Developing distance language learners' interactive competence--can synchronous audio do the trick?

This article discusses findings from two pilot studies that investigated the use of Internet-based audio conferencing and e-mail by distance language learners. Students enrolled in courses at the British Open University met once a week online with their tutor to complete a series of tasks that were designed to help them improve their spoken competence. In addition, learners were encouraged to use the online environment for further meetings without their tutors. It is suggested that the higher number of opportunities learners had to communicate in the target language as a result of the availability of an online environment increased both their interactive competence and their confidence in their target language skills. Another outcome was that students with different levels of proficiency appear to require different types of tutorial support and that communication and fluency-related tasks are ideally used in an online environment with learners of at least intermediate competence in the target language.

To date, most language courses in open and distance language learning have relied mainly on printed material in the form of course books. Some providers of distance education have supplemented these with videos and audiotapes, or referred their students to specific television programmes or radio broadcasts. However, while these resources provide learners with various stimuli to practise their reading and listening skills, it is also true that each medium provides students with only a limited range of opportunities to practise their productive skills.

Distance learners have few opportunities to write in the foreign language for an audience other than their tutor. But they normally have even fewer chances to test and to improve their speaking skills in authentic communication. The number of tutorials available to students is usually restricted by financial and logistic constraints and much time that could be used for communicative activities is lost because tutors have to deal with the preparation of, or feedback on, assignments or with administrative jobs.

Several projects carried out over the past few years have sought to remedy this situation by investigating options that would give language learners more opportunities to encounter the foreign language in spontaneous interaction and in less predictable ways that is the case in written or recorded course material. Studies undertaken in this direction range from e-mail projects such as the International Writing Exchange or a tutored use of bulletin boards (e.g., Lamy & Goodfellow, 1999) to the investigation of point-to-point video conferencing between groups of learners (Skowronek & Kind, 1997; Zahner, 1998). Studies like the MERLIN project, which combined a "pathway" of activities with computer conferencing and a website that allowed students to initiate telephone conferences with their tutor and! or other learners (Marsh, Arnold, Ellis, Halliwell, Hodgins, & Malcome, 1997), even began to investigate the benefits for language learners of being able to talk to other students from home by way of a second teleph one line. However, none of these projects has yet addressed the benefits for students of being able to engage in verbal interaction in real-time online environments from their homes over a single telephone line.

This article reports on a pilot study conducted at the British Open University (OU), which was designed to provide participants with opportunities to talk to each other by means of a series of meetings over an Internet-based audio conferencing client using a single telephone line. Nine groups of students on the OU's first-level German and third-level French courses met once a week with their tutors, each of whom worked for the OU's Centre for Modern Languages. Students who commanded a basic and an upper-intermediate level of proficiency in the target language respectively met over a period of three months during which they completed three task-based activities. Learners had access to the conferencing tool, e-mail, and to a dedicated project website where they could find regularly updated information about their activities. Furthermore, they were encouraged to hold additional meetings among themselves to benefit as much as possible from the fact that the server hosting the audio software was available on a 24 hours a day/7 days a week basis.

Tasks, which were made available to students one week in advance through the project website, were designed to engage students in collaborative based projects which were true to life but also encouraged them to experiment with their target language. Each task description referred students back to selected pages in their course material. Great care was taken to ensure that learners could start with vocabulary and structures with which they were already familiar but that they also could experiment with less familiar vocabulary or grammatical structures.

This article begins with a discussion of findings from previous research into networked language learning. It then goes on to outline the design and the pedagogy adopted for the present study, paying particular attention to the specific situation of OU language students. It presents data about learners' use of and their feedback on the individual tools they used and it discusses the effect on the outcome of the project of variables such as student attendance, the tutor role, the availability of context cues, and the significance of error correction.