 Imagine learning Arabic by speaking face to face with fellow students and instructors – not in person or in a typical classroom, but over the computer.
This type of foreign language learning is the newest way the University of Oregon’s Yamada Language Center is increasing communication practice options for self-study language students.
“Technology allows the classroom to be extended,” said Jeff Magoto, director of the center.
Language instruction is now moving into a new realm, a virtual realm. In the center’s Virtual Language Lab, students can access communication-focused computer programs to complement their classroom instruction.
Students can use tools such as online listening comprehension activities and cultural videos, visit live Internet chat rooms, or send instant voice messages to native speakers, tutors and other students across campus and beyond. Technological advances such as these are changing the way languages are being taught and learned, making it possible to teach languages which usually have few instructional materials.
In 1999, the YLC was one of the first language centers in the country to gather all the audio and video materials available for a language and package them together online. Since then, with help from grants from the university’s Ed-Tech Committee, the center has continued to develop new digital tools for the latest methods of language instruction.
With access to a host of resources, the YLC can teach an increasingly broad array of languages to a growing number of students. This fall alone, the center offered courses in ten different languages such as Arabic, Hindi, Modern Greek, Catalan, and Turkish.
In the Persian language class, instructor Zahra Foroughifar and her students designate times to “meet” outside their normal classes, visiting with each other in online chat rooms where they practice speaking what they study in class. Using the computer, webcams and microphones, small groups of students view each other and the instructor on their screens and practice speaking through a computer program called Amiga LiveChat.
The center has become a hub for these languages and the demand has grown so much that Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese, and Korean, are now being offered as full-fledged, three-year programs through the UO’s new World Languages Academy.
The significance can be seen in the numbers. In 1997, the UO had only two students studying Arabic. Now there are 69 in the World Languages Academy and 15 in the self-study program. -
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