Dialogues on CD Enhance Foreign Language Classroom Instruction

An Oral Language Archive, a collection of authentic French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish dialogues on compact discs (CD), has been created to enhance classroom instruction in the foreign languages at Carnegie Mellon.

Created by Chris Jones, director of the Language Learning Resource Center in the Department of Modern Languages, in collaboration with colleagues in each of the languages, the Oral Language Archive CDs include 41 dialogues in French, 48 in Spanish and 55 in Japanese.

The dialogues, which may be used by teachers in the classroom, in small study groups or by individuals, are arranged by topics, like food, travel, work, and home and family. They are playable on all CD players and in all computer CD-ROM drives. Courseware to accompany the CDs is available, with more under development.

"ln classroom language instruction, students are exposed to large quantities of what has come to be called 'teacher talk'–language that is consciously or unconsciously simplified by the teacher to help students understand," Jones said.

"While this is perhaps necessary at the beginning stages of the process, it can be discouraging later for those learners who arrive in Paris and find to their dismay that 'No one speaks Intermediate French!'

"The Oral Language Archive is intended to help remedy this problem by exposing learners to recordings of native speakers talking to each other about everyday topics, without any of the simplification encountered in language classrooms," Jones explained.

"The result should be that students will be better prepared to encounter the real world of language, avoiding the trauma of passage from classroom to authentic language use."

In five years, Jones hopes the Oral Language Archive will be a part of basic language instruction nationwide. In the meantime, he and his colleagues will be adding more dialogues to the archive, which will involve travelling overseas to capture different dialects of the various languages.

Researchers are developing a World Wide Web text database that will allow users to find dialogues based on an index, as well as on regional origin of the speakers, topics and speech functions.

Institutions that want to offer Intranet access to their communities can purchase appropriate licenses and use the dialogues in QuickTime format over networks.

Originally, the Oral Language Archive was designed to work via the Internet and was housed on a server at Carnegie Mellon. However, the proprietary distribution system proved impossible to support because of the speed of the development of Internet technologies.

Jones said he will continue to work on facilitating network-based use of the dialogues, using industry-supported QuickTime and RealAudio formatted dialogues.

The archive has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Foreign Language Resource Center at San Diego State University Carnegie Mellon.

----Lisa Ritter

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