An important key to success at developing communicative abilities in a second language is actively practicing the four communication skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). With this in mind, the Open Voice system was developed to support students’ active engagement with the skills of writing and speaking. This paper explains how the Open Voice system was developed and revised in order to increase English Language Learner output.外国語習得においては、読む、書く、聞く、話す、の4技能を能動的に練習することが、コミュニケーション能力を身につけるために重要な鍵となる。岡山県立大学が独自に開発した英語教材 Open Voiceは、ライティングとスピーキングのスキルを高めるため、学生が積極的に学習に取り組めるようデザインされている。小論では、 英語学習者のアウトプット力増強に向け Open Voiceがどのように改訂されてきたかを述べるとともに、アクティブ・ラーニングの要素が効果的に導入されていることを明らかにした

Des Marais Eric

Mikami Judith

Sugimura Ai

Okayama Prefectural University ePublications Repository

 Introduction Across all four domains of Second Language Acquisition (reading, writing, speaking, and listening), active learning is considered to be one of the most important factors (Cohalan, 2014). As opposed to passively listening to lectures on English grammar and memorizing vocabulary, learning actively means that students must use the English language in order to master it — they must practice all four skills. This is in line with MEXT’s own policies on university education and active learning (Ito, 2017). Active Learning is “any instructional method that engages students in the learning process” (Prince, 2004, p. 1). Project-based learning and collaborative learning are examples of active learning, but any strategy in which students are using and applying concepts and knowledge are active (Collins & O’Brien, 2003). In Second Language Acquisition, this generally refers to students developing communication skills as opposed to memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary or copying sentences. However, that does not mean that learning grammar rules or memorizing vocabulary are not useful. In fact, one of the most empirically-researched models of learning, Bloom’s taxonomy, shows that passive learning is an important step that must be done along with the various modes of active learning (Krathwohl, 2002). According to the revised version of the taxonomy, there are six cognitive domains that all need to be addressed: 1) Open Voice: Incorporating Active Learning to Increase English Language Learner Output  Ai Sugimura, Computer Science and Systems Engineering Eric Des Marais, Division of Language and Culture Education Judith Mikami, Former Part-time Lecturer  An important key to success at developing communicative abilities in a second language is actively practicing the four communication skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). With this in mind, the Open Voice system was developed to support students’ active engagement with the skills of writing and speaking. This paper explains how the Open Voice system was developed and revised in order to increase English Language Learner output.  Keywords: English Language Education; Active Learning; Speaking Skills; Writing Skills 3-1?????????????3?1?2018?3-1?～3-9?http://doi.org/10.15009/00002291/ Remembering; 2) Understanding; 3) Applying; 4) Analyzing; 5) Evaluating; and 6) Creating. The first two, Remembering and Understanding, can be easily addressed through passive learning techniques. The other four, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating, all require active learning strategies. At Okayama Prefectural University, the English Language Program (ELP) teaches all four language skills during the first year. Students practice receptive  skills (reading and listening) during the first and third quarters, and they practice production skills (writing and speaking) during the second and fourth quarters. Production skills require students to do something — they must write and speak. A student must be active in order to write or speak, so active learning is an important part of developing skills in writing and speaking. In order to facilitate active learning in the classroom, Professors Matsuda and Chida developed the Open Voice system. Open Voice combines Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) with Active Learning to help students develop written and oral fluency. It consists of two workbooks and online components that form the basis for instructor facilitation of student activities. Judith Mikami developed the IT component. The workbooks have been updated twice through the efforts of Ai Sugimura, Yoshihiro Minamitsu, Eric Des Marais, and Judith Mikami. Open Voice was first used in the 2016-2017 school year. It has gone through two revisions in order to recalibrate the support for students and faculty, and to increase student talk time. This paper will describe some of the changes made in the Open Voice system in order to demonstrate how Active Learning has been incorporated in the English Language Program at Okayama Prefectural University.  Methodology Data for this paper comes from a textual analysis of the Open Voice workbooks and scripts for the online components. There are two levels to the Open Voice system. Students use Open Voice Basic in the 2nd quarter and Open Voice Intermediate in the 4th quarter. Bloom’s revised taxonomy and Scaffolding Theory were used as a framework for this qualitative analysis.  Data Analysis Open Voice Format Open Voice was designed with the intention of helping students practice communicating in English. The primary goal is to increase the speaking time of students in class as much as possible. The basic format involves the students creating one-minute speeches and then, using IT, transmitting them to each other for peer evaluation.  3-2Open Voice: Increasing English Language Learner Output There are two levels in the Open Voice, basic and intermediate. In the basic level, students practice writing and speaking about daily life topics (for example, food or university life), while in the intermediate level, the topics are more complex such as explaining about pop culture in Japan.  There have been many changes to the structure of the books to better support students, but the main format has stayed the same. The beginning of each topic focuses on the low-level cognitive domains of remembering and understanding, and students progress through the domains of applying, analyzing, and evaluating. The end of each topic involves the highest-level cognitive domain – creation. Students first listen to an approximately one-minute speech about a topic. They listen individually and can take their time to repeat it as needed. Then, they are provided some new vocabulary and opportunities to use the new vocabulary. After that, they are provided with topic questions to use as discussion prompts with each other. Then, they must write their own one-minute speech and record it. Students then listen to each other’s speeches and provide peer evaluation. They rate each other on: 1) the structure and organization of the speech; 2) grammar; and 3) pronunciation, accent, and rhythm. However, changes have been made since the original version to increase the amount of student engagement with the material. The following section will highlight some of the important changes made from the first to the current version.  Organization of Unit Topics Originally, students focused on one topic each week. In the original version, the basic level focused on daily topics (Year 1) :  1 Self-Introduction 6 Travel 2 Family 7 Movies 3 Friends 8 Books 4 Interests & Hobbies 9 Weekends 5 Skills 10 Health Figure 1. Open Voice Basic topics for the first year  The intermediate level was organized by communicative functions, and teachers were required to pick at least one topic from each category (Year 1):   Narrative Topics Hypothetical Topics Food If you were an animal Club Activities Talk about your past dreams English in your life If you were the prime minister 3-3?????????????3?1?2018?3-1?～3-9? Descriptive Topics Expository Topics Describe your university Explain about convenience stores in Japan Describe a famous place Explain about pop culture Describe a person you admire Explain about Japanese traditions  Figure 2. Open Voice Intermediate topics for the first year.  However, this meant that the entire basic level was focused on descriptive communication. And, in the intermediate level, students needed more time to explore the four communicative approaches.  In order to unify the two levels, the functions were split between the two levels.  Open Voice Basic Narrative Self-Introduction  Interests and Hobbies  University Life  Food Expressing Your Opinion Describe this picture  Tokyo Olympics  What are the pros and cons of using a cell phone?  How do you declare your love in other cultures? Open Voice Intermediate Expository Explain about convenience stores in Japan  Explain about a Japanese national holiday  Explain about pop culture in Japan  Explain about a person who made a real difference in your life Hypothetical If you were an animal  If you lived in the past  If you lived in a foreign country  If you were a superhero or a supervillain  Figure 3. Open Voice Basic and Intermediate (Year 3)  Now, students are able to focus on each communicative function (narrative, expressing your opinion, expository, and hypothetical) for approximately four weeks.  The new organization of topics also shows a progression, moving from self to the outer world. The narrative topics focus on explaining the self, the expressing your opinion focuses on explaining your own thinking on current topics, then in the intermediate level, students practice: 1) explaining about different aspects of 3-4Open Voice: Increasing English Language Learner Output Japan; and 2) communicating about hypothetical situations that do not exist. It also shows progression in terms of moving into the higher cognitive domains of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The Narrative function focuses on the lower order domains of remembering and understanding, while the Hypothetical function provides the opportunity to develop metacognitive skills through hypothesizing new situations.  Scaffolding the Topic Structures and Incorporating Bloom’s Cognitive Domains One common problem with Active Learning is that there is sometimes too much freedom for students. Without guidance from the teacher and the curriculum, they lapse back into old patterns, or just do nothing since there is no clear goal. This can be a problem in the SLA classroom. Scaffolding Theory (Harris, 2011) states that teachers must provide students with supports, and then as they master a skill, the supports are slowly removed until the student can produce the skills independently.  In the first version of Open Voice, it was difficult to provide students with the time and support they needed to do well. Mastery is important because it increases the confidence of students. Without confidence, students of a foreign language can become too shy to practice. Later versions of Open Voice increased the scaffolding and reduced the amount of copying that students engage in. The following explains important changes made to increase support for student mastery. Introductory Listening Section At the start of each topic, students are provided an aural model in the form of a one-minute speech. In the first version of Open Voice Basic students were expected to transcribe the speech. In later versions, this was changed to give students more flexibility to engage with the topic. Students are now provided multiple ways 3-5?????????????3?1?2018?3-1?～3-9? to shadow (or follow) the speech: 1) Prosodic shadowing; 2) Content-based shadowing; 3) Dictation/dict-gloss; or 4) Overlapping. The different forms of shadowing provide the opportunity for students to utilize the understanding domain function through content-based shadowing. Vocabulary Building The way vocabulary was presented to students changed from the first to the current version of Open Voice. In the original version of Open Voice Basic, students were given many simple phrases to model. Figure 4 illustrates an example from the Topic of Family. While these are useful phrases, most of these would already be familiar to student who has graduated from high school. Plus, by providing useful phrases, it becomes a simple exercise to write a one-minute speech about family and required only the lowest of Bloom’s cognitive domains. It requires very little active use of grammar or vocabulary.  In the current version, students are given a list of higher-level vocabulary words, phrases, and idioms, which they must look up themselves to find the definition. Then, they must look up synonyms for some of the words and then write sentences. This actively engages them in the understanding domain as to how the English words relate to the Japanese translation.  Also the useful phrases section was separated out into its own section to encourage students to apply the models to themselves instead of just memorize them.  Then, instead of transcribing a one-minute speech, students are asked to actively engage with a new text by rewriting or paraphrasing it. To help them, some of the words of the text are highlighted and students must find synonyms for the words. Then they use the synonyms to rewrite the text. While this is a relatively simple version of paraphrasing, it provides a scaffold to help students practice the higher cognitive domain level of restating. Guided Dialogue Practice Students now shift from the controlled writing exercise to verbal practice. In the original version, students were provided with a list of questions to ask each other. To increase student engagement, later versions of the text asked students to add their own questions to the list. Also, in order to help them give longer answers, and sample was provided that demonstrates how to expand an answer beyond a simple “yes” or “no” by adding extra information. This allows them to engage the domain function of applying new information. By using this guided dialog format, students gain mastery over producing short answers related to the topic.  3-6Open Voice: Increasing English Language Learner Output Independent Oral Production The final section of each topic involves students working independently to express themselves. First, they write a short speech. Then they must record their speech. In the first version of Open Voice, students were provided with space in which to write their own speech with very little guidance on what to write. This lead students to take an extraordinarily long time to think of something to write and also to copy the model of the first speech without analyzing, organizing, or creating their own speech. In the current version, the writing is split into two parts. First, students must create a mind map of their topic, and then expand this into notes for their final speech. After that, they write their speech. This helps them learn how to organize their own thoughts and express them in English. After they have written their speech, they record it using the online Open Voice computer system. To encourage self-evaluation, an important part of active learning, students are allowed to listen and re-record their speech until they are satisfied with it.  Peer Evaluation Another important concept in Active Learning is peer evaluation. Students examine each other’s work, and through learning to assess other people’s work, they become better at self-reflecting on their own work. Over time, the peer evaluation items have been updated to reflect the kinds of mistakes that students make. In the current version, peer evaluation is included as part of the book, and uses a Likert-type scale to help students assess each other on structure, grammar, and pronunciation, accent and rhythm. By having a clear rubric, students are better able to understand what they need to focus on for their learning goals.  Conclusion Open Voice is Computer Aided Language Learning system that helps students increase their ability to communicate their own ideas in the English. As is common in designing active learning methods, it can be difficult to balance learner autonomy with necessary supports to facilitate increasing their objective skills and their subjective sense of mastery. Through multiple iterations, the Open Voice system has improved its balance to help teachers facilitate the growth of student’s abilities. While the current version of Open Voice was not specifically designed within the framework of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, future revisions of Open Voice could integrate more activities covering a larger variety of cognitive domains. Lesson objectives could all be defined through Bloom’s revised taxonomy. This should increase student engagement and 3-7?????????????3?1?2018?3-1?～3-9? further develop the English language skills of students.  However, future empirical research should examine quantitative measures of student success in order to objectively determine the effectiveness of Open Voice.  References  Collins JW 3rd and O’Brien NP (editors). The Greenwood Dictionary  of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Cohalan, E. (2014). A review of the key factors in second language acquisition. AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 6(2). Harris, R. (2011) Participation in third level education: Issues for non-native speakers of English. Institute of Technology Blachardstown Journal 21, p. 5.  Ito, H. (2017). Rethinking active learning in the context of Japanese higher education. Cogent Education, 4(1), 1298187.  Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218.  Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of Engineering Education, 93(3), 223-231.                 3-8Open Voice: Increasing English Language Learner Output Open Voice 改訂の歩み―英語学習者のアウトプット力増強に向けた アクティブ・ラーニングのために  杉村 藍 （情報工学部) Des Marais, Eric（語学教育推進室) 三上ジュディス (元本学非常勤講師)  要旨 外国語習得においては、読む、書く、聞く、話す、の 4 技能を能動的に練習することが、コミュニケーション能力を身につけるために重要な鍵となる。岡山県立大学が独自に開発した英語教材 Open Voice は、ライティングとスピーキングのスキルを高めるため、学生が積極的に学習に取り組めるようデザインされている。小論では、英語学習者のアウトプット力増強に向け Open Voice がどのように改訂されてきたかを述べるとともに、アクティブ・ラーニングの要素が効果的に導入されていることを明らかにした。  キーワード 英語教育、アクティブ・ラーニング、スピーキング・スキル、ライティング・スキル  3-9?????????????3?1?2018?3-1?～3-9?

Open Voice 改訂の歩み : 英語学習者のアウトプット力増強に向けたアクティブ・ラーニングのために

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Open Voice 改訂の歩み : 英語学習者のアウトプット力増強に向けたアクティブ・ラーニングのために

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