problems with collaboration across subjects as well as crossculturally; • design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes; • manage, analyse and put together different kinds of information for teaching purposes; • create, critique, analyse, and evaluate multimedia texts; • pay attention to the ethical responsibilities; • reflect on questions that are part of twenty-first century literacy. As can be seen from this short summary of a very long document, the key areas that NCFTE focus on include: • • • • • • •

proficiency collaboration designing and sharing information managing, analysing and synthesizing creating and critiquing being ethically responsible, and reflecting.

As is evident, the NCFTE emphasises specifically the skills we have discussed in ‘ICT in the Curriculum’ section of this chapter. Proficiency thus, means not only our

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teaching ability in a subject but also our ability to integrate ICT within the school. This, again, as we have discussed, does not mean using ICT for its own sake but for improving the quality of teaching within the school. For example, for teaching English grammar, you can make use of simple programs like MS Word or take the help of a large storehouse of texts (known as ‘corpus’) to guide students in learning. The latter, that is, corpus, is a good fun way to learn since here the students find out on their own how a certain grammatical rule works. In either case, your integration of ICT will be determined by what and how you intend to teach in the class. Similarly, collaboration leads to designing and sharing information in such a way that benefits both the students and the teachers at the school. For example, collaboration across subjects can lead to a richer understanding of the subject topic. It can also open new ways of lesson designing. This could further lead to what Edward de Bono calls ‘lateral thinking’—a way of thinking that can help us think across subjects and open new ways of understanding a subject. We are also aware that ICT can overwhelm us at times. There is just so much information available, and we may feel flooded by all that information. NCFTE proposes that teachers and students need to manage, analyse, and synthesize large amounts of information that is available. For example, when we typed in “environmental pollution” in the Google search box, it displayed 281,000,000 results in 0.58 s! And this was only at the time of writing this chapter. You may want to type the same phrase in Google while reading this and see for yourself how many search items Google returns within a record time. A few months later, the number will only increase. As teachers, therefore, we need to manage this computer-mediated information overload. We need to make judgments about which sites may be useful and which not. We need to analyse and bring together information from different websites. In other words, we need to synthesize them. It is only after this choosing, deciding, and synthesizing, that we are ready for the classroom—and yes, this is a long, sometimes difficult, and yet an essential road to take. Communication in the classroom is greatly dependent on this aspect of managing ICT. We also might need to create new things using ICT since the school might not have what you, as a teacher, may intend to do. In doing so, you will need to make judgements about what is available and then move on to the next step of creating something that you really want to do. What we mean is that you do not need to create a new software or a learning platform (though that may be possible for a computer teacher), but instead, you need to create a new learning environment. For example, once we have identified which sites to use for teaching ‘environmental pollution’, we can create a lesson plan that integrates videos, audio clips, PowerPoint presentations as well as tasks for students to explore on the internet. Finally, we need to reflect on the actions that we have taken, improve upon them and try out new things in the classroom. As we have discussed earlier, ethical responsibility underlies all these actions. As teachers, therefore, we need to start at the basic level—operating a computer at its most fundamental level—for example, storing, retrieving, and managing data. Then comes the intermediate level, when we might need to create and manage content with a variety of software applications and digital devices. And then, we can move on

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to the advanced level that may deal with designing, participating, and collaborating on web-based networks to produce knowledge. This level obviously involves ethics of computer usage. Finally, reflecting on ICT usage forms an essential part of the overall teaching and learning process. Now that we know how ICT can be used within a curricular framework, let us see how ICT can be used in a specific curriculum of an English classroom. We will focus on specific skills and how the uses of ICT within a curricular framework can help us develop skills like Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing (LSRW) in English. We will discuss the specific tools to develop these skills in greater detail in the following chapters. However, here, we will lay the groundwork and see how an understanding of the changes in today’s world can help us develop an ICT-supported classroom for these skills.

2.5 ICT for Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing When we think of communication as language teachers, we generally imply the four skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, in the Digital Age, these skills themselves have undergone a change. This is because all communication is always within a certain context, and the contexts that the digital world offers us are different from the traditional contexts within which these skills were practised. What we mean can be illustrated by an example. About 20 years ago, ‘reading’ a text would have meant reading from a textbook. The reading lesson would have involved reading the text with a teacher and completing certain tasks after reading the text. These tasks could have been done in the classroom or as a part of the students’ homework activity. Nowadays, however, it is very common that we read things on a screen. Think of the number of times we check our mobile phones for ‘reading’ SMS-es or WhatsApp messages (if we have a smartphone), our Facebook page or our email accounts! Moreover, technology makes it possible for us to ‘do things’ to the texts that we read. For example, we can highlight the message, we can take notes, we can add a smiley, and we can revisit the text as many times as we like. We can also share it with as many people as we like. More importantly, this can be done at our pace and our time—at home, at school, or even while travelling to school. We, thus, can say that the context of reading that was mostly limited to our schools and homes has now been expanded to include other spaces and times that did not form a part of any communication context earlier. In a sense, you can say that the way you ‘read’ has changed in today’s world. We can take another example from ‘writing’. Writing as a language learning skill two decades ago usually meant a written piece that was produced by the student so that it could be corrected or graded by teachers. The focus was on the final written piece that the student-produced. However, with the development of technology and ICT tools, the nature of writing itself has changed. For example, while typing this page, we often came across red lines on the page indicating that there was a spelling revision needed in the document. Similarly, there would also be green or blue lines

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indicating that there is a suggested revision with the grammatical structure of the sentence that we typed in. These automatic ‘prompts’ are something that ICT (or, in this case, the Word programme) can provide instantly. In a sense, therefore, our focus while ‘writing’ is not only on the ‘product’ (that is, the chapter) but also on the ‘process’ that we are involved in while writing. ICT enables us to do this. In this section, therefore, we will look at some general principles of communication in the digital age with specific reference to the skills of Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. In our later chapters, we will look at these skills separately and in greater detail with specific reference to how to teach them using ICT. We will also try to see how it fits in with our discussion on curriculum in the previous section. The first principle that we possibly need to consider is the principle of context. As outlined earlier, any communication takes place within a given context. However, the digital age provides a variety of contexts for our communication to take place. These contexts vary depending on what ICT tool we are using as well as which forms of communication we are engaged in. For example, if we use emails for communicating amongst teachers, then the type and level of communication will differ from the same emails being used by students for personal purposes. Further, if we have created a class email group for sharing of information (this can be done by creating a Yahoo Group or a Google Group), then, depending on who is being addressed, the form of communication varies. Thus, a teacher addressing a group of students will have a different mode of communication than a student addressing her friends through the group. It will also depend on whether the communication is one-to-one (teacher to a particular student), one-to-many (teacher to the entire class), or many-to-many (students to students). Similarly, if we create a class Facebook page or a Twitter account or even a WhatsApp group, it might so happen that these applications will use different types of communication modes—visuals (photographs or images, for example), audio, video as well as text messages. Also, depending on the nature of the application, we might be restricted in our communication. For example, Twitter accounts allow only 280 characters for posting a message. Communication, in this respect, therefore, cannot be limited to simply Listening, Speaking, Reading, or Writing (LSRW) but will include other forms as well. This is called ‘multimodal’ communication—communication using many modes. Communication in the Digital Age, therefore, cannot simply restrict itself to traditional forms of LSRW activities but needs to consider various other modes too. These other modes play an important role in shaping our communicative practices. Secondly, because communication in the digital age takes place at a rapid pace, we also need to be aware that there are certain changes in the language, and we need to bring these changes to the notice of our students. We are here referring to what we commonly call ‘SMS language’. We, as teachers, are often faced with answer sheets or students’ written work that use this sort of language (and often complain about it). For example, it may not be uncommon to find in students’ answer sheets words like ‘bcoz’ (for ‘because’), ‘u’ (for ‘you’) and ‘ur’ (for ‘your’). This language is produced in a certain context, especially in the context of short messages. Since the messages are generally short and must be typed at rapid speeds (for example, while chatting), it is common for us to shorten the word. Also, since certain applications have a word limit, this practice is quite common. However, we, as teachers, need to draw

2.5 ICT for Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing

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our students’ attention to the fact that there are two different contexts involved here. While in some contexts, such short messages or shortening of words is acceptable, in others, they are not. This is something that we need to bring to the class while teaching communication. Thirdly, our students are most likely to face a world where messages are multimodal in nature that is, they will possibly have to read different ‘modes’ of texts—a combination of visuals, written text, and even sound. A good example of this is the ‘Help’ page of any website or any digital tool that we use or browse. The ‘Help’ page generally is a combination of all these modes—pictures explaining the concept, a written piece of text accompanying the pictures, and sometimes audio or video clips too to add further details to the concept. We will have to train our students to become aware of all the given options and help them to use all these features at the same time! Fourthly, we perhaps need to re-think our understanding of ‘listening’, ‘speaking’, ‘reading’, and ‘writing’. For example, what we call ‘writing’, as in writing an essay or writing on a given topic, can take the form of typing on a computer which is also a form of writing. However, this requires an extra skill to be learnt— typing on the keypad of a computer. Moreover, if we are engaged in a chat (for example, on WhatsApp), we need to type fast since the person on the other side may have been waiting for a response for a while. In such situations, it often happens that what we ‘write’ in a way takes up the form of ‘speaking’. We are literally ‘speaking’ while ‘writing’, and that is how we are communicating. This ‘writing’ is very different from what we expect in an essay or on an assignment. This is again something that we as teachers need to pay attention to. Similarly, what we understand as ‘listening’ has changed considerably in this age. It is possible today that an audio clip is played and replayed again and again, and students can listen to specific parts of the clip for their listening practice. It is possible to mark a specific time on an audio clip for specific vocabulary or grammar items, which students can listen to and practice, and at the same time make notes and revisit them as many times they like. This was not possible about 20 years ago. Finally, we need to be aware that for the teaching of ‘communicative competence’, that is, the ability to be competent in a language, we also need to consider the role of the teacher. As stated earlier, the digital age allows different forms of communication to be placed side-by-side—one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many. The traditional classrooms mostly followed the model of one-to-many, where the role of the teacher was that of the authority figure, and the teacher was seen as the starting point (and often the endpoint) of communication. However, with the increase in the many-to-many communication in the digital age, we need to re-think our roles as teachers. This is especially true of English teachers since we have a major role to play in shaping this communication. Figure 2.2 explains why we have such an important role to play. As can be seen in Fig. 2.2, the number of users of English on the internet still ranks the first. Though Chinese is a close second, the number of English users still outstrips other languages. As teachers of English thus, the responsibility would be on us to help our students manage this digital traffic. For this, we need to keep in

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2 ICT, Communication, and the Curriculum Top Ten Languages on the Internet in Millions of users – March 31, 2020 1400

NUMBER OF USERS IN MILLIONS

1200

1186 1060 English

1000

Chinese 888

Spanish Arabic

800

Portuguese Indonesian + Malaysian 600

French Japanese

400

Russian

363

German 237 200

0

171

All the rest

198 151

118 116

92

LANGUAGES

Fig. 2.2 Top ten languages on the internet in millions of users—April 2019

mind not only the different aspects of the curriculum but also the different demands that different skills have on us as teachers in the Information Age. In our next two chapters, we will specifically look at the skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing and how ICT can help us in teaching these skills in the English classroom. We will end this chapter with a reflective activity.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Make a list of activities that you regularly engage in, as teachers. e.g., teaching specific vocabulary, teaching grammar, teaching reading comprehension or any activity that is specific to your subject. • Refer to your syllabus and think of the aspects that you would like to teach through ICT. • Visit http://www.cambridgeenglishteacher.org/ • Browse through some of the activities mentioned on the website. • Reflect on the following questions:

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– How will you integrate some of these activities in your lesson? – How will you make changes to these activities to suit your own context?

2.6 Summary In order to integrate ICT into the curriculum, we need to consider four key points: individualisation, collaboration, sharing of control, and responsibility. These, as we have seen, are important as any ICT initiative is ultimately based on how it is integrated into an institution. Along with this, we have seen how larger curriculum frameworks also determine the use of ICT within the classroom. These curriculum frameworks provide guidelines that could be useful for framing the integration of ICT skills. However, we also suggest at the end of the chapter that the nature of ‘skills’ that are taught in a language classroom are themselves changing. We, as teachers, therefore, need to be aware of such changes and integrate them, so that we can build a more robust curriculum.

References Books Fullan, M. (2007). The new meaning of educational change. Columbia University Press. Pratt, D. (1980). Curriculum, design, and development. Harcourt, Brace Jovanovitch Inc.

Articles Jedeskog, G., & Nissen, J. (2004). ICT in the classroom: Is doing more important than knowing? Education and Information Technologies, 9(1), 37–45. Ward, L., & Parr, J. M. (2010). Revisiting and reframing use: Implications for the integration of ICT. Computers & Education, 54, 113–122.

Curriculum Websites Curriculum for ICT in Education. Available on http://ictcurriculum.gov.in/ National Policy on ICT in School Education. Available on http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/ mhrd/files/upload_document/revised_policy%20document%20ofICT.pdf NCFTE document. Available on http://www.ncte-india.org/ncfte_19.3.2010.asp

Chapter 3

ICT in the Classroom: Active Listening and Reading

Abstract This chapter examines the role of ICT tools in improving the relationship between teaching and learning in the classroom. This chapter specifically focuses on listening and reading skills and how certain ICT tools (from simple programmes to more high-end tools) can be used for the development of these skills. Keywords ICT and receptive language skills · ICT-driven listening design · Active listening · Reading skills · New literacy practices · ICT-based reading skills · Reading communities · Interactive reading

3.1 Introduction As we begin our focus onto the skills of listening and reading in language teaching and learning, we will first begin with a word of explanation here. Traditionally speaking (and in many recent publications on language skills), listening and speaking, and by extension, reading and writing have generally been clubbed together. There is overwhelming evidence now that in the field of language education, in general, and English language education in particular, these pairs of skills often are correlated and influence each other (Grabe, 2009; Lynch, 2009). However, we have put these two skills together in this chapter since they are also considered to be ‘passive’ skills as opposed to the more ‘active’ skills of speaking and writing. Listening, thus, across many classrooms is often a neglected skill, the most significant reason being its perception as a ‘passive’ skill, and therefore, it becomes more difficult for teachers to track and assess. Interestingly, therefore, while testing listening skills has been popular with teachers, in terms of teaching, it is often viewed as a natural skill that can be picked up without any concerted focus across language curricula. The same, however, does not apply to reading skills which occupy quite an important position within the South Asian classrooms. Most classrooms would have some sort of reading activity that generally sets the tone of a class, which later may proceed to other forms of practices like discussing or writing about the reading that has been done. However, again as in the case of listening, reading in traditional classrooms has often been seen as a ‘passive’ skill that can only be tested through reading comprehension tasks. In fact, syllabi across classrooms in South Asia bear sufficient © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_3

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evidence to the fact that reading texts are often seen as launch pads for testing and assessment. The belief again seems to be that since it is a skill that goes on in one’s head, it would best be taught if it is tested more and more. Our effort in this chapter would be to focus on the ‘active’ nature of these skills, especially after the advent of technology in our lives. We may no longer consider these skills as passive since the way we use them, even in our day to day digital activities, shows that they now require a different kind of engagement as language teachers.

PAUSE AND REFLECT • Do you use any listening or reading activities in your class? If yes, how? • Are there any specific ways that you use ICT for teaching listening and reading? • Which parts of the activities will you call ‘active’ and which ‘passive’ when you use ICT for listening and reading? • Make a list and see if the rest of the chapter addresses some of these issues. In the world of technology that we live in today, it would be difficult to separate the skills in watertight compartments. In this multimedia environment which increasingly asks you to do multiple things simultaneously (Sherry Turkle call it ‘Windows Personality’, Turkle, 1996), it would be difficult to distinguish listening from speaking or reading from writing since doing these activities online often involves simultaneity. For instance, listening to a webinar or a podcast today may often involve simultaneously the following: commenting on the platform (writing), reading and responding to other people’s comments (reading and writing) and expressing one’s own emotional states through emojis (speaking). As a teacher, therefore, one needs to be aware of these developments, and our own attitude towards technology will also determine how a particular listening or reading task is going to be used.

3.2 Active Listening: Past and Present The history of teaching listening for language learning is a long one though, in South Asia, it has generally been a neglected skill, barring a few cases. However, some recent initiatives (like those taken by Teacher Education through School-based Support (TESS) India, an Open University, UK initiative that supports teachers in classrooms) have brought listening back into focus. In the South Asian context, one can trace the history of technology-aided teaching of listening to the 1960s and 1970s when language laboratories were established with the availability of magnetic tape technology. However, these labs were meant for more of ‘listen and repeat’

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types of activities and were focused on drill and pronunciation practice. With the advent of digital CDs in the 1990s and web tools a little later, the nature of listening itself changed. One of the most important reasons for this was the fact that these new technologies could transform the ‘passive’ nature of listening to an ‘active’ one. One, with the advent of the internet, more open-source learning environments were available—podcasts, vodcasts, YouTube videos, voice or speech recognition software, video-conferencing tools, games, personal digital assistants (like chatbots) and so on. These tools could now help learners to interact with technology in various ways—through teacher guidance, on their own, by assuming avatars or personas online and even by producing their own content (the recent popularity of TikTok or Helo are good examples of user-generated content). Secondly, because of the availability of this technology, many felt that along with content and pedagogic knowledge, teachers would need to have technological knowledge as well. This was known as the TPACK model (Mishra & Koehler, 2006)—Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge. This also changed the attitude towards teaching listening skills. Finally, based on teachers’ own experiences and creation of materials for the classroom, it was also realised that one will need to take into consideration how simple or complex the technology is and how much effort would be needed by the teacher for creating these materials. The availability of open educational resources (OERs) often minimised this necessity of material production, but because the technology enabled teachers to produce materials and publish online, it gave them a sense of achievement in producing listening materials.

3.3 ICT and Listening Listening has often been neglected because, as mentioned earlier, it is often seen by teachers as a ‘passive’ skill and cannot be tracked. Most studies in listening in the field of English language education, however, have shown that teaching listening is an important aspect of skill development (Field, 2008; Rost, 2011). Skills that are needed for listening are quite complex and can range from understanding phonetic or phonemic features of a language (that is, understanding individual word sounds or understanding the intonation of a particular speech) to macro-level features like listening for gist or inferring information from a piece. Similarly, quite a few strategies are also involved when people engage in listening. Strategies might actively comprise of predicting (making informed guesses about something that students have listened to or are going to listen to), listening for answers (responding in the mind to the questions that are being raised during the listening process), clarifying (seeking an explanation from the speaker), taking notes (creating a thought chart about what is being listened to), re-listening (especially in the case of a recorded audio/ video) and extensive listening (listening to more related information through hyperlinks and other related online materials). With the wealth of material available on the world wide web now, listening has taken a completely different turn in recent times. Here are some of the changes that

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ICT-driven listening has produced in the field of listening. These may be seen as developments that can then be successfully integrated within the classroom.

3.3.1 Teacher Control While the early era of language labs and later that of CDs and DVDs often saw a strict form of teacher control, the proliferation of material on the web has changed that control substantially. The control that teachers used to exercise was not simply limited to classroom control of when students listened to but also what students listened to. The material for language labs was mostly pre-selected by teachers, and the entire listening session was accordingly planned. The students often did not have any say in what they were going to listen to. This has changed quite dramatically nowadays with the availability of an abundance of resources online. This does not mean that teachers are not required anymore, but the availability of resources demands a different sort of engagement on their part. Thus, to help students, teachers would need to direct them, scaffold the material for them, and also possibly learn from them about the richness of listening materials.

3.3.2 Teaching Skills and Strategies Related to the teacher control mentioned above, we will possibly need to think of the nature of skills and strategies that teachers would need to ‘teach’. In the language lab, teachers often had a pre-determined set of skills and strategies that were associated with particular sets of listening material that were to be used in the classroom. However, with the new technology-aided material available online, the teaching of skills and strategies themselves would need to be revised. It might not be, for instance, enough to just decide on a set of skills and strategies but possibly also find out which sets of skills and strategies do our students lack or need more practice in, and then customise their online experiences to support those skills and strategies.

3.3.3 Active Listening and Integrated Skills As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, listening in online environments is an interactive experience based on what the students are listening to. Thus, for instance, if the students are simply listening to a podcast, then it might fall in the category of ‘traditional’ listening. But if the same student is listening to the podcast and then moving on to reading more about the topic in the hyperlinks provided with the podcast, and then further goes on to watching and listening to videos related to the topic, then the student is integrating different types of skill sets progressively and is

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engaged in active listening. We must remember that this ‘pathway’ that the student has chosen is more or less determined by them and does not necessarily involve a very formal teacher-controlled directive.

3.3.4 Active Reflection on Listening The role of the teacher in such an interactive environment is possibly to guide students towards reflecting on their own practices. The advantage of a multimedia environment is that the students can listen to and go back to the listening material as many times as they would like to. For instance, Google podcasts (available in the Google PlayStore) contains a rich source of listening materials for students and teachers. These podcasts can be shared, customised and, if the teacher is using an assessment platform like Kahoot (a game-based quiz platform), can even be used to quickly assess students’ listening. Listening need not be just listening to a specific audio for a specific reason, but may now be expanded to include different types of activities to expand the scope of listening itself. The teacher can build in a reflective activity where the student or the learner reflects on the difficulties or problems and/or successes that they encountered during the entire process. This specific problem can then be addressed by a customisable listening activity again in a cyclical fashion.

3.3.5 The Variety in Listening Activities One of the advantages of having a medley of listening activities online is its sheer variety. Thus, while earlier classrooms were restricted by their choice, if a teacher decides to teach listening to their students today, they will be overwhelmed by the choice of activities and materials available. For instance, The Internet Archive (archive.org) has an entire section dedicated to audio texts drawn from various sources and consist of a veritable collection of genres—audiobooks, poetry recitations, news, multilingual recordings, music, folk literature and many more. The ‘how to’ videos in YouTube are also a great resource for listening activities and can be successfully used by students and teachers to design collaborative activities.

3.3.6 Designing Listening Activities and Publishing on the Net Finally, with the availability of technology, students can design their own listening activities that may have been quite a difficult task in the past and probably would have needed sophisticated technical help from experts. There are quite a few freeware as

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well as commercial software available for designing a listening activity. One such freely downloadable software for importing audio files and recording one’s own audio is Audacity. This is an audio-editing software that supports many audio formats and, after a bit of practice, can be engagingly used by students to produce their own audio files. In fact, with support from the institution, students can produce their own ‘radio podcasts’ either for the local community or the institutional community.

ACTIVITY This is an active listening and interactive skills activity. • Step 1: In groups, ask students to choose a podcast to listen to from either Google podcasts or The Internet Archive. This could be based on any topic or any genre, for example, music, story, poetry, films, current affairs, the environment, or world affairs. If you have a large class, this activity will work well. Based on the number of groups that you have created, you can assign a wide variety of topics. • Step 2: Ask students to make audio notes by recording themselves to what they have listened to. They may also be encouraged to find more about the topic that they have listened to from the internet. • Step 3: Ask each group to produce a small ‘program’ on the topic that they have listened to. For example, the ‘music’ group could base their program on what they have listened to but add a few things of their own, the films group could do the same and so on. Ideally, the ‘program’ that they produce, and record should not be a very long one (between 5 and 7 min). • Step 4: Introduce students to Audacity and the basic functions of the software. Let them practice ‘editing’ features for a few days. Ask each group to record their programs on the software and then edit a bit (for instance, by adding sound effects or music) • Step 5: Assemble the entire programme together and share it on the class blog or a YouTube channel, if you have one, or on the institutional website. This could be the class radio program!

3.4 ICT and Reading Like listening, reading in an online environment can no longer be considered ‘passive’. Reading has become much more interactive, and the experience of ‘reading’ itself has transformed quite significantly over the last decades. Online reading texts often contain hyperlinks, and therefore, the experience of reading is much more ‘lateral’ than ‘linear’. This means that one tends to jump and connect across different sorts of ‘texts’ much more than what we tended to do in a printed text which had to be processed in a linear fashion (until and unless, of course, you

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were reading extremely experimental fiction like Julio Cortazar’s Hopskotch which asks the reader to read it in a linear and non-linear fashion). Similarly, online reading texts are most likely to have images, audio, video or other kinds of texts (like scroll ads) that are either a part of your reading or just support your reading. Think of a typical Wikipedia page—the page will not only have the standard reading text that you will need to read by scrolling down but also a series of hyperlinks embedded into that text, with video links, images on the right pane or as a part of the text as well as external links at the end of the page that suggest further readings. As a reader, you therefore, might decide to make any number of choices as you read through the text. You might click on a hyperlink that will take you ‘out’ of the page or a video that might take you to a YouTube video webpage. You may also decide that the information is not sufficient enough for your purposes which may lead you to click on the external links embedded on the page to know more about the topic. In addition, reading online also allows readers to practice collaborative reading. Quite a few studies have suggested that using collaboration as a reading strategy can help students develop their reading capabilities. Reading, for instance, has been tried out using read-aloud techniques on technology-aided platforms like Skype or other collaborative spaces, which allows video and audio interaction (see Hockly, 2016). Technology can also allow readers to comment or share ideas not only among themselves but also through a blog or a forum with the writers. There are hundreds of writing forums that not only have readers and budding writers who interact with themselves but at times even established and famous writers who answer readers’ questions. Reading, in this sense, has become much more interactive. Further, as we have seen in the case of listening, reading as an isolated skill is no more a norm since in a technology-aided environment, it often interacts with other skills. Going back to our example of the Wikipedia page, the students do not simply have the option of reading the page but also editing the page (the ‘edit’ you do most likely will be moderated before it is posted) based on further readings or information that they have. This, of course, is not only possible in Wikipedia but any Wiki page online. In addition, in a multilingual environment like South Asia, the text that we read online can be translated into many languages, including the possibility of translating a specific word into a specific language of our choice. Finally, contemporary online reading specifically invites readers to create their own texts through the availability of mixed media texts like interactive fiction (IF) or hyperfiction or digital fiction. These texts allow readers to choose their own reading paths by giving them options to create their own branched stories based on the choices that they make. We will see later in this chapter how such IF can be used for teaching reading in an interesting way to our students.

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3.5 Reading: Past and Present The teaching of reading has undergone various changes historically based on the ways in which a particular historical era viewed reading practices. In our own interaction with teachers in contemporary technological times, we have found that one of the most recurrent and common complaints has been that students are not interested in reading anymore. In fact, this is not a complaint of our times but has been the complaint historically! This is due to the fact that reading has always been a taught skill, and based on the access that a certain population had to formal education and reading practices, the levels of reading literacy varied from time to time (see Lyons, 2009; Fresch, 2008). We must also understand that teaching of reading in the field of second language learning has followed different approaches.

3.5.1 Teaching Approaches in Second Language Reading The teaching of reading has followed three general approaches. One may be termed the ‘top-down approach’ which focuses on the global or general understanding of the text using various strategies like predicting (what will come next, what is the text about, what does the title tell me and so on), inferring (making informed guesses, understanding based on the context, and so on), identifying text-type (the genre of the text and what it tells me about what to expect) and so on. This approach, as is apparent, focuses on a generalised understanding of the text. The ‘bottom-up approach’, on the other hand, is more attentive to the actual nitty-gritties of text construction—words, their meanings, their connections across sentences to construct meanings, and so on. Both these approaches were often seen historically to be antithetical to each other. However, it is generally accepted in most studies that reading often involves an ‘interactive approach’ that combines both these approaches and that a successful reader is often adept at combining both these approaches (Hudson, 2007; Urquhart & Weir, 1998). In addition, we must also take into consideration the fact that in today’s world of technological texts, the nature of reading and the readers’ interaction with such texts have changed considerably.

3.5.2 Reading Today As briefly discussed earlier, the nature of the reading text itself has undergone a fundamental change today. Though there is no conclusive evidence that today’s generation of readers prefer to read more from the screen than from the medium of paper, it is also true that with the rapid spread of mobile technologies and the convergence of many kinds of technologies (for instance, you may not need special software to read certain kind of texts as was the case in many of the early technologies), many people

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do read from the screen more often (Hockly, 2016). There are, therefore, certain things that we will need to keep in mind when we, as teachers, engage with these kinds of changed reading texts. Firstly, as we have seen, the nature of the reading text itself has undergone a fundamental change. What we and our students might encounter more often are shorter texts through apps such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media platforms. This is slightly different from the traditional set-up of most of our English classrooms, where reading texts are often long ones and are mostly in the printed form (or if shared electronically, for example, through email or as an e-book, a copy of the printed text). This does not mean that we will not read longer texts on screen. One might still access longer texts on screen, for example, through Kindle or as free copies of e-books in the PDF format. However, this kind of reading has a completely different function from reading shorter texts. Moreover, reading such longer texts involve skills such as reading for pleasure or reading for evaluation and analysis, which are usually the characteristics of a more accomplished reader. Secondly, the nature of the text itself has become much more digital. A digital text is substantially different from a traditional print text. The digital text is more interactive, hyperlinked, and more often than not, consists of a combination of images, videos, audio, and even emojis or emoticons! In fact, the visual text has become so popular nowadays that a large number of people on social media platforms are even writing emoji stories and doing emoji quizzes (see Seargeant, 2019). In addition, the digital text is often read in a different manner (for example, by ‘scrolling’ and not by ‘flipping’). Reading a digital text, therefore, might also require other skills and strategies than the ones mentioned earlier, such as specific forms of digital literacy. This may also be linked to an awareness of critical literacy since writing on the internet is often uncensored and may contain opinions or suggestions that need to be critically evaluated, even though they may look genuine with the multiplicity of text types used. Thirdly, related to the reasons mentioned above, reading needs to be seen more as an active skill now. This is because reading online often combines other skills because the technology almost invites you to do this. A simple speech-to-text software, for example, using your Google voice command or other digital assistants like Siri or Google Home can combine three skills at the same time—speaking, writing and reading (and maybe, even more advanced skills like evaluating and editing, if you are not very happy with what you see on the screen!). Similarly, a PDF document whose primary function was to produce a read -only document which preserved the layout design has, in recent times, developed into a document that can be edited, highlighted, commented upon and sticky-noted, almost simultaneously along with reading the text. Finally, reading on the digital platform has evolved into what is often termed ‘new literacy’ practices. This basically means that the complaint that students are not reading may not be completely true. They are possibly reading different sets of texts that may not have been available in a traditional classroom—tweets, blogs, wiki

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posts, WhatsApp messages and so on. The complaint simply means that students are not only reading different types of text but also reading them differently.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Make a list of activities that you regularly engage in for teaching reading. e.g., teaching specific vocabulary, teaching grammar, teaching reading comprehension, teaching critical skills, etc. • Refer to your syllabus and think of the aspects that you would like to teach through ICT. This may be a complete unit or simply a part of the text. • Check out a few web tools like Glogster (for making interactive posters) or PowToon (for making short interactive animation clips) and how they may be used to support your regular classroom teaching. Try one of them out in the class. Carry out a small survey to find out how students felt about it (or ask them to submit anonymous feedback through an online questionnaire). • Based on the survey, reflect on: – What kind of ICT tools can you successfully use in making reading interesting? – What are the best ways to integrate these activities within your own context?

3.6 Using ICT Tools for Reading What then are the things that we can do as teachers to harness the potential of these new literacy practices? Here are a few suggestions:

3.6.1 Forming Reading ‘Communities’ One of the significant affordances of new technologies is its ability to form communities and bring people of similar interests together. They are also called ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) and basically are groups that tend to collaborate to do similar things online or offline. Many of the platforms that our students read from are collaborative in nature and are meant to promote communities. Thus, a reading blog, a Facebook page, or a Twitter community with shared interests for reading are perfect places to have collaborative reading and developing communities of practice. These platforms can be set up collaboratively between teachers and students, though they might work best if the role of the teacher is not very intrusive.

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3.6.2 Linking Reading and Writing As we have already pointed out, reading as a standalone skill is considered quite uncommon in today’s world. One of the best ways to make use of the technological possibilities is to link reading with other skills. For instance, reading can be linked to writing by sharing an online text which can be written upon. Scrible, a web tool, helps readers to highlight and make notes on shared online texts and can collaboratively help students to read and write at the same time. Alternatively, students can organize their thoughts after reading a text by using a word-cloud software like EdWordle, which acts as a graphic organizer and can help produce a written piece, as well. An interesting way that combines interactive reading with creative writing is interactive or digital fiction. These kinds of fiction not only allow students to follow their own pathways in a story but also allow them to craft their own stories (see Activity later in the chapter).

3.6.3 Using the Multilingual Potential of Technology While the internet, as we know it today, had an overwhelming bias towards English when it first began, things have changed considerably today. With the availability of translation plug-ins (Google Translate is one of them), it is possible to translate almost anything and everything on the Web. True that such translations may not be of a very high quality or even, at times, may be misleading. This possibility in and by itself provides learning opportunities for reading and related activities. Students can explore their own multilingual abilities on the web through such plug-ins (even correcting the online translations of the text can become an interesting reading task). For some interesting work that has been done in the South Asian context, you may like to visit Pratham Books’ Storyweaver project, as well as the reading projects carried out by the Bookworm Trust.

ACTIVITY • Using Interactive Fiction for Reading • Interactive Fiction or IF (also called digital fiction) is a game-based storytelling environment where readers-players can choose their own paths and contribute to a given story (O’Sullivan, 2019; Skains, 2019). Unlike eversions of printed texts, digital fictions are often “born digitally” and is, therefore, completely ICT-based. • Here is a list of some interesting IF that the students can be asked to visit and explore. They can be ‘read’ on their mobile phones as well:

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph David Morris’ Frankenstein 10:01 by Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie Breathe by Kate Pullinger.

• Students then may be asked to share their experiences on a class blog or on a WhatsApp group or on an email group. They can be encouraged to comment creatively and critically on each other’s experiences. • If the students are motivated enough, they can then be asked to create their own Interactive Fiction by using Twine (twinery.org), an ICT tool for telling digital stories. This could be the new “born digital’ class magazine that can be shared.

3.7 Summary In this chapter, we have seen that though listening and reading have generally been considered ‘passive skills’, they are essentially much more than mere passive skills. With the advent of ICT technologies, the nature of both these skills have changed as ICT facilitates a more active engagement. Teaching listening, therefore, has now the possibility of moving away from teacher-controlled material and guided classrooms to a more collaborative and interactive student-determined and teacher-facilitated space. Moreover, the abundance of authentic materials available on the internet can enable a different kind of engagement in teaching both the skills. Thus, for instance, while listening can often be combined with other skills for classroom practice, reading can become a choice to move away from linear texts to more digitally interactive texts. This does not mean that we need to completely move away from what we were doing in teaching listening and reading. We simply need to explore the possibilities of digital platforms of podcasts or software for listening and more interactive activities for reading with a view to integrating them into our regular classroom teaching practices.

References Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press. Fresch, M. J. (2008). An essential history of current reading practices. International Reading Association. Grabe, W. (2009). Reading in a second language: Moving from theory to practice. Cambridge University Press. Hockly, N. (2016). Focus on learning technologies. Oxford University Press. Hudson, T. (2007). Teaching second language reading. Oxford University Press. Lynch, T. (2009). Teaching second language listening. Oxford University Press.

References

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Lyons, M. (2009). A history of reading and writing: In the western world. Macmillan Education. Mishra, P., & Koehler, M. J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teacher’s College Record, 108, 1017–1054. O’Sullivan, J. (2019). Towards a digital poetics: Electronic literature and literary games. Palgrave Macmillan. Rost, M. (2011). Teaching and researching listening (2nd ed.). Longman. Seargeant, P. (2019). The emoji revolution: How technology is shaping the future of communication. Cambridge University Press. Skains, R. L. (2019). Digital authorship: Publishing in the attention economy. Cambridge University Press. Turkle, S. (1996). Who am we? Wired, 4, 01. Urquhart, A. H., & Weir, C. J. (1998). Reading in a second language: Process, product and practice. Longman. Walker, A., & White, G. (2013). Technologically enhanced language learning: Connecting theory and practice. Oxford University Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Websites For Bookworm Trust: https://www.bookwormgoa.in/ For Storyweaver: https://storyweaver.org.in/ For TESS India: https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate (https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/ course/index.php?categoryid=45)

Chapter 4

ICT in the Classroom: Speaking and Writing

Abstract This chapter introduces specific tools and concepts that can be used in the classroom for developing speaking and writing. The chapter focuses on common ICT tools that can be effectively used for classroom learning. These tools include word processing, multimedia presentation, spreadsheets, email and Blogs. The chapter provides an understanding of these tools and how they can be used within pedagogic frameworks. Keywords ICT and productive language skills · ICT for speaking · Development of speaking skills · ICT for writing · Product-based writing · Process-based writing · Situated writing

4.1 Introduction The two skills that we are going to discuss in this chapter are often regarded as productive or active skills. However, while listening and speaking were generally paired together, reading and writing were also seen as intrinsically related. With the advent of technology, these distinctions, as we have discussed in the previous chapters, seem to be blurring a bit. Thus, the ‘written’ form of internet language or technologically-enabled language often mimics the spoken forms of language and quite often display “speech-like characteristics” (Crystal, 2006). Thus, orthography (writing, in general) on the internet does not always necessarily need to be the way we think of writing in the classroom. The use of different orthographic features like capitalization (to indicate shock or anger), punctuation marks like exclamation (to indicate surprise), the various forms of shortenings and acronyms (including words and phrases and even sentences), and the use of various graphic forms like emojis are an accepted part of ‘writing’ on the internet. Though this might be slightly alarming for the teaching community, we also need to possibly understand that some of these features were always present in our writing systems as they developed historically. Therefore, treating them as something that is damaging to the writing system may not be the best way to go about teaching it. This chapter will specifically look at how to negotiate this ‘new’ nature of writing on the internet and how the potential of technology can be harnessed to help students write. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_4

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Similarly, speaking as a skill has generally been neglected in South Asian classrooms. This may be for different reasons—the large size of the class where individual attention to speaking skills may be difficult; the problem of testing speaking, especially in large classrooms; the non-inclusion of speaking within the testing curriculum and high-stakes tests like the year-end examinations where the focus seems to be more on writing; or, a systematic dependence on traditional read-and-repeat practice exercises without focusing on the other significant features that the spoken language contains. One of the most often repeated complaints that we hear is that students are not fluent or are not confident enough to speak in the second language. During the course of this chapter, we will look at the different kinds of communicative ideas associated with speaking and writing and how using technology can help us achieve at least, some aspects of these communicative competencies in our classrooms. We will also discuss how speaking and writing have become more than ever inter-connected in the world of technology.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • What kinds of speaking or writing activities do you use in your classes? • Do you use any specific ICT tools when teaching speaking and writing skills? • Do you address the issues of the speech-like nature of writing on ICT platforms? If yes, how? • Make a list and see if the rest of the chapter addresses some of these issues. It is increasingly true that our use of technologies is no more restricted to single media access (which means that we use only one technological medium at a given time), but what is generally being referred to as ‘concurrent media use’ or ‘media multitasking’. Thus, we may be listening to music on our phones and watching TV at the same time or reading something on our screen. Because of the different kinds of technological practices that we carry out in our daily lives, which may also be concurrent, it might be quite possible that the characteristics of one (for example, speaking) may spill over into another (for example, writing). We will see how this can then be used and leveraged for language learning and teaching.

4.2 Spoken Skills: Past and Present Historically, speaking has always been an important aspect of culture and has carried a sense of prestige and status attached to it. A good speaker has always been respected and has carried an enhanced social value. In terms of second language learning and English language education, it is possibly because of this enhanced prestige attached to it that speaking is often seen as a difficult skill to master. We have had a long history

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of different kinds of teaching practices for teaching speaking, which included repetition of given language chunks for memorisation and ‘automaticity’, the teaching of grammatical structures to improve fluency and accuracy, the teaching of grammar combined with interactional notions (formality, functions, politeness etc.), and of course, the teaching of spoken language as contextual and meaningful within a sociocultural discourse. In this long history of teaching speaking—a journey from teaching memory-based repetitions to contextual language—listening and speaking were often twined together. Thus, students would listen to something and then reproduce it in some form or the other. It is only recently that along with fluency in the language, other features of the spoken form of language like appropriacy, flexibility (ability to paraphrase or circumlocute, for example), coherence, use of ‘long turns’, and ‘noticing’ (looking for specific spoken forms) is getting emphasized (see Hughes & Reed, 2017; Goh & Burns, 2012). Speaking, generally, follows four stages (adapted from Scovel, 1998): a.

b.

c. d.

Conceptualisation generally involves planning the message, drawing from one’s background knowledge, the understanding of the speech situation, a basic knowledge of the patterns of discourse and the general ‘monitoring’ of the speech. Formulation involves using specific words and phrases, sequencing them in a particular order, and using spoken grammatical markers (which might be different from the written grammatical markers). Articulation is the stage of the actual production of speech and the use of the articulatory organs for speaking. Self-monitoring involves the ability to check and self-correct mistakes and other features of the speech.

As can be seen, all these processes take time, but speech is something that puts pressure to produce all these almost at the same time simultaneously. The listener may not want to wait for you to produce speech after long deliberation. Since the spoken language has this ‘pressure factor’, students in second language situations find it a bit more challenging to speak, especially in a language that they are in the process of learning. Added to this, if the speaking also involves assessment of some type, then the pressure is even higher. However, we also know that the world of technology today has an abundance of speaking samples spread across the web. So while earlier classrooms might have been restricted by the availability of spoken models (the teacher themselves might have been the only model in some classrooms), ICT has made it possible to not only expose students to various forms of speaking but also, to notice the specific linguistic features that speaking contains. For instance, a teacher can now direct a student to a YouTube video of an interview or a non-scripted speech and ask them to notice the following features (see Thornbury, 2002). Note how some of the features are very distinct from writing, and how some are quite close to it. a.

Automation: Spoken language often contains lexical chunks (for example, collocations), prefabricated phrases (like ‘Nice to meet you’) or formulaic

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b.

c.

d.

e.

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language (like ‘Hi…how are you doing?’). Many of these features of spoken language are important to teach since they can fill in unnatural gaps in a second language learner’s speech due to the lack of confidence or the lack of control over grammar and vocabulary. It also partially solves the problem of ‘pressure’. Online: Spoken language is constantly ‘online’ since the speaker, unlike writing, does not have the time to edit and correct (self-correction might happen later) since the listener does not have the time for long pauses. More use of conjunctions and referencing: Since speech is always produced in real time and in a real place within a context, there are often constant references to it during the speaking act. Moreover, since the speaker may not have too much time to produce ‘well-constructed’ complex sentences, the speaker usually joins sentences with the help of simple conjunctions like ‘and’, ‘but’ etc. Fragmented grammar: Again, speech, unlike writing, often produces fragmented grammar or incomplete sentences, primarily to save on time and to carry the conversation forward. Repetition and overlap: Repetition is a common feature in speaking, and in order to gain time, the same phrase or clause or grammatical structure may be repeated. Similarly, when two or more speakers are involved, there might be overlaps (two speakers speaking at the same time), false starts (beginning and then losing way) etc.

If we can make our students aware that spoken features are often quite distinct from written features and, in addition, are often ‘messy’, we might give them the confidence that is needed for practising the spoken language. We must also emphasize that many of the features mentioned above have only been highlighted in recent studies because of the availability of large amounts of spoken data that can now be stored as corpus on large ICT-enabled data banks. This data then can be analysed, and the various features of spoken language that were only assumed by intuition can now be seen in practice. Thus, while traditional methods of teaching speaking would generally follow repetition of written sentences or vocabulary for speaking, recent ICT-enabled data can make us aware that spoken language has some distinct features of its own and can be very different from written language.

4.3 ICT and Speaking One of the important points to remember here is the distinction between planned and spontaneous speech. Thus, while many of our classrooms are geared towards preparing students for planned speech, the skills and strategies required for spontaneous speech are often quite different. An interesting way to find out the differences between the two is to ask students to record the same speech twice—once, produced spontaneously and once, in a planned manner. Just as a game or fun experiment, you could send out a prompt (a question like ‘What’s your favourite film/book/place to visit’ etc.) to a group of students either on WhatsApp or on email or on any audio

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messaging service with the instructions that they would require to respond to the prompt within a minute or so. They can be instructed to speak for about 30 s and send the audio file back to you. You could then ask them to prepare a speech based on the topic and present it for about 30 s in the classroom later. If possible, record both the versions and show the students how they differ. These are some of the skills and strategies that you might notice in the two versions: a.

b.

c.

d.

Rhythm: Spontaneous speech is generally less rhythmic than planned speech. This is due to quite a few reasons, but the main reason is that it avoids monotony and helps speakers to respond quickly. Since planned speech also resembles writing in some ways, it is more rhythmic. To try this out, you might again ask students to record a planned and spontaneous speech on a given topic on Audacity or Vocaroo and compare them for rhythm. Audacity produces a graphic representation of the speech and gives a rough idea of this. Use of pauses and filler phrases: One of the most common strategies that speakers use in spontaneous speech is pauses and ‘filler phrases’. However, speakers must be made aware that long pauses (until and unless contextually appropriate) are not the norm in spoken language. Similarly, overuse of filler phrases like ‘I mean’, ‘…like’, ‘you know’ etc., may mar the quality of the conversation itself. Again, a good experiment would be to ask your students to record themselves in paired conversation (using Chirbit or Vocaroo or the recording device of their phones) progressively over the term and create an espeech file on Soundcloud or Dropbox or OneDrive or GoogleDrive or any such ‘cloud’ storage. Ask them to see if they are improving in the use of pauses and filler phrases in their spontaneous speech. Proficient speakers also use pauses and filler phrases effectively even in their planned speech. Backtracking and false starts: Backtracking happens when speakers express an idea and then go back to qualify the message either by correcting a mistake or adding to the information. For example, ‘I bought a book—was expensive’. We have already seen what false starts are common in spoken language. Backtrackings are quite common in spontaneous speech because of the pressure of time. In planned speech, on the other hand, this might be more controlled since the speaker has time to construct the sentence in a particular manner. Repetitions, Stammers and Hesitation Noises: A good way to understand and make students confident about their spoken skills is to make them realise that repeating a word or a phrase, stammering or making different sorts of hesitation noises (err, erm, uh, etc.) are normal speech processes and need not be seen as an inessential part of speech. There is no perfect speech, and spontaneous speech is messy. Students can again be asked to record an unscripted interview and notice these features, and how they are strategically used by a fluent speaker. It would also be worthwhile noticing that too many stammers or hesitation noises often hamper the meaning of the utterance.

In addition to the technologically-aided noticing of spontaneous speaking activities, another good way to practice speaking activities is to use chatbots, which are online applications that can be used to conduct online chats or conversations. In

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fact, Walker and White (2013) strongly recommend that chatbots may be used for speaking activities since they have multiple advantages—they can repeat endlessly, and they can provide individualised instructional models for a variety of pronunciation practice. They also suggest the use of voice/speech recognition software (speech-to-text software) for practising spoken skills. In addition, the availability of the voice message software for almost all messaging services now provides an interactive platform for practising spoken skills. Thus, the voice messaging function of WhatsApp can be used to practise speaking within a group of students, the advantage being that all these messages can be retrieved and listened to by the students later to notice the various features of their own speech. This definitely provides them with an opportunity to improve on their own skills. Further, if students have access to video calling, then setting up (based on the number of students that one has) a video chat on a given topic would be a good way to practise speaking. However, speaking to a group through video chats would need a certain level of confidence and proficiency in the spoken language. As we have said earlier, since the language of chat, or as it is more commonly known as SMS language (also called ‘textese’), resembles spoken language, maybe it would be a good idea to allow reluctant and shy students to use text chat as a conversational medium before they move on to actual speaking. Chatting (though it is writing) can be seen as a kind of a stepping stone for speaking. For planned speech, based on the aspects of speech that the students like to practice, there are quite a few options for using ICT. Though these sites are not free (they allow some free tools to be used by the teachers), Learnosity and Thinglink can be used for some very interesting interactive communicative tasks. Since both the platforms allow embedding of audio and video in the tasks, they could be effectively used for teaching and testing speaking. Similarly, speaking tasks can be designed to be carried out on audio messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram that provide free and accessible forms of technology for practising skills and strategies.

ACTIVITIES Activity 1 (Adapted from Stanley, 2013). Explain to the students that the class is going to maintain an audio journal of language learning in the class. The students need to contribute to this journal not by writing but by speaking. The students can then be directed towards an audio-recording website like Vocaroo or Chirbit or simply be asked to record the audio on their devices and email them to you. The audio could be around 1 min long consisting of students’ experience of a particular class and what they learnt in it. The activity can be conducted across a few weeks and then collated. If you are feeling particularly enthusiastic, you can even try a podcast hosting service like Podbean or BuzzSprout and create a podcast of your students’ experiences of learning in the class.

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Activity 2 Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Decide with your students a particular day and time for an audio/video session (For the video session, you can use Skype or Google Meet which allows recording facilities). Decide on a topic beforehand on which the students would need to conduct some research before they come for the session. The session can take the form of a tag relay. So, the teacher can begin with a short talk on the topic and then tag a particular student in the audio itself. The student who is tagged, then responds and speaks and then tags someone else in the group and so on and so forth.

This activity ensures that everyone is listening to what the other is saying and then responding and speaking in turns. All the audio files can then be posted on a blog or a Google Classroom (if the teacher uses one) where the students and the teacher can review the features of the spoken texts produced by the students.

4.4 Teaching Writing: Past and Present Historically, the teaching of writing for second language education has by and large followed three major approaches. They are called the ‘product approach’, the ‘process approach’ and the ‘situated approach’ (see Kroll, 2003; Hyland, 2016). The product approach to writing views the act of writing to be focused on the actual end-product, for instance, in the context of the classroom, a written essay or a poem. This approach, therefore, promotes ways to achieve this product which might include the practice of good vocabulary, grammatical structures, text organisation mechanics etc. The process approach, on the other hand, is concerned with the actual psychological and mental operations that come into play while writing. This approach, therefore, focuses on brainstorming, planning, organising, editing, offering feedback, revising, and so on with a view to helping students produce a written piece. Finally, the situated approach to teaching writing emphasises the fact that any writing takes place within a socio-cultural context, and it is this context that interacts with how and what people write. This approach, thus, points towards aspects like social situatedness, classroom contexts, readers’ expectations, and accepted norms of ‘communities’ (‘discourse community’ is a common term in this approach) of writing. This, of course, does not mean that the approaches replaced each other or there was a neat historical progression. Within the South Asian classroom contexts, for example, all the three approaches may co-exist depending on the institutional resources, assessment processes, and teacher-awareness of the significance of the

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writing process. It may, however, be safely said that since the assessment practices in most of our classrooms determine what and how we teach, the classrooms generally tend to follow a product approach, where the final product is assessed or evaluated. With the spread of ICT, however, we are also aware of the fact that the nature of writing, as well as the function of teacher-roles have changed. This change can be seen in simple word-processing programmes such as Microsoft Word, which allows you to edit, do a spellcheck and a grammar check, as well as format the text, both during the process of writing and after you finish writing. In fact, ICT tools can constantly offer feedback, untiringly, like in a process approach. Similarly, with the availability of software like Grammarly or Reverso (that allows grammar and organisational checks as well as some translation), the nature of writing itself has undergone a sea change. Here are some of the ways in which ICT has changed the nature of writing (adapted from Hyland, 2016): a. b. c.

d.

e. f. g.

an increased possibility of combining the types of text, for example, alphabetical with an image or an emoji or audio; the availability of vast amounts of information literally at the writer’s fingertips to process and convert into writing; the interactive nature of platforms like blogs and wikis make writing much more open since there’s a possibility of ‘writing back’ (and even editing) to the writer; the choice of readers is no more restricted to a narrowly imagined audience but to an unlimited number of potential visitors to the web who can read (and comment); the gradual blurring of written and spoken channels of communication where ‘writing’ often takes the form of ‘speaking’ (for instance, in chats); access to different types of ‘discourse communities’ for writers; the possibilities of collaborative writing practices.

All these transformations, of course, offer a great many opportunities but also pose some serious challenges to the teaching of writing. We will try to see in the next section how these challenges and opportunities can be concretely integrated within classroom practices.

PAUSE AND REFLECT: • Make a list of things that you have been doing to help students write. Make a parallel list of things that you have ‘noticed’ where students face difficulties in their writing. These difficulties could be linguistic (lack of vocabulary, grammatical errors etc.), discourse-based (lack of organisation, lack of coherence etc.) or social (use of abbreviations and shortened words in a formal piece of writing; informality in tone; using emoticons to indicate a feeling, lack of understanding of the addresser and the addressee etc.).

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• Carry out a small-scale search on the internet on how ICT tools can help you resolve some of the difficulties that your students face. Based on the survey, also think of how you can change your own teaching methods. • If possible, try out one of the tools in the class. Carry out a small survey to find out how students felt about it (or ask them to submit anonymous feedback through an online questionnaire). • Based on the survey, reflect on: – What kind of ICT tools can you successfully use in making writing interesting? – What are the best ways to integrate these activities within your own context?

4.5 ICT and Writing As we have seen earlier, the three major approaches to writing can be termed ‘product’, ‘process’ and ‘situated’ writing. In this section, we will see how all of these approaches can be supported by ICT and web tools. We must, however, point out that when we talk about writing in this section, we have in mind a range of writing practices—chat messages, short opinion pieces, blog entries, wiki edits and formal written essays that our classrooms demand. Let us take a look at each approach in detail.

4.5.1 Writing as Product Depending on what our product is, there are several ICT tools available for writing. Thus, if the idea is to design a classroom poster, one can use tools like Adobe Spark or Canva for producing professional-looking designs. Microsoft Publisher also has very useful design templates for creating a booklet or a flyer. However, when we speak of such online tools, they may provide us with the technical finesse of design, but the input language needs to be provided by the students. Moreover, the product at the end is more or less based on the language that has been taught in the classroom and teachers might not have the time or enough leeway within a tight curriculum to provide individual attention for each product. This is especially important if the final product that the students produce is going to be assessed. It is here that online linguistic support for the written product may be used effectively. One significant way in which the students can be guided to seek help in their writing is to visit Online Writing Labs (OWLs). A typical OWL provides quite a few multimedia support activities that the students can access in their own time and then practice. An OWL can also provide useful teaching material for our classroom

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activities. A typical OWL would generally provide guidance on the process of writing, the ways to conduct online and offline research, arranging and organising resources (citing and referencing), the different writing styles for different types of products, essentials of grammar, making presentations, and so on and so forth. One of the earliest OWL that was created and offered free was the Purdue University OWL. This OWL contains comprehensive guides to the mechanics, grammar, punctuation, and different types of writing assignments, and can provide much-needed online help to students in their writing. Another OWL that is available for free for visitors is the Excelsior OWL that, like the Purdue OWL, provides extensive resources for students to help them in their writing. The use of these OWLs can perhaps be best harnessed if the teacher and the student collaborate on a class blog or a wiki where both students and teachers can contribute and exchange their own experiences of using such OWLs. Alternatively, one can use a virtual bulletin board like Padlet or NoteApp (these apps act like classroom notice boards, and notes can be posted every day and collated later) to post experiences or uses or activities based on such OWLs.

4.5.2 Writing as Process While teaching writing through the process approach, we must take into consideration the fact that this approach generally is intensive and requires substantial efforts on the part of the students and the teachers. In the pre-ICT days, this approach worked well in classrooms of a small size where students could be given individual attention by the teacher to help them in their writing process. However, large classrooms, like in many institutions of South Asia, provide a different context, and the process approach may pose a certain number of problems (for a discussion on some problems of the process approach, see Leki et al., 2008). However, there are quite a few ICT tools available now to ease the way process approach to writing can be used in the classroom. But before that, we would need to understand what is involved in the teaching of writing as a process. The following are some of the areas the process approach to writing highlights. a.

Goal-setting and extensive planning: Proficient writers often set goals about what they intend to achieve through their writings and accordingly plan to realise those goals. The plan would generally involve brainstorming, jotting down and discarding ideas, note-taking, agreeing or disagreeing as to which ideas are to be included and, so on. Today, ICT comes in handy for doing many of these activities. There are quite a few mind-mapping tools or graphic organisers that can produce a visual representation of connected ideas like a network. The signs of a good mind-mapping tool or organiser are that they would generally provide you with enough storage space, allow you to attach audio and video files, and

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c.

d.

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collaborate. Mindly and MindMup are two useful tools for producing such ideaoutlines, and both of them allow you to save and export the files to other sites or platforms. Reviewing and revising: Even before one actually starts writing, there is a constant revision and reviewing of the planned draft. One of the ways that a teacher can help students to fine-tune their plan is to set them a problem task (for example, answering a problem question related to their writing) which students can then try to solve by visiting sites like Wikipedia or online encyclopedias (Britannica is one of them). We have already mentioned in Chap. 2 how a WebQuest can effectively provide a game-like environment in encouraging students to solve a problem. In addition, tools like Scrivener and Gingko aids students in organising their ideas as well as note-taking. Drafting and Editing: These skills are comparatively more complex to master, and students would need the most support from their teachers in developing these skills. As has already been outlined earlier, the amount of effort needed here requires time, which teachers might find difficult to allocate. However, the availability of basic ICT tools like the spelling and grammar check function of word-processing (Microsoft Word, for example) can aid students in basic drafting and editing. In addition, tools like Grammarly help students with editing their errors in grammar, often suggesting alternative structures that might be more appropriate to a context. Further, the ‘Review’ tab in Word also allows through ‘Track Changes’ saving of different versions of the edited text so that one can keep a record of changes made in the multiple drafts. Final composition and editing: Once the students are done with the processes mentioned above, the written text can be put up on a collaborative platform like a wiki (try Wikispaces) or Etherpad or Google Docs. Alternatively, a Google Classroom can be created, if possible, allowing students to share documents and collaborate. Teachers can then open the documents for peer feedback (feedback by other students) as well as teacher feedback. The teacher must instruct students to follow an accepted framework for feedback (for feedback protocols, see Lee, 2017; Bitchener & Ferris, 2012). Students can be encouraged to incorporate some of the feedback in their revised draft and re-submit on the platform again.

As can be seen, the process writing approach can be more time-consuming but perhaps more rewarding than the ‘product’ approach in terms of imparting actual writing skills to students. Since the teachers in our classroom contexts are constrained by various factors like class size or workloads, the use of ICT tools for some of the processes outlined above may enable the student to become more autonomous and the teacher to become more supportive.

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4.5.3 Writing as Situated In both the product and process approaches, the focus is either on the written text or the mental processes of the writer. However, we know that our students are also situated within certain social contexts that often determine or influence not only how we write but also when and what we write. This is especially true today since we spend different kinds of lives on the various ICT platforms. Thus, for example, when we write an email to a friend or a colleague, the nature of our relationship with that friend or colleague also determines the kind of email we write (for instance, choosing to use an emoji or gif in the email!) We need to remember that we often use technology to satisfy relational needs for promoting interaction, differentiating between relationships, and evaluating different kinds of roles (for details, see Bloch, 2008; Thomas et al., 2013). In other words, what we write is often affected by complex factors like our previous experiences of writing, our social standing, the availability of resources, or the importance given to writing in an institutional context. We will briefly summarise the aspects that the situated approach to writing focuses on. a.

b.

The writer’s identity/stance/position: When we write a Facebook post or tweet a message, or change our statuses on WhatsApp, we are constantly socializing through our writing. One way to make students aware of the identity (or identities) that they assume in the course of writing is to make them notice the various written posts on their own social media platforms. This can be done through data donation on a wiki or a blog where students choose which written data from their messages across social media they would like to share and ‘donate’. The students and/or teachers can then be invited to comment on the students’ written posts about what they think is the ‘stance’ or ‘point of view’ that the student adopts in the posts (do anonymise the ‘donated data’ so that it does not lead to a personal loss of face) as well as guess to whom the posts might have been sent. Alternatively, on a class Facebook page, invite students to write about their experiences of writing different kinds of things in their daily lives (including writing for their classes). Probe how they think that they are different (or not) from their peers or family members, or friends, and what they do in making sure that they are different (or not). These reflections can again be opened for comments. The focus of these kinds of activities is to make the students aware that writing is a social process and all writers have a stance or a position. The idea of audience: One of the most common assumptions is that writers always write for an audience that they have in mind, a kind of an ‘imagined audience’. For instance, when we were writing here, we believed that these words would be read by teachers as well as researchers and scholars who work with the higher secondary and tertiary levels across varying contexts of social institutions in South Asia. We might also have a few students in mind who might be interested in reading what we have written. However, if we encourage students to write for and on the internet, then the ‘audience’ is not very clearly defined. It is a matter of some debate whether writing on the internet assumes a definite, imagined audience or an indefinite, fuzzy audience (see Barton & Lee,

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2013). It is true that if you are posting something open to the public, practically anyone can read it. However, we also know that we read mostly those posts that we would like to read and not something that is strongly disagreeable. We ‘like’ or ‘share’ such writings more readily than the ones we don’t like. So, when we write on the internet, there is, in a sense, an idea of an implicit audience in our heads. Keeping this audience in mind not only determines the text of our writing (the words definitely) but, in the case of the internet, also the design of our writing (images, fonts, layout, colour palette etc.). This is one aspect of writing that we have not dealt with in this chapter since it involves a scope beyond the teaching of English as a second language. However, we are aware that writing today, more than ever, involves an aspect of multimodal design. As we look around the internet, we notice that it would be very rare to have just printed words on a site. It is bound to have various media (hyperlinked text, audio, video, images and therefore, multimodal) as well as a pleasing design and layout. In fact, we might actually avoid sites or webpages that do not appeal to our sense of aesthetics. In order to prepare our students for future online environments and possibly online publishing, we might need to think of integrating design and multimedia skills in our classrooms. The activities below exploit some of the ideas that we have seen across the various approaches to teaching writing.

ACTIVITIES Activity 1: Blogs in a blended mode • Step I: This activity expects students to work both online and offline. Ask your students to create a blog of their own. You will need to guide them to create their blogs. The students can use either Blogger or WordPress. Both are simple to use, and the blogs can be created in minutes. • Step II: Divide students into small groups and tell them that they are peer groups. Tell each student in the group to choose a topic of interest from their syllabi and write a short piece on the topic. This can be done offline. Everyone in the group should be encouraged to consult each other while writing. If possible, they can make use of some of the ICT tools outlined in this chapter to brainstorm, edit, spell and grammar check etc. Make sure that each group has a range of students from high proficiency to low proficiency in terms of language and use of ICT (a simple class survey can be done at the beginning of this activity). This will enable the individuals in the group to learn from each other. • Step III: Once each individual in the groups is ready, ask them to post their written piece on the blog. Invite students in the other groups to comment on each other’s blogs including comments on how the assignment/ written piece can be improved.

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• Step IV: Ask each student to collect the comments, revise the draft and re-post it on the blog again. The teacher can now comment on each of the posts individually. • By the end of this activity, students can now have access to an answer bank based on their syllabus! Activity 2: Class Twitter Twitter, the microblogging site, is a good way to teach students summarising and paraphrasing since it restricts each post to 280 characters. • Step I: Ask students to create a twitter account. Make sure that each student ‘follows’ each other on Twitter. This will allow them to see each other’s posts. • Step II: Create a class hashtag, for example, #MyEnglishClass. • Step III: Post a debate or a discussion topic and ask students to research about it from various websites. Students can also follow hashtags like #ESL, #TESOL, #TEFL, #EFL, #ELT, #ELLs, etc. to get ideas for the topic. Alternatively, they can follow major language experts most of whom are on Twitter. However, ask them to post the summary of what they found within the word limit of 280 characters. Make sure that they use the class hashtag. • Step IV: Ask students to comment on each other’s posts (the comments could be on the language of posts as well as the content of posts). • Step V (Extended option): Invite an ‘expert’ for a Twitter chat on the topic of discussion.

4.6 Summary In this chapter, we have explored the possibilities of teaching speaking and writing by using the possibilities of digital ICT tools. While speaking as a skill has been neglected in the general language teaching curriculum, the availability of new ICT tools today can provide effective ways to encourage students to practice speaking at their own pace and in their own time. Additionally, it also provides the opportunity for teachers to experiment with different methods of teaching and testing (for example, through audio assignments), which may not have been possible in earlier classrooms. Similarly, the teaching of writing in South Asia, though largely focused on the ‘product’ approach, has the distinct possibility of adopting the ‘process’ or the ‘situated’ approach due to the availability of new ICT tools. The emergence of different platforms for writing and the varying modes that they offer also opens the possibilities of writing as a practice. Finally, in addition to what we consider to be the essential mechanics of writing, it might now be needed to think of writing itself as a multimodal practice. We might, therefore, need to take steps to ensure that these

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aspects of multimodality, such as design and layout, may have to be actively engaged with, in our classrooms. The classroom thus, may need to become more collaborative—for instance, inviting a teacher of Arts or a multimedia designer for teaching these skills—an argument we have repeatedly made in our chapter on integrating ICT across the curriculum.

References Barton, B., & Lee, C. (2013). Language online: Investigating digital texts and practices. Routledge. Bitchener, J., & Ferris, D. R. (2012). Written corrective feedback in second language acquisition and writing. Routledge. Bloch, J. (2008). Technology in the second language composition classroom. University of Michigan Press. Crystal, D. (2006). Language and the internet (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Goh, C., & Burns, A. (2012). Teaching speaking skills: A holistic approach. Cambridge University Press. Hughes, R., & Reed, B. S. (2017). Teaching and researching speaking (3rd ed.). Routledge. Hyland, K. (2016). Teaching and researching writing (3rd ed.). Routledge. Kroll, B. (2003). Exploring the dynamics of second language writing. Cambridge University Press. Lee, I. (2017). Classroom writing assessment and feedback in L2 school contexts. Springer. Leki, I., Cumming, A., & Silva, T. (2008). A synthesis of research on second language writing in English. Routledge. Scovel, T. (1998). Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press. Stanley, G. (2013). Language learning with technology. Cambridge University Press. Thomas, M., Reinders, H., & Warschauer, M. (Eds.). (2013). Contemporary computer assisted language learning. Bloomsbury. Thornbury, S. (2002). How to teach vocabulary. Pearson educational. Walker, A., & White, G. (2013). Technologically enhanced language learning. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 5

ICT Beyond the Classroom: New Media and Learning

Abstract This chapter is a hands-on chapter on the use of Web 2.0 tools so that students’ own practices of new media can be leveraged to take learning beyond the classrooms. These tools include various software applications, tools, and platforms and how they can be effectively used to supplement classroom activities and make learning ubiquitous. The chapter also discusses the use of e-portfolios that can integrate all the skills discussed in the previous chapters. In the process, we will consider the various levels of learning in accordance with Bloom’s taxonomy and map different software and tools catering to the specific level(s) of learning. Keywords Language learning and Web 2.0 tools · Technology adoption functions · Discussion forums · Electronic portfolios · Bloom’s revised taxonomy for twenty-first century skills · ICT for different levels of learning

5.1 Introduction We have seen in the previous chapters the different ways in which ICT can be incorporated into teaching various language learning skills in the classroom. Let us now investigate the various areas into which teachers can make use of technology for students to take it beyond their classrooms. The three major strands of research regarding the exploration of technology for learning in recent times have included, extending in-class learning experiences through online group work such as electronic discussion forums, the creation of portfolios in electronic formats that help students present evidence of students learning, and several other applications that supplement in-class learning with their seamless use outside the classroom. Let us now look at these strands in which the incorporation of various software into learning cycles beyond the classroom can enable enriching student learning experiences.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_5

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5.2 Functions of Technology Adoption The embedding of online learning by language teachers can materialise in varying degrees of adoption and implementation. In the scope of this implementation, the commonly adopted uses of technology can be categorised into five different functions. These functions include delivery, communication, collaboration, feedback, and testing. The first kind of use that is delivery, comprises teachers uploading audio, video, and textual materials online for students to access or download for later use. The second use of technology for communication, can be seen when teachers send messages about the lessons or the tests or assignments to inform students about an update on the course or lesson. The collaborative function includes teachers designing online tasks or activities that require students to post messages on a topic collectively for discussion of a relevant issue, in the form of blogs or wikis or online forums. The fourth practice includes teachers drafting a survey or a quiz for students for purposes of feedback collection. And finally, the function of testing involves teachers arranging and administering online tests and/or students submitting their assignments online. While all these functions can be fulfilled within one standardised virtual learning platform (if the institution has installed it), the incorporation of technology for learning depends highly on the diverse functions and purposes that teachers would like to use them for. Consequently, whether the institution installs a learning management system or a virtual learning environment platform, value-added student learning experiences hinge primarily on the creativity and choices of technology use, made by the teachers. In places where the installation of an institution-wide virtual learning system is not affordable, the situation could turn out to be advantageous for teachers, in a way that can incorporate free systems that allow for more flexibility and fluidity in teacher-led and student-centred learning. Let us look at these pedagogical strategies and learning activities that can be adopted and implemented by different technological systems and tools for adding value and enriching overall student learning experiences.

5.3 Discussion Boards and Forums The formation of online learning groups and communities is a practice that language learning researchers have recommended time and again, for adding value to learning experiences pertaining to student participation and motivation. As the practice can be viewed in accordance with the social and constructivist approach to language learning, the inclusion of discussion boards in an online learning environment becomes more relevant. The common functions of technology, such as content delivery via posting course materials on a platform and subsequent communication, can be a good starting point for enabling students to engage with the course content beyond the physical learning space. However, it is the responsiveness of students

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and discussion of the content and materials that would facilitate a more meaningful learning experience. This learning experience gained from participation in online discussion boards has varied advantages for both teachers and students alike. As teachers take up the role of facilitators of learning by handing over the control of learning to students, the online discussion boards can prove beneficial as they help foster: • • • • •

active engagement in course content with an initial prompt, collaborative brainstorming, thinking, and formulation of ideas, cooperative learning through shared abilities and reasoning, open and alternative viewpoints for understanding and consolidation, and enhanced accommodation of various student learning styles and paces.

Moreover, when the teacher contributes to the online discussion board on an equal footing, it elicits further student involvement as the online forum becomes a space of sharing among peers without any pressure of being judged or evaluated. Thus, by working together and participating collectively, a sense of community is fostered among students, which stimulates critical thinking and improves communication skills. Let us now consider different platforms that can effectively enable this cooperative learning strategy. We can broadly categorise these platforms or software into two main streams, namely, the enterprise versions and the free versions. The enterprise versions of platforms are usually paid ones which consist of several user licenses that can be used at an institutional level. These enterprise platforms are usually large-scale learning management systems that comprise a range of pedagogical features embedded into them. Some of these learning management systems include Blackboard, Canvas, BrightSpace, (part of the Desire2Learn or D2L group), Moodle, Sakai, and several more. Discussion forums are usually a standard feature that come along with the suite of features these platforms offer. However, since installing these massive systems would require institutional purchase, support, and management, it may leave the teachers dependant on the institution for the incorporation of certain pedagogical practices for enhanced learning. While it may be worthwhile for institutions to invest in technology-enabled learning infrastructure and equipment, teachers could explore the potential of freely available technologies for enhancing their teaching practices. It is here that the free tools would help teachers do so. As the name suggests, the free versions of the tools are freely available online, and would only require an account creation or sign up with a valid email address. Within this category, we can further group the free platforms into three sets, namely, • first, platforms that solely act as online discussion boards, • second, integrated platforms that offer various other features, of which one feature can be finetuned for discussion purposes, and • third, platforms that are specifically designed for educational purposes only, where discussion boards form an integral part.

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The first set of these platforms include online forum building tools used in the real world either by businesses or online web communities to discuss various aspects. These include phBB (https://www.phpbb.com/), myBB (https://mybb.com/), and the Simple Machine forum (https://www.simplemachines.org/), which are free and opensource bulletin boards software that enable easy creation of discussion topics and forums on their boards. These free and open-source tools are easily downloadable with readily available online support where teachers can create topics for discussion and get students to engage online. The second set of integrated platforms are the mega web service providers and social networking sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, and several such online platforms. Here, the teacher can first create a private group that is accessible to the students of a particular course or a class, and then send them an invite to join in for contributing to the forums. Students find discussions on these platforms more motivating and engaging since this form of online interaction is the closest to their everyday experiences of their digital lives. Finally, the third set of platforms include specific learning management sites or platforms that have been created solely for educational purposes. These include platforms such as Padlet (https://padlet.com/), Flipgrid (https://info.flipgrid.com/), and Nearpod (https://nearpod.com/), as well as document commenting and annotation platforms such as NowComment (https://nowcomment.com/) and Diigo (https:// www.diigo.com/), which doubles as a social bookmarking website. Padlet is a tool that acts like an online wall for students to brainstorm their ideas, post ideas, questions, and comments for discussion. One can think of Padlet as a virtual sheet of paper that learners fill in to develop further discussion. Teachers can create special sessions, and students can either discuss the topics online or can share files and images to elaborate their thoughts and ideas. Another such online tool, Flipgrid, also acts as an online space for collaborative thinking. When the teacher posts a discussion topic, students can reply to the topic with a recorded video or textual comments. The multiple modes of responses foster student engagement as they develop speaking, listening, and writing skills through participating in the online discussion.

ACTIVITY: • Upload a document to diigo. This can be an editorial or an opinion piece from a daily newspaper. • Highlight 10 to 12 specific parts in the document (depending on the length and content of the document) that students will need to comment upon. (You can decide if you would like students to comment upon a specific grammatical aspect, such as the use and context of modals throughout, or a specific topic related to the content of the editorial opinion piece.) • Post your own comment, as a teacher on the first highlighted part of the document to give students a start.

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• Get students to comment on at least three of the highlighted parts of the document. • Also, ask students to respond to at least two of the comments posted on the highlighted document by their classmates. • In class, get students to present the summary of discussed comments on the documents. Similarly, Nearpod is an interactive teaching delivery tool through which teachers can embed various engaging elements in the materials presented. Teachers can easily upload documents, presentation slides, audio files and videos on the platform. They can embed multiple interactive features in these materials, which solicit responses from students for a more engaging learning experience. The other two tools that enhance students’ learning experiences by encouraging group collaboration include the annotation platforms, NowComment and Diigo. Teachers can upload documents and create online discussion areas on these platforms. Students can then highlight different parts, annotate words or paragraphs, add comments, and discuss different details of the document in depth through multiple conversations. The platforms also allow students to upload documents or save web pages for commenting upon, in an organised manner. They can revisit the points made directly on different parts or sections of the materials anytime. This experience makes the learning more fun, engaging, detailed and meaningful for the students, as they are actively involved in the learning process through online collaboration. All these software come with both free versions where the teacher can create an account for a set number of students as well as a subscription version, which usually offers licenses for more number of students. The free versions of these software usually offer most features embedded within the scope of the platform. As mentioned earlier, the most effective way of encouraging students to partake in online discussions is to make the learning task or activity as closely relatable to the fluid social networking tools which students are used to in their daily lives. All the platforms mentioned above consist of features for discussion that can be easily identified as part of the digital practices of the students’ everyday lives.

5.4 Electronic Portfolios As online forums fulfil the function of technology for collaboration in learning, the functions of feedback and testing can be fulfilled through the technological adoption of electronic portfolios to enhance student learning experiences. An electronic portfolio or an e-portfolio is a multimedia platform that allows students to bring together and showcase their academic skills, learning, and achievements throughout their course or learning. Just as a traditional paper-based portfolio consists of collecting a learner’s works, an electronic portfolio would have evidence

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of work presented in an electronic format on an online or digital platform. The platform gives learners opportunities for creating, designing, thinking, sharing, and learning by demonstrating various elements of their academic work. In other words, the e-portfolio is an academic profile for students. They can upload multimedia files, including text, images, audio files, and videos to represent their coursework and reflect on it and share it with their other students and teachers. The e-portfolio also provides students with an opportunity to interact with their peers’ work. Students can post comments on their classmates’ work and receive feedback on their work from their peers and teachers. By helping students present, interact, and enhance their learning, the e-portfolio becomes a valuable tool for creating an academic digital identity (Hiradhar & Gray, 2009) that can be taken forward from their academic life onto their future professional journey. For language learning, an e-portfolio is a handy tool for collecting evidence of language ability and skills. The e-portfolio, in a way, acts as a means of providing further evidence on specific language skills that students would like to showcase, as it goes beyond giving a specific performance score on a particular language skill. For instance, if the student received an excellent score for writing, the student could put up a sample of their writing as evidence of the score achieved. Thus, the students’ written skills showcased in the e-portfolio supplement the actual score that the student received for writing. The same would hold for speaking skills, where students can upload a video of themselves onto the e-portfolio to demonstrate their speaking ability in the language. Thus, students can collect evidence of their various skills over time and document their progress as they go along. The process of gathering evidence of learning progress can thus motivate further learning. Let us now look at the processes and purposes involved in creating e-portfolios and various types of platforms that cater to the design of e-portfolios.

5.4.1 E-portfolio Creation Processes and Considerations The electronic portfolio can be a helpful tool for formal learning and assessment and a documentation tool for extra-curricular activities and experiences. E-portfolios thus, not only act as a means of assessing student learning achievements with evidence and regular test scores and grades but also act as a means of documentation for various activities during their course of learning. Consequently, e-portfolios are fast becoming popular as they reflect the growing significance of technology in daily lives. To adopt this technology as part of the teaching–learning process, teachers will need to familiarise themselves with the processes and stages involved in creating student electronic portfolios. The creation of the electronic portfolios will include the following steps that will require decision making on various aspects of the portfolio, such as:

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purpose of the portfolio—formative or summative assessment, collection of artefacts—items to include, incorporation of reflection on the learning, opportunities for feedback and interaction, and presentation of the final e-portfolio.

Before implementing e-portfolios as a tool for learning and assessment into a course, teachers would need to follow the various aspects of the decision-making processes mentioned above. First, the teachers would need to decide why they would like to implement an electronic portfolio into the curriculum and identify the purpose, outcome, and goal of the e-portfolio. The different purposes for creating e-portfolios include simple documentation of evidence for a formative or a summative assessment or showcasing thematic work based on the audiences. The starting point of establishing the purpose of the e-portfolio would be to get students to write an introduction about themselves and what to expect from their portfolio. This step enables the students to work towards a specific goal and to gather evidence all along the way to fulfil their specified purpose in terms of learning. This could be as specific as using the present continuous tense, and as overarching as the language used in reporting business news across mainstream media. Second, the teacher could clarify the kind of artefacts to be collated and demonstrated as evidence for the achievement of the goals set out by students in the first stage of the process. Students could demonstrate their learning through artefacts that range from links to useful blogs, websites, and activities done in class and beyond class. Thus, students could create a digital archive of their work consisting of various media and materials that substantiate their learning. The third aspect for consideration regarding adopting the e-portfolio technology is reflection. The process of learning becomes more relevant and meaningful when a reflective element is integrated within it. When teachers get students to develop their e-portfolios, teachers should also ensure that each evidence or activity is accompanied by a reflection. The reflective statements or journaling could include how students learned from the showcased artefacts and activities. As students provide a rationale for the demonstrated evidence of learning, they can consolidate their insights into a specific topic or goal by providing a meta-analysis of their learning. Teachers should also make sure that the student e-portfolios have the possibility of receiving feedback and engaging in functional interaction on the commented artefact(s). With this feature, students can then visit their classmates’ e-portfolios and leave comments or give feedback, as well as invite their peers to do the same. The entire process of interaction through the e-portfolios further strengthens their learning collaboratively. Finally, teachers can make students aware of the parts that get published and presented to a targeted audience. Students should have the freedom to choose the different formats of their e-portfolios tailored for an intended audience. Thus, the learning artefacts and reflective statements could be presented to the teachers and the classmates on the course, while the wide range of activities to showcase a specific set

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of skills could be delivered to prospective recruiters in the academic or professional fields. Once the teacher has considered the potential of platforms to cater to these processes, the selection of a suitable e-portfolio platform becomes easier.

5.4.2 E-portfolio Platforms Several electronic platforms which offer the varied features mentioned above could be used for the implementation of e-portfolios. In the same vein as discussion board platforms, e-portfolio platforms can be chosen from proprietary hosted platforms or open-source platforms. The proprietary platforms start off with trial accounts for testing for a larger number of students, after which a license fee is charged for the number of accounts. The decision of going ahead with these kinds of platforms would require several layers of testing and verification for administrators, students, teachers, assessment committees, etc., at the institutional level. While it would be worthwhile for a teacher to help authorities implement an institutionwide system for this technology, working with individual courses on a trial version could be a good starting point. The hosted services proprietary e-portfolios include portfolio software embedded in learning environment systems such as Blackboard (https://www.blackboard.com), or standalone ones such as PebblePad (https://www. pebblepad.co.uk), Pathbrite (https://pathbrite.com/), Foliotek (www.foliotek.com), and myDesiretoLearn (https://www.mydesire2learn.com), to name a few. The second type of portfolios, which include the open-source portfolios, are basically free for several users as they are open-source platforms. Teachers can create accounts or get students to create accounts on these systems. These open-source portfolios can be embedded into the institutional virtual learning platform too. The most common types of open-source portfolios (OSP) include Mahara (www.mahara. org/) and Foliospaces (https://www.foliospaces.org). They are freely downloadable and easy to set up. Both these OSPs are hugely popular for the creation of personal learning spaces to showcase achievements, provide evidence or learning, reflect as well as interact with peers for feedback. Another portfolio platform that is embedded into an OSP learning management system is Sakai (https://www.sakailms.org) from where teachers can choose to download either a free cloud-hosted service or a free self-hosted service. The other free platforms which can be used as electronic portfolios are free blogging sites such as Blogger (https://www.blogger.com) or Edublogs (https://edublogs.org/), which cater to only education-related blogs. Teachers can design a portfolio-based activity for students to host their evidences of learning and reflections on these platforms. Finally, there are several other webpage building sites that can be finetuned for the creation of electronic portfolios as deemed fit by teachers. These sites include Weebly (www.weebly.com), Google Sites, which comes with a google account, and WordPress (www.wordpress.com), all of which have the potential to enable the creation of a webpage for showcasing specific areas of learning among students.

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The simplest way of choosing the right portfolio to fulfil the specific need of learning would be going in for an open-source portfolio, wherever the institutional support is unavailable. With the open-source platforms, teachers can go through the different features offered by each platform and then decide what would suit their programs or courses. Moreover, teachers will have to ensure that the testing and trialling of the system is done rigorously before opening it up to a larger group of students. Secondly, when working in a group, the communication and documentation for using these portfolios become crucial as teachers customise these open-source platforms for specific purposes of their courses.

5.5 Levels of Learning While incorporating various technologies in language learning can enrich student learning experiences, it is essential to remember that only the appropriate use of technologies will help teachers to do so. When teachers are fully aware of the scope and levels of learning entailed in pedagogical processes, from acquiring knowledge to applying it creatively, adopting appropriate technology will be meaningful. Without a complete understanding of a particular technology and the levels of learning for practical application, teaching with technology could quickly become superfluous. Teachers may thereby feel distanced from its use and hence, may not explore the full possibilities in conjunction with the levels of learning. So, let us look at the levels of learning to be considered for designing and implementing appropriate and suitable technologies into language learning. The most widely adopted framework for creating language learning courses across various curricula has been Bloom’s taxonomy, developed by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Later, in 2001 his students David Krathwohl and Lorin Anderson revised the taxonomy to make it more relevant to the twenty first-century teaching and learning environment. The taxonomy is a multi-level model of classifying human thinking and learning according to six cognitive levels of complexity ranging from lower-order thinking skills to higher-order thinking skills. These levels include: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Remembering Understanding Applying Analysing Evaluating Creating.

While the first three skills, namely, remembering, understanding, and applying, are considered basic cognition or lower-order thinking skills, they tend to be the foundation for any meaningful learning.

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PAUSE AND REFLECT: Look at the video introducing the Bloom’s digital taxonomy at https://youtu. be/fqgTBwElPzU and think about the questions asked towards the end of the video: • How can the tools you use support different cognitive levels? • Which tools help you address lower-order thinking skills? • Which tools can challenge students’ higher-order thinking skills? The first skill of remembering is vital for the learning process as it involves recalling and retrieving knowledge in the form of producing definitions, facts, or lists or retrieving information. Teachers can ask students to use tools or platforms requiring searching, highlighting, copying, listing, and bookmarking. Thus, for teaching a concept, teachers can get students to search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, and ask them to bookmark the specific pages with the highlight or bookmark function of the search browsers embedded in Chrome or Edge or Firefox. The use of word cloud software such as Edwordle (http://www.edwordle.net/), or WordClouds (https://www.wordclouds.com/) or Microsoft’s Word Cloud application can prove helpful for this skill. Word clouds are a great way for learning and remembering key concepts or significant points of a topic. The second skill of understanding involves constructing meaning and building relations through varied functions in written or graphical forms. The process of demonstrating the understanding of concepts can start from, first subscribing to feeds, and moving onto tagging and annotating the content on those feeds. Tools that enable these processes thus range from RSS feed subscriptions to using annotating software such as Diigo (www.diigo.com) and Pinboard (https://www.pinboard.com/). The practice of collating web resources and tagging or annotating important parts will enable students to organise their retrieved information and create links between various resources to construct meaning. The third skill of applying knowledge refers to situations where students produce the learned material in the form of diagrams, models, simulations, presentations, or any other audio-visual and textual or graphical content. To demonstrate the applicability of the acquired knowledge, students would be involved in various processes in the form of charting, drawing, recording, editing, vocalising, and uploading their learned knowledge on a topic or a specific area. Tools such as Scribblemaps (https://www.scribblemaps.com/), Blabberise (https://edu.blabberize. com/), and Prezi (https://prezi.com/) or a Powerpoint presentation, can be useful to demonstrate how well students can apply knowledge of learned concepts through the actual execution of the same. With the acquisition of these three foundational skills, students can then move further towards achieving higher-order thinking skills such as analysing, evaluating, and creating.

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The skill of analysing entails the processing of data, dividing the data into parts, establishing relationships between those parts and making sense of its overall structure and purpose. Students will thus need tools that help them to compare, deconstruct, organise, link, validate, and integrate the knowledge and information acquired. Mind-mapping tools, as well as surveying or polling applications such as, Survey Monkey or Poll Everywhere can facilitate such analytical processes quite smoothly. For the skill of evaluating, teachers need will need to get students to make judgements based on the criteria and standards through checking and critiquing the content they come across. Learning activities and tools that foster the processes of interpreting, summarising, inferring, exemplifying, and explaining would require incorporation into the process for acquiring the skill of evaluating. The suite of Google apps such as GoogleDocs or GoogleSheets for collaborative inputs, as well as the use of various discussion boards mentioned earlier in this chapter, can prove useful for honing the skill of evaluating through cooperative learning. Finally, the skill of creating would involve combining elements and reorganising elements into new structures and patterns with careful planning to form a coherent whole. This level of learning, in a sense, draws on all other levels, with students remembering, understanding, and applying knowledge as well as, analysing and evaluating outcomes and processes to construct the final end product. The digital environment allows for publishing to take place at an ever-increasing rate and in constantly evolving formats. The end products could thus take the form of a website or a blog or a Wikipedia page, which could provide students with some real-world experience and relevance. Teachers can thus design their teaching and learning activities to guide students to acquire these skills by completing various learning experiences in a relevant and meaningful manner. As technology becomes a significant part of learning, these skills have become the Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. The revised taxonomy, in a way, caters to the twenty first-century skills of communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Teachers could thus work towards creating activities in conjunction with each skill to provide students with a comprehensive learning experience, while helping them achieve various cognitive skills through the inclusion of a relevant technological tool.

ACTIVITY: • Refer to two different news reports from two different publications on a recent incident and create a list of activities for students for each skill level based on the Bloom’s taxonomy. • You may ask students to work in groups and present the activities. 1. 2.

Remember: Describe the main events in the articles Understand: Summarise what articles are about

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3. 4. 5. 6.

Apply: Construct a theory as to why the publications chose to write about this specific topic Analyse: Differentiate between how the two publications have reported the incident Evaluate: Assess whether or not you think the incident was reported factually. Create: Compose a blog or a poem to convey the same incident to a younger audience.

• Now, consider which tool or platform would be most suited to fulfil each level of learning.

5.6 Summary The incorporation of technology into teaching can become meaningful when teachers are sure that the pedagogical purpose should precede the technology and not vice versa. Keeping in line with the twenty-first century skills of collaboration and creativity, discussion boards and electronic portfolios have proved to add value to the entire process of formative and summative learning. Moreover, Bloom’s taxonomy in its revised form is a useful model for teachers to implement the teaching of various skills in a systematic and meaningful manner. Several tools and apps could cater to the revised set of skills from the Bloom’s Digital taxonomy, which teachers could use judiciously to provide students with a meaningful learning experience.

References Forehand, M. (2005). Bloom’s taxonomy: Original and revised. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning. Teaching and technology. Retrieved [June 2021] from http://epltt.coe.uga. edu/ Hiradhar, P., & Gray, J. (2009). From a social digital identity to an academic digital identity: Introducing ePortfolios in English language enhancement courses. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology/La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, 34(3).

Chapter 6

Managing ICT: Administration, Evaluation, and Policymaking

Abstract This chapter deals with ICT platforms, software to choose (Do’s and Don’ts), evaluating ICT with special reference to principles of multimedia evaluation, and ICT Policy. For ICT Policy, the areas that are specifically explored include, safeguarding and maximizing the potential of ICT resources. The chapter ends with an example of ICT Policy for guiding the teachers on managing an ICT framework within the school. Keywords Principles of ICT management · Learning modes · Platform choice · ICT integration · ICT evaluation factors · ICT policy design

6.1 Introduction During the course of this book, our focus has been on the use of ICT tools for teaching–learning purposes across various classroom contexts. However, for the successful employment of any ICT plan or design within an institution, the stakeholders, especially the administrators, managers, and teachers, would need to take into serious consideration various aspects of institutional contexts, requirements, and possibilities. Thus, while individual or group motivational factors for teachers in the use of ICT can play a crucial role, there is also a danger that lack of effective management of ICT tools for teaching–learning purposes may lead to serious demotivation and even abandonment (Bhattacharya & Hiradhar, 2017). For an effective and sustainable institutional ICT practice, the tools themselves need to be managed and designed with some thought so that they produce a sense of ownership among their users. In this chapter, we focus on two aspects that we think are essential for a successful implementation of ICT in an institution—a framework for evaluation of ICT tools and the designing of an institutional ICT policy. Though in the South Asian context, these are often administrative decisions and may not be entirely under the control of teachers, it would be useful to be aware of such guidelines since many practising teachers may need to provide informed inputs in the institution’s ICT policymaking. For instance, institutions having digital learning labs (or language labs) may often

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_6

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need the expertise of language teachers to make knowledgeable choices about ICT infrastructure and tools to be used. We will begin with some general principles of ICT Management and then move on to specific aspects that would be required for ICT evaluation and policymaking.

6.2 Managing ICT: General Principles It would be a good idea to keep in mind a few general precepts in order to chalk out an institutional ICT policy. The principles that we outline here are based on the ways that ICT can be used in an institution by teachers. Teachers, for instance, can be encouraged to produce their own teaching material based on their own subject areas with a view to supplementing their classroom teaching, and such teacher-produced material can then be stored on an ICT platform or virtual space (on a ‘cloud’ space, for example). Or alternatively, the institution may purchase a commercially available software that then is used by teachers to either teach classes or produce supplementary ICT material on. In both cases, which we term ‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’ model of ICT implementation, there are a few specific decisions to be made.

6.2.1 Mode of Learning This is undoubtedly the first principle that is needed to govern the institution’s choice of adoption of ICT. Most of the activities and suggestions proposed in the earlier chapters assume that the institution prioritizes the best available practices in the modes of learning available. The mode that we have based most of our suggestions on is blended learning. The blended mode of learning advocates, as the name suggests, a ‘blend’ of ICT-based teaching and face-to-face classroom teaching. The mode, however, can vary across classroom contexts. One of the most common variants of this mode is known as flipped classroom, where content inputs from the teacher are delivered through an online mode. This content may be in the form of classroom notes and links to related materials and sometimes audio or video, or recorded lectures that the students access outside the classroom. The face-to-face classroom time is then used for discussion and feedback on what the students viewed online alongside individual guidance and problem solving. It is in this sense that the classroom is ‘flipped’—the actual content teaching is delivered outside the classroom. Another mode within blended learning that has gained popularity is what is known as dogme learning (see Meddings & Thornbury, 2009). The idea of dogme learning is actually borrowed from a film movement that strongly advocated the removal of frills from film-making (special effects, for instance). Within the language teaching context, dogme learning strongly advocates the removal of textbooks from the classroom, the belief being, language emerges from actual interaction between students and teachers. In recent times, practitioners of dogme learning heavily depend on ICT

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tools to encourage students to create materials which, in turn, are guided and mentored by teachers. Since this form of blended learning discourages the use of coursebooks or textbooks, the co-creation of classroom materials is often ICT-dependent. The two variations of blended learning discussed above, however, are not the only models but, for our purposes here, may be considered as almost two sides of a spectrum of choices available in the mode of blended learning. As is evident, based on the mode of learning adopted by the institution and the amount of freedom that teachers have in terms of determining the nature of the coursework, the institution will need to make choices of ICT tools. In the case of the flipped classroom model, the institution will need to actively pursue the setting up of a shared ICT platform for teachers and students that will enable the ‘flipping’. On the other hand, for the model of dogme learning, the sharing of student–teacher produced material would still require some kind of storage (cloud-based or otherwise) that can help people collaborate. In addition to a platform thus, the institution might need to think of additional storage options for the collaborative material like Google Cloud, OneDrive, or Dropbox.

6.2.2 Choosing the ICT Platform Linked to the mode of learning that the institution adopts is the choice of the ICT platform. With a view to choosing the right platform, one needs to make a few informed decisions. This choice is often dependent on various factors like the amount of investment that the institution is willing to make, the size of the institution, the nature of blended modes followed across the institution, and whether the institution has any plans to expand the courses they offer from a blended mode to online or open mode (see Stevenson & Bauer, 2014). Thus, if the practices of the institution are overwhelmingly determined by teachers who engage in blended modes of learning as a part of transacting their curriculum, then, the teachers may simply use Wikispaces, Google Sites, or Google Classroom. The institutional support system would need a dedicated broadband infrastructure and, at best, a networked wireless campus. However, if the institution requires all or most of its teachers to host a part of their coursework online for students, then it would need to create a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) (Bower, 2015; also see, Pegrum, 2014). A VLE usually involves a Course Management System (CMS) or a Learning Management System (LMS) that facilitates organisation, posting, evaluation, and feedback mechanisms for students and teachers. The most popular (and almost free) VLE is Moodle which allows teachers to upload their course materials, along with audio and video files and virtually several other activities in the form of discussion forums and quizzes, to name a few. Students can also post their assignments or classwork on the platform. We say that this is ‘almost’ free because the platform needs to be hosted on the institution’s server space which might have a certain cost involved. However, based on what you would like to do on the platform, this cost is often negligible compared to other commercial products.

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Another popular VLE is Blackboard, but this is a commercial platform and would need investment on the part of the institution. However, the advantage of this platform lies in the fact that the company provides hosting services, and the institution would not have to worry about the hosting space and subsequent maintenance. A VLE which functions like a social media platform is Edmodo, but though it is quite easy to use and free, it does not contain all the possibilities of Moodle or Blackboard. It is, however, quite flexible in its language teaching possibilities.

6.2.3 Integration Within the Curriculum We have discussed this in detail in our second chapter and explored what needs to be done if ICT is to be integrated within the curriculum. Within the South Asian context, however, a significant part of any curriculum is the assessment and evaluation system that the institution follows. This often determines the amount of time that a teacher can (or is willing to) spare for integrating ICT within the curriculum. This is especially relevant, since the assessment system is often linked to the levels of motivation that teachers and students have in using ICT as an ‘extra’ mode of learning a language. If the assessment system does not encourage the actual testing of ICT-integrated aspects of teaching (for instance, if the test is a paper-and-pencil test that primarily assesses content and memory), the teachers and students may not have particularly positive attitudes towards the use of ICT creatively or critically (see Bhattacharya & Chauhan,2010). On the other hand, if the ICT-enabled content for teaching–learning carries substantial weightage in the assessment system, the students and teachers might be more autonomous and motivated in the use of ICT. Linked to this, of course, is the amount of investment that the institution would make towards ICT infrastructure and the kind of peripheral software or hardware required. It has been seen in India, for instance, that heavy investment in ICT infrastructure does not automatically translate into its effective use. This is often due to the heavy dependence on a traditional assessment system that tests content and not the critical or creative aspects of teaching and learning. For a successful ICT-integrated curriculum, therefore, the ICT infrastructure should be able to support various testing and assessment related applications. More importantly, the infrastructure must be flexible enough to enable teachers (and, in certain cases, students) to integrate or innovate various practices in testing and evaluation within the ICT eco-system. This would hopefully allow students and teachers to stay invested in the curriculum without dismissing ICT-enabled activities as something ‘extra’ or superfluous.

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PAUSE AND REFLECT: In a famous experiment in 1999, called ‘Hole in the Wall’, carried out in the city of New Delhi, children from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds were left with a computer enabled with an internet connection. Within a few months, it was found that students did learn a few things though most of the programmes on the computer were in English, a language that the students did not presumably know. Based on the experiment, Sugata Mitra went on to make a strong claim that students left with ICT-enabled infrastructure can learn on their own and do not require teachers for their educational development (see Mitra, 2015). In contrast, in the United States, Waldorf School in the Silicon Valley (heart of ICT industry in the US) follows a philosophy today that shuns the use of technology in the early years of education calling it a ‘no-tech or low-tech’ approach. Instead, it emphasises simple resources and the use of imagination for learning. • These two examples may be seen as the opposing ends of an ICT-inlanguage-education spectrum. • Think of the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and place your own institution within this spectrum. Make a list of things that you think should be supported institutionally for an ICT-enabled education.

6.3 Evaluating ICT Tools Designed for Language Learning While testing and evaluation are an integral part of the teaching–learning process, it might also be necessary for teachers to evaluate a particular software or platform that the institution may be willing to invest in. It would therefore, not be amiss to keep a working framework in mind for evaluating the kind of ICT or multimedia software to choose for the institution. However, before we actually look at the framework, it would perhaps be necessary for us to understand that any evaluation of ICT tools for language learning would need to keep in mind the following factors as general guidelines.

6.3.1 The Developer It is essential that we understand the specific background of the language-learning tool or software or platform developer. The developer brings with them their own experiences of language learning and teaching and the specific eco-systems within which they operate. It would, therefore, be interesting to look into the actual models of

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instruction that the software developer employs for language-learning (For different methods and approaches of instruction, see Richards & Rodgers, 2014). For instance, the language-learning material could be based on a structural method, or audiolingual method, or communicative language teaching approach, and so on and so forth. It would also be important to judge the tool by examining how the technical aspects of the programme and the programme interface integrate into the instructional method. In other words, do the technical features successfully assimilate the claims they make in terms of the methods of teaching?

6.3.2 The Learner This, perhaps, is the most important aspect to keep in mind. For any ICT tool to be successful, we must think in terms of the formative experiences of the learners, the school and community contexts, the classroom contexts, and whether the tool will successfully adapt to learner behaviour. A good practice, therefore, is to make a list of the intended learning outcomes that the teacher or the institution aims for and then evaluate the ICT tool keeping this in mind. In other words, what would we want our students to achieve once they use the tool or the platform?

6.3.3 The Product Though it may be extremely difficult to measure over the short term, a good way to evaluate the product is to observe whether there is a perceptible change in the way students learn. This could be done through log-in records (the number of times the learners are using the tool), feedback on the language-learning process and tests based on the learning material. Institutionally, nevertheless, there should be ways to measure the long-term effects of such tools. However, this is beyond the scope of this book. Along with the general guidelines discussed above, the framework that we outline here has been adapted from Chappelle’s (2001) pioneering work in this area. Chappelle gives six major criteria to evaluate any multimedia or online material and resources in language teaching:

6.3.4 Language Learning Potential The first and foremost criteria for any language learning tool is whether it does what it promises to do, that is, language learning. However, there are quite a few related questions to this aspect of the tool. Firstly, any language learning would involve both an understanding of the form as well as the meaning of language. For instance, the ‘interrogative’ is the form in which a question can be asked, but the question itself can have different meanings in English—it does not always necessarily expect an answer

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(for instance, it could be a request or a rhetorical question etc.). One of the things to look out for any language learning software is whether the focus is on simply the form or also the nuances of the meaning. A good tool will have both. Secondly, does the software adapt itself to the response of the learner, or does it have only fixed responses? In other words, the software must be capable of being responsive to the needs of the learner and produce interactivity. Thirdly, the tool ideally should have in-built support systems for the learner that could either be online or remote or offline so that if the learner is stuck with a particular form, they can seek help whenever needed. The available help could also add to the scaffolding for language learners. Finally, the tool must allow a sufficient amount of control to the learner so that the learner can claim to own it. The reason why games are so popular on the internet is precisely because they allow a sense of ownership to the players. A good ICT tool for language learning should also have this quality of gamification.

6.3.5 Learner Fit It might be possible that within an institution, there might be a wide range of learners at varying linguistic levels. One of the aspects to be acutely aware of, therefore, is whether the tool fits the linguistic levels of the learners and is capable of catering to the varying levels. In other words, the tool must have a range or a variety of inputs that can suit various levels. In addition, the tool ideally should not be a ‘closed’ one and should have the possibility to allow teachers (or students) to add their own material with a view to match their own learning needs.

6.3.6 The Focus on Meaning As mentioned earlier, the tool must combine both form and meaning so that learners can focus on both. However, we also need to understand that much meaning-making that we do in our everyday lives is a result of a complex negotiation between us and the world. It is based on various factors like our own learning experiences, the context, the nature of language, the relation between the speaker and the listener, the different strategies that are available to us etc. We have discussed some of these strategies that we use regularly in our chapters on skills. In order to evaluate any ICT tool for language learning, we must revisit these complexities of meaning-making and assess whether the tool involves such negotiations, exchanges and accomplishment of meaningful goals.

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6.3.7 The Authenticity of Language One of the most important aspects of language learning is the exposure of learners to ‘authentic’ language (see Maley & Tomlinson, 2017). Authentic language is language-in-use, that is, language that is used in our daily interactions and that we encounter in our daily lives. A significant criticism about the design of earlier kinds of textbooks in the classrooms was that they contained ‘inauthentic’ language for language practice. The internet, of course, has a vast repository of authentic language that is constantly changing and evolving. One thing to look for, in an ICT tool, is whether it contains enough varieties of authentic language and allows learners to engage with it. Does the tool prepare the learner for actual language use in the real world?

6.3.8 Assessing the Impact Any language learning has some assessable outcomes. In testing literature, this is often called a ‘washback’ effect. Thus, any assessment tool can have a positive or a negative washback. A positive washback will make the learning more meaningful, enjoyable and will motivate learners to constantly engage with the materials. A negative washback, on the other hand, will deter learners from participating in the learning process and will only produce rote learning and formulaic repetitions. It is thus imperative on the part of any ICT tool to have a positive washback effect. It should not only be able to provide enough opportunities for the learners to creatively and pragmatically learn the language but also enable them to reflect, synthesize and adapt the materials for their own learning purposes. In other words, the material should be customisable to the learners’ needs as much as possible. In addition, it should have a positive impact not only on the learners but also on the teachers and the institution, so that it remains a two-way process of engagement.

6.3.9 Practicality This is, perhaps, not emphasized enough when choosing an ICT platform or a software. Software or platforms are often loaded with promises of things that they can perform, but the key criterion that governs their effectiveness is whether the material is easy to use under practical conditions. This depends on various other factors like internet access, institutional infrastructure, exposure to ICT, and training aspects that are in-built within the institutional system. These decisions are often beyond the scope of the teacher since they would involve technical system and hardware decisions but a conversation may be initiated regarding these factors while choosing the

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software. Linked to this are the significant aspects of social and cultural appropriateness of the material being offered and whether the material has the capability of creating a connect with the learners who may belong to different social and cultural backgrounds. Further, the criteria must include recent developments in the field of language teaching and how they can be incorporated within the platform/software itself. It would be self-defeating if the ICT tool is non-flexible and promotes only one method or approach of language teaching that may or may not work within a particular context. Similarly, the ‘interactive’ nature of language learning must be kept in mind at all times, and the ICT tool should be judged in terms of its possibility of producing a collaborative learning environment. These aspects of choosing an ICT platform are often linked to the ICT policy that the institution has in place.

6.4 Designing an ICT Policy For any successful integration of ICT within the learning framework of an institution, a sufficiently though-out ICT policy by the insitution would be especially useful. This should not be confused with the sets of instructions that accompany a software or platform and are shared within an institution for ease of use. What we mean by a policy statement here is a flexible and collaboratively developed framework that takes into account the key issues involved in integrating ICT in the teaching and learning of English. Within the South Asian context, such policies might be instrumental in an appropriate adoption of ICT within the institution. We must make it clear, however, at the outset, that what we mean by ‘policy’ here is not an administrative manual but a set of guidelines that pertain specifically to a teaching–learning context. Here are some issues that we think are integral to any institutional policy and should be addressed in a given context.

6.4.1 The Question of Access There have been quite a few debates and discussions around the idea of access. The term ‘access’ is difficult to pin down to a singular meaning. For instance, does it mean owning a device so that one can use ICT tools effectively? Or does it mean other support systems like broadband connectivity, network coverage, the nature of device sophistication, availability of electricity and so on? Opinions are often divided when it comes to terms like ‘access’ that leads to ‘digital divide’ (the haves and have-nots of the digital world) (for an excellent understanding of this debate, see Warschauer, 2004). Within the South Asian context, we are aware of the fact that there can be considerable variations in terms of access. During extraordinary times such as a pandemic, the questions of access and divides become even more pronounced (See Scroll, 2020). Though teledensity (the number of mobile devices per 100 individuals

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in an area) in India in December 2018 was estimated at around 87 (www.ceicdata. com), the mere possession of a device does not automatically translate into access to digital education. The use of ICT technologies is often crucially dependent on local social contexts (Woolgar, 2002) and the kind of support provided to users of such technologies over a period of time. Any ICT policy for the institution will therefore need to keep in mind the following questions: i.

ii.

iii.

Do students of the institution have access to stable infrastructural facilities both at the institution and at home? If not, what can be done with regard to the design of ICT-integrated teaching–learning so that students/teachers can have an equitable experience? Does the policy have in-built training programmes for teachers and students so that there is a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the platform/software? Does it have online/remote/offline support mechanisms? Would it be possible for the institution to offer support (for instance, financially) to students/teachers to gain access in a socially inclusive manner? Warschauer (2004) especially emphasizes this idea of social inclusivity. Within the South Asian context, we believe, this is a major concern.

6.4.2 Internet Safety One of the most important aspects that has emerged due to the spread of digital ICT is the issue of internet safety. This is especially pertinent if the institution has young children but is equally relevant in all interactions between teachers and students that carries an online component. Though the actual safety protocols will need a dedicated ICT team at the institution, as a teacher, here are some precautions that need to be kept in mind while formulating a policy: i. ii. iii. iv.

making sure that student identities are kept safe; ensuring that public display of students’ data or photographs are regulated and monitored; in case of interaction on an online platform or app, a good idea would be to use first names and not the complete name; if a particular project requires students to create blogs or wikis or webpages (as suggested in some of the activities), it would be advisable that teachers and students collaborate on deciding and sharing policies of such pages.

In addition, here are a few websites that provide internet safety policies as well as other ethical guidelines. i. ii.

A good place to begin is commonsense.org that provides internet safety guidelines along with a free curriculum for safety topics. If the ICT collaboration between students and teachers requires the use of images, audio or video extensively, it would be essential that the policy includes copyright laws and an understanding of intellectual property rights. In other

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iii.

85

words, a good reminder to teachers and students alike, would be to restate that not everything on the internet is available for copying and pasting just because it is there! A comprehensive site to visit and understand this aspect is creativecommons.org, which also provides abundant multimedia materials under the creative commons license. If the institution is committed to using open-source software like wikis or blogs (as opposed to licensed software which is often commercially produced and distributed), teachers and students should be encouraged to visit opensource.org to understand how open source works and also interact with the open-source community online.

6.4.3 Reflection and Feedback Mechanisms For the sustainability of any ICT platform, it is essential that feedback from teachers and students is regularly received. This can be done in two ways. The institution can encourage teachers to incorporate feedback mechanisms in their use of various ICT tools that not only provide inputs about the tool but also the content, delivery and pedagogic value. This individualised feedback can then be collected and analysed for arriving at decisions regarding the continuation of a particular tool (to renew a subscription, for instance). Alternatively, the institution can design a centralized feedback tool that is then integrated with all teaching–learning activities of the institution. This will enable making informed choices about improving institutional teaching–learning contexts. There are numerous applications that can be used to collect such feedback-related information, including Survey Monkey, Google Forms, Doodle, Mentimeter, Kahoot, Qualtrics, Socrative, and many more. These software applications can be chosen according to the context in which they need to be tailored to. However, simply collecting feedback data may not be enough, and an institutional policy should also incorporate what is to be done with the data. A good policy, therefore, would have a clear guideline for the data analysis and how this analysis will be built upon to improve the teaching–learning situation. In the case of English language education, this is even more important since, as we have seen in the previous chapters, reflection and feedback form the core principles of language teaching. The institutional ICT policy will thus include all the aspects, as seen in Fig. 6.1.

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ICT Policy Access Is the policy socially and contextually inclusive? Does it take into consideration the realities of students and teachers?

Safety Are the user identities safe? What are the expenses of ensuring such safety? Which issues (e.g., copyright or IPR) need to be highlighted? Which norms (like open source) need to be followed?

Platform/Software Is the platform/software flexible and adaptable? Do the apps work across devices? Do the tools consider network/bandwidth and other hardware necessities?

Feedback Mechanisms Is feedback collected from students and teachers? How is the feedback used?

Fig. 6.1 ICT policy

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ACTIVITY For evaluating ICT infrastructure and designing a policy for it, a good starting point is an existing policy document, if available. In India, for example, there is a policy document called the National Policy on ICT in School Education available on mhrd.gov.in. Though the policy document is primarily meant for schools, it can be quickly adapted for the institutional context in which you work. For this activity, we would like you to follow the steps given below. • Step I: Scan through the National Policy on ICT document quickly and jot down what you think the focus of the policy is. • Step II: Visit learningportal.iiep.unesco.org and read through the ‘Brief’ on ICT in Education. The ‘brief’ highlights the following initiatives that have been taken or may be taken across the world”. – – – – –

One Laptop per Child (one.laptop.org) Using Tablets for educational activities Using Interactive White Boards or Smart Boards Using E-readers Flipped Classrooms.

• Reflect on your own context and compare them with the policy highlights of the National Policy on ICT. Which of the initiatives mentioned in the UNESCO site, do you think, can be included in your own context? You may, of course, expand the list of initiatives and add your own. • Step III: Create a blog or a wiki page and share the ideas generated in Steps I and II with your colleagues. Ask for their opinions about integrating some of the ideas so that an ICT Policy framework can be designed for the institution. • Step IV: Based on the interaction, design a collaborative ICT framework.

6.5 Summary This chapter surveys the various ways in which ICT can be successfully integrated within an institutional setting. This involves evaluating multimedia software or platforms that are used within the institution and making informed choices about them. But as we argue, this choice itself should be within the framework of an ICT policy that the institution follows. Both of them together should be seen as essential parts of the institutional framework for ICT-enabled language learning. It is, however, relevant to mention here that any choice of an ICT-enabled framework must be ideally backed by up-to-date language teaching principles that can have a significant impact on the learning outcomes of the students. The framework, thus, must include research inputs in language teaching, the practical necessities of the institution and the social

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and cultural contexts within which the institution functions. There is a plethora of ICT tools available in today’s ICT saturated world, and every day brings in a newer tool. However, keeping the needs of the institution and the practicality principle in mind, one may choose those tools in an informed manner if the institution has a transparent and well-intentioned ICT policy in place. The tools might change in a rapidly changing ICT eco-system, but the underlying principles that govern the institutional practice, if robust, may guide teachers, managers and administrators to choose the right ones.

References Bhattacharya, A., & Chauhan, K. (2010). Augmenting learner autonomy through blogging. ELT Journal, 64(4), 376–384. Bhattacharya, A., & Hiradhar, P. (2017). Institutional discourses, technology-mediated practices and pedagogy: A critical perspective. In S. R. Garg & D. Gupta (Eds.), The English paradigm in India: Essays in language, literature and culture (pp. 243–264). Palgrave Macmillan. Bower, M. (2015). Deriving a typology of Web 2.0 learning technologies. British Journal of Educational Technology, 47(4), 763–777. Chappelle, C. (2001). Computer applications in second language acquisition: Foundations for teaching, testing and research. Cambridge University Press. Kundu, P. (2020, May 05). Indian education can’t go online—only 8% of homes with young members have computer with net link. Retrieved from ht tps://scroll.in/article/960939/indianeducation-cant-go-online-only-8-of-homes-with-school-children-have-computer-with-net-link Maley, A., & Tomlinson, B. (Eds.). (2017). Authenticity in materials development for language learning. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. (2009). Teaching unplugged: Dogme in English language teaching. Delta. Mitra, S. (2015). Minimally invasive education: Pedagogy for development in a connected world. In Rothermel, P. (Ed.), International perspectives in home education. Palgrave Macmillan. Pegrum, M. (2014). Mobile learning: Languages, literacies and cultures. Palgrave Macmillan. Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (2014). Approaches and methods in language teaching (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Stevenson, C. N., & Bauer, J. C. (2014). Building online communities in higher education institutions: Creating collaborative experience. IGI Global. Warschauer, M. (2004). Technology and social inclusion: Rethinking the digital divide. The MIT Press. Woolgar, S. (Ed.). (2002). Virtual Society? Technology, cyberbole, reality. Oxford University Press.

Chapter 7

Conclusion

Abstract This concluding chapter ventures into the future to predict ICT-enabled teaching-learning possibilities in South Asian contexts. The chapter features educational and policy reports and evaluates them against the actual ground realities in South Asia. Keywords ICT futures · Future learning designs Hockly and Dudeney (2018)‚in an article, predict the future of learning technologies for English language education. They identify the following modes of learning that may stay with us for a long period of time: a. b. c. d. e. f.

Blended learning Big data and learning analytics Flipped learning Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Mobile learning Machine translation.

They also mention game-based environments playing a significant role in the field of English language education. While we have seen in this book that tracing the future course of technological innovations can be difficult due to the rapid pace with which ICT changes, our attempt has been to demonstrate that ICT combined with sound teaching–learning principles can possibly be the best way forward. In addition, ‘blended learning’, ‘flipped learning’, or ‘mobile-based learning’ may keep developing in multiple ways as the nature of technology changes and the access to technology improves across South Asia. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has almost compelled teachers to move online, and this may also encourage the proliferation of MOOCs, which can then be employed for learning analytics and adaptive learning. Further, based on such analysis of learner data, English language education in the future may develop ‘nudge learning’ as a technique for altering student behaviour positively (nudge theory was developed in behavioural economics but is often used in language learning for ensuring positive reinforcements regarding student learning behaviour; see Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 P. Hiradhar and A. Bhattacharya, ICT in English Language Education, SpringerBriefs in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9005-1_7

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What, then, is the future of ICT in English language education across South Asia? We must point out here that the title of the chapter is more of a question than an answer. We can only surmise what the future can look like. It would interesting to speculate, however, and what we predict in this chapter is based as much on current trends as it is the possibilities of ICT. We will try to base our predictions on evidence-based studies conducted by organisations that work in the field of ICT and education. We will specifically refer to reports produced by Educause Foundation (library.educause.edu), Rand Corporation (rand.org) and Promethean (resourced.prometheanworld.com). We will, however, contextualize these projections by drawing from actual surveys conducted by Pratham, an NGO in India, on the status of early education in schools in India published annually as the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER). Educause Foundation publishes a report annually called the Horizon report, which attempts to predict short-term (for the next one to two years), mid-term (for the next three to five years), and long-term (five or more years) ICT trends that will have an impact on higher education. In their 2019 Horizon Report, these were the predictions: • Short-term: (a) (b)

Redesigning learning spaces Blended learning design.

• Mid-term: (a) (b)

Advancing cultures of innovation Growing focus on measuring learning.

• Long-term: (a) (b)

Rethinking how institutions work Modularized and disaggregated degrees.

As long as short-term predictions of the report are concerned, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has definitely pushed teachers and students across South Asia to redesign their teaching–learning practices sooner than expected. We assume that this sudden disruption would possibly accelerate blended learning modes post-COVID, creating possibly a new normal. The supplementary role that ICT has played over a considerable period of time in South Asia, we think, will get integrated within the learning design itself. As far as measuring learning is concerned, assessment and evaluation have been thorny issues during the pandemic because of the sheer numbers that we are confronted with in South Asia. In India alone, for instance, there are about 900 Universities and 40,000 colleges with millions of students at any given point in time. To design something in the form of a standardized evaluation that fits all would be a massive challenge. Moreover, since testing and assessment has always been seen as high-stakes as they are linked to employment and a future career, the nature of testing and examinations in South Asia have mostly been offline in a proctored context. Again, online proctoring applications have witnessed manifold growth in the

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recent context and perhaps would continue to grow to address the issue of massive numbers of students appearing for exams. It is true that many institutions were forced to innovate and adopt new methods for assessing learning, but the intense debate that occurred during the pandemic was centred around the possibility of examinations in an online mode. Moreover, the variability in terms of infrastructural resources across South Asia, as well as the lack of teacher-preparedness, compounded the problem. However, the pandemic might serve as a kind of impetus to address such institutional constraints. The New Education Policy of 2020 that has recently been implemented in India, for instance, stresses the use of ICT across a range of teaching, learning and evaluation activities. In another report published by the Rand Corporation titled ‘Foresight and Optimisation in Horizon (2020)’, the authors argue that in the future classrooms, artificial intelligence applications and comprehensive personalised learning will play significant roles. They emphasize that digital education will take the routes of ‘gamification’, ‘MOOCs and distance learning’, ‘big data and learning analytics’ and a significant ‘blurring between formal versus informal learning’. However, the report points out that the key factor that might modify students’ and teachers’ adoption of such methods of learning is whether the chief focus of technology will be to develop critical skills to assess information or to expand anytime-anywhere learning opportunities. This seems to be a serious concern and, we hope, that we have been able to address this concern in this book. The adoption of technology just because it is ubiquitous is probably not a sound strategy for language teaching, as we have repeatedly mentioned through the book. Every instance of ICT adoption needs to be backed up by a critical pedagogical framework that provides opportunities for students not only to learn the language but also to critically process information that they come across. In the future, this might become even more crucial as ICT develops in unpredictable ways and students of the future would be increasingly enveloped in a digital environment. In the third report that we examine, titled ‘The State of Technology in Education2019/20’ by Promethean, the predictions in terms of the top five technologies that will grow the most in the field of education are: a. b. c. d. e.

cloud-based lesson planning and delivery tools, online assessments, virtual reality and augmented reality, robotics/coding, and remote learning technology.

One thing to notice is that many of the predictions across the three reports appear to align. Thus, there seems to be a consensus that online courses, online assessment, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and informal learning or remote learning are going to become a part of the norm. Similarly, it is also assumed, as we have seen, that the generation of big data will help provide more ‘nudge’ frameworks for

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learning a language. Students and teachers may be suggested institutionally predictive frameworks that will govern their teaching and learning behaviour. However, such predictions must be examined in the light of actual ground realities that exist in South Asia. The ASER reports provide a view of the ‘early years’ of school education in India and has been doing so since 2005. The report specifically offers insights into early language skills and numeracy tasks across Indian schools. The report of 2019 states that “a focus on activities that strengthen cognitive skills rather than subject learning in the early years may generate substantial benefits in terms of children’s future learning” (ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’, 2019). The report also comments on the nature of varying inputs that different school contexts provide, indicating further that there seems to be a large gap between public-funded institutions and private ones. This seems to be the general case across South Asia. The report, perhaps, serves as a warning against the use of ICT as a delivery tool of set patterns of syllabi while the focus could be on the development of cognitive skills through such tools. Moreover, the nature of the digital divide that seems to be still a major feature of ICT implementation in the countries across the subcontinent will need to be addressed more meaningfully. The variations that exist between public-funded institutions and private ones (this does not necessarily mean that private institutions are better off than the public-funded ones) could possibly be considered while designing a public policy on education across South Asian countries. The allocation of resources for ICT and teacher education, as we have argued in Chap. 6, not only would improve access but also would perhaps motivate teachers to engage with such tools in a more sustained fashion. Just like ICT is not the magic panacea for teaching and learning, the belief that teachers would automatically translate ICT tools into pedagogic frameworks also needs to be given ample thought. The practice of Continuous Professional Development (CPD) frameworks will have to be reinforced with the introduction of context-based ICT tools. It is generally acknowledged that context plays a significant role in language teaching and learning (Byram & Grundy, 2003). where learners are “social actors in specific relationships with the language they are learning, relationships which are determined by the socio-political and geopolitical circumstances in which they live”. The context inevitably also affects the cognitive skills that students develop over a period of time. In addition, we also, perhaps, need to acknowledge that technologies themselves exist in a certain context. In Chap. 6, we argue that any institutional policy for the use of ICT, first and foremost, must take into account the particular context it is in. At the same time, the ‘affordance’ of technology would also determine what to use, when, and how. The future of ICT for English language learning in South Asia would, therefore, increasingly depend on the nature of the context, the nature of resources available, the design of learning outcomes and the nature of technological affordance. The use of ICT needs to be framed, however, within a sound pedagogic framework that focuses on the cognitive skills of the students rather than a mechanical process of implementation for syllabus completion or content testing. This is probably what lies ahead as a challenge for students, teachers, administrators, and policymakers.

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References 2019 Horizon Report. (2019, April 23). Retrieved from: //library.educause.edu/resources/2019/4/2019horizon-report ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’—National Findings. 2019. Retrieved from http://img.asercentre.org/docs/ ASER%202019/ASER2019%20report%20/nationalfindings.pdf Byram, M., & Grundy, P. (2003). Introduction: Context and culture in language teaching and learning. In M. Byram & P. Grundy (Eds.), Context and culture in language teaching and learning (pp. 1–3). Multilingual Matters. Foresight and Optimisation in Horizon 2020. (2020). Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/ran deurope/research/projects/foresight-optimisation-horizon-2020.html#:~:text=Given%20that% 20the%20world%20in,on%20those%20ten%20key%20areas Hockly, N., & Dudeney, G. (2018). Current and future digital trends in ELT. RELC Journal, 49(24), 164–178. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press. The State of Technology in Education 2019/20. (2020). Retrieved from https://resourced.promet heanworld.com/technology-education-industry-report/#landing