2003 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
English Education and Making of Educational Materials in the Information Society
| Project/Area Number |
13480049
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Educational technology
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| Research Institution | Waseda University |
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Principal Investigator |
YASUYOSHI Itsuki Waseda University, School of Science and Engineering, Professor, 理工学部, 教授 (20141294)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
MCFARLAND Curtis Waseda University, School of Science and Engineering, Professor, 理工学部, 教授 (10199664)
SAKURAI Toshiko Kobe Shoin Womens University, School of Literature, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (40149555)
MURAKAMI Makoto Toyo University, School of Engineering, Lecturer, 工学部, 講師 (80329119)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2001 – 2003
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| Keywords | Distant learning / Authoring / Broadband / multimedia / E-text database / Evaluation methods / collaboration / Natural language processing |
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| Research Abstract |
Since broadband Internet connections have become widely available, multimedia educational software is estimated to be of great importance for the immediate future. PDAs and mobile phones owned by many young people are considered to be as effective as PCs in near-future language learning.
We made a comparative study of PCs, PDAs, and mobile phones in terms of usability, effectiveness, and interactivity in language learning. PDAs were judged to be more useful than mobile phones in the 2001-2 experiment. Students studied in a multimedia English program using the three different environments (eight students per PC, PDA, and mobile phone) and afterwards took exams. PCs turned out to be very dependable, but PDAs showed a great potential for language learning because of their portability and unique functions.
Our research also focused on how to develop learning materials using the Internet. We made three different movies for our collaborative experiment in creating educational software on the w
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eb. The traditional way of making educational software is for programmers to design, produce, and edit learning materials in one place together with authors and editors, but in this research each team member could occupy a different site on the web and still collaborate simultaneously in the production of software. Commuting time was saved because the participants in this collaboration did not have to meet physically at one place.
In order to decide whether the text used for educational software is appropriate for students, we used text-analyzing programs and the English text database : the levels of the texts were decided by the number of their vocabulary words. We added another one thousand texts (700 megabytes) to the present English Text Database to extract more sample sentences in textual analysis. We also came to the conclusion that at least 4000 vocabulary words were necessary for college students to understand the average English newspaper and its equivalents, although Japanese high-school graduates learn only two thousand words at high school.
We also collected and analyzed TOEFL and various English tests to make a prototype of CBT (Computer-Based Testing). This program was designed to evaluate students' English language abilities automatically pointing out their strengths and weaknesses based on grammar and usage data stored in the databases. Less
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