Innovation in Language Learning

According to a recent study, there has been a dramatic growth in the use of multimedia by this digital generation who has grown up surrounded by digital content during the past few years. Consequently, this significant increase in the use of digital media has changed our educational concept of students from being consumers of knowledge content to being critics and creators. In spite of educators’ awareness of the increasing need represented in the conceptual shift from centuries-old teaching paradigms to the increased focus on the enablement of learners and the powerful combination of teachers and technology, some experts point out that there remains a gap between the vision and the tools needed to achieve it.  Furthermore, education institutions are not responding enough to the changes needed to curricula to recognize newly learned skills. This paper aims to identify the challenges we face in our Chinese language programme at Massey University in New Zealand and on the basis of which to propose a new language teaching and learning model. It is hoped that this new model will engage students more actively in the learning process, turning them from passive recipients of linguistic knowledge to real life communicators who can become active in the target language speaking environment.  

NOODLL is a New Optimized Open Distance Language Learning model. Below is a brief account of its features:

●     New: it is not a plugin itself; rather, it is a new design of teaching and learning model based on Moodle and Poodll and other elearning resource creating tools such as Hot Potatoes, Quizlet etc.

●     Optimized: the integration of the above elearning tools not only helps to create more enjoyable language learning experience for students and to make their goals more achievable, but also offers an elearning environment and virtual classroom that are cross-platform and more user-friendly for students.

●     Open: In light of Moodle’s designing philosophy, which is people-oriented and student-centered, and that learning environment should help to stimulate students’ interests and enthusiasm in learning, NOODLL is designed to be highly personalizable, allowing students to easily choose from a range of activities to cater to their own learning styles, experiences, interests and competencies. NOODLL also uses the interactive and collaborative tools to promote online interaction and collaboration among students.

●     Distance: here the term is used in a broad sense; it refers to anytime-anywhere-learning as discussed above. This model can be used both in self-learning and with the help of teacher.

Language Learning: since the process of learning a second language differs greatly from that of studying other subjects, NOODLL takes into account of factors such as ways to provide feedback at different competency levels, effective methods used in online interaction, designing principles of online language activities, the role of student autonomy for the online learners etc.