Hearing voices, seeing words

This week in class, we discussed different educational theories. I entered this class without a strong background in formal educational theories, so for me, this explanation was a big help. One of the most interesting theories discussed was the "dual coding" theory--the notion that people learn better when their different senses are engaged in learning the material. This could be, for example, simultaneously listening and watching, or simultaneously watching and moving the body.

The question of simultaneous input is one I've been thinking about a lot lately, as it is closely related to what happens in language learning classes. These days, the communicative language teaching theory is probably the most commonly accepted theory among foreign language teachers. The communicative approach heavily emphasizes input (and some production) in the target language, with minimal use of the students' known language. Key to this method is the teacher's ability to provide "comprehensible input"--that is, to speak in the target language and to simultaneously make that input understandable to students.

How best to do this remains an outstanding question. Probably the most traditional method, one many former language students will recognize, is for a teacher to accompany a long monologue in the target language with lots of pantomime: for instance, miming the act of carrying a suitcase and unpacking it for airport security during a lesson on travel-related vocabulary. Right here, in what is perhaps the simplest foreign language lesson plan possible, we have an example of dual coding. Foreign language learning environments lend themselves naturally to a dual coding approach because supplementary pictures are more than an illustrative nice-to-have: the task at hand is one of parsing meaning in an unknown tongue, a challenge oftentimes only made possible by the addition of visual input.

Lately, I have been thinking about how a function normally carried out by a teacher--that of providing visual input to make the target language comprehensible--can be replicated or even enhanced on a computer screen. The visual images computers can provide are not limited by time or space: rather than a teacher's pantomiming pulling a suitcase, for instance, a computer program can offer the student any number of suitcase images, which the student can replay at his or her leisure. On the other hand, human body language does communicate quite a bit that can be lost during a human-machine interaction: the raising of an eyebrow, for instance, to indicate a question. How best to map spoken content to visual input in a technology context? I've been ruminating on this of late, and haven't arrived at clear-cut answers yet. But it seems to me that the 2-D space of a computer screen is quite different from the 3-D space of the human body, and that creative thought is needed to understand the unique opportunities and limitations of the medium.