WPP A - DESCRIPTION OF NEED OR OPPORTUNITY

What is the important educational need that you are seeking to address?


The Centro Boliviano Americano (or CBA) is an EFL school in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Students enroll in before- or after-school classes that meet for 1.5 hours each day Monday through Friday. The English program is designed to complement the students’ regular schooling. The regular program is designed to take 3 years to complete and students are expected to be at an advanced level of English when they graduate from the program. Exceptional students have the opportunity to earn scholarships to study at universities in the United States.

Because Bolivia is a Spanish-speaking country, one problem is that the students have little or no exposure to anything in English outside of regular class time. While students have textbooks and workbooks, there is little opportunity for building fluency outside of the limited time in class. Classes are often large and teachers do not necessarily have the time to meet with and evaluate each student one-on-one. Thus students need a way to have more effective encounters with the English language that can be evaluated without creating more work for the teachers.

How you plan to address this educational issue with technology?  

One effective way to increase fluency in a language program is to provide a variety of timed reading and writing activities for students. Unfortunately, having these materials available in print for all the students and teachers would be nearly impossible in a school the size of CBA. It would also be difficult to fit these timed reading activities into the already limited class time that the teachers have with their students. However, all students in Santa Cruz do have access to the internet as internet cafes are abundant and the cost to use them is more than reasonable. With this in mind, I would like to create a platform, or modify an existing one, to provide students with the opportunity to access fluency building exercises via the internet.

I will use the website Quia.com to create a space for the students to access timed reading and writing materials. Students will be able to log in, access the materials specific to their level of fluency, and complete the activities.  As the students complete the activities, the activities will be evaluated automatically and the results will be available for the teachers to access in the Quia gradebook. This will allow the teachers to see which students have completed which activities.  It will also allow the teachers to determine each student's strengths and weaknesses based on the quiz results.  This solution will create the needed exposure to English outside of class time, it will not create a great deal of extra work for the teachers, and it is cost effective (subscription cost between $29 and $49 per teacher per year).

Logistics of solution:

After talking to the administration at CBA, we decided that we will start with a trial run, or Phase 1, beginning in April 2012 and ending in June 2012.  This will be done with one teacher and one of his/her intermediate English classes.  Only timed reading activities will be made available during Phase 1.  During Phase 1, we want to determine the following:

• Ease of use of website for students
• Ease of use of website for teacher
• Frequency of website access by students
• Effectiveness of evaluation of activities (in terms of students receiving feedback and teachers receiving the results)

Phase 2 will begin in June 2012 and will last until December 2012.  The purpose of Phase 2 will be to assess improvement of the fluency of the students.  In addition to the timed reading activities, timed writing activities will also be added to the website.  At the end of the 6-month period of Phase 2, we hope to see an increased fluency in the students who have used the website in comparison to those who did not use the website.

Phase 3 (dependent on results of Phase 2) will begin in January 2013.  Phase 3 will make the website accessible to all students working at the Intermediate level of English at CBA. 

Phase 4 will begin in June 2013.  Phase 4 will maintain the website for the intermediate students and make the website available to all students working at the advanced level of English at CBA. 

Relevant research and resources:

There are many ESL/EFL activities on the internet, but the majority of the activities are learning games. Very few activities seemed specifically designed to build fluency through timed readings or writings.

And yet, studies have shown that extensive reading (ER) and repeated reading (RR) are an effective way to develop reading fluency and comprehension for students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in settings where there are limited sources for L2 input. ER is an approach in which readers choose from a collection of leveled materials with the goal of reaching specified target times of silent sustained reading (Taguchi, Takayasu-Maass, and Gorsuch, 2004).

Timed readings are especially beneficial for increasing comprehension. “If a reader reads too slowly (below 200 wpm), they may be reading word by word and forget what is being read, and the result is poor comprehension. To minimize the functional limitations of short-term memory in the reading process, a variety of strategies have been suggested, one of them being timed reading. Timed reading involves having students read under time pressure, the purpose of which is to improve reading speed to an optimal rate that supports comprehension rather than developing speedy readers.” (Chang and College, 2010).

There seems to be a number of platforms that would allow me to accomplish my goal. Blackboard, Angel, etc. have excellent platforms for doing online class work. However, these platforms are more complex than what I would like for the trial run of this project. Quia.com has the resources in place to create timed activities/quizzes for the students that are graded automatically, and the results sent to the teacher. It has everything we are looking for at this point.

When researching the website, I needed technical assistance. Tutorials were easy to find and helpful to use. The tech support team also responded to my inquiry within 24 hours. This is the kind of support that a teacher using Quia.com will appreciate.

A plan for the portion you will implement during this course and the portion you will implement after this course is completed.

During this class, I will be working on implementing Phase 1 of the project. At the end of the class, I will survey or interview the students to determine their thoughts on the new website. Because this will be done just a few weeks after the implementation of the project, I will plan to repeat the survey/interview process at the end of Phase 1 in June 2012.

How would you know you were successful?

I will have to measure my success at each step along the way. For this class, I will evaluate the responses of the student surveys/interviews. This will help me revise my plan and determine what changes need to be made for the rest of Phase 1 and the following phases.






Sources:

Taguchi, E., Takayasu-Maass, M., Gorsuch, G. (2004).  Developing Reading Fluency in EFL: How assisted repeated reading and extensive reading affect fluency development.  Reading in a Foreign Language [Online]. Available: http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2004/taguchi/taguchi.html

Chang, A., College, H. (2010). The effect of a timed reading activity on EFL Learners: Speed, comprehension, and perceptions. Reading in a Foreign Language [Online]. Available: http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/October2010/articles/chang.pdf