Creating Interactive On-line Exercises for Beginning Language Acquisition Students

Biographical Notes

Helen Bauch received her B.A. from St. Louis University in Missouri and her M.A. in Spanish from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She began her teaching carreer at the Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic teaching ESL. She then taught both Esl and Spanish at Texas A&M University in College Station Texas. Since moving to California she has taught Spanish at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California.

For the past three years Ms Bauch was chair of the Language Learning Center Commitee during the planning phase of the new Tandberg lab. Interest in state -of -the -art lab materials prompted her creation of oral on-line exercises in Spanish as part of two State grant projects.

Mr Dwight Ayle received his B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Cal Poly, Pomona. After graduation he has worked at Mt San Antonio College in a number of technical positions. He has served as Senior Programmer/Analyst and Senior Instructional Analyst in the Instructional Technology Department. He was also Coordinator of Instructional Technology and Multimedia in Staff Development. He is presently Technical Coordinator of online learning and staff and organizational learning at Mt Sac. It is within this present position that he served as head technician for the two grant projects which resulted in five teaching web sites used by language acquisition students in four language areas.

Barbara Vigano was raised bilingually (French and German) in French speaking Switzerland. She holds an M.A. in French and an M.A. in German. Has taught French and German for the last 20 years.

She is past President of Southern California Chapter of American Association of Teachers of German. She has developed a 100 page packet, available in four languages, of instructional materials on ìFive World Revolutionsî

She was Chair of the Educational Technology Committee at Mt. San Antonio College and developed multimedia programs for French and German. She has created web sites with Discussion webs for all her French classes. She will demonstrate the interactive web site that she created for French 1 (http://vclass.mtsac.edu/french1).

Abstract
Format: Panel, 3 presenters, 90 minutes

Method of Presentation: 60 minutes showing and explaining student exercises and chart templates for creating exercises followed by 20-30 minutes of Q&A. (Both pedogical and technical questions are invited.)

Presentation will demonstrate interactive on-line language acquisition exercises developed by 5 Mt. San Antonio College faculty members through an 18 month grant project. Exercises include (1) fill in the blank type French grammar exercises with feedback hints for wrong wrong answers (2) Beginning level Spanish oral exercises for listening, comprehension and dication practice (3) multiple choice ESL reading skills exercises with feedback following each choice selection. Presentation will show the "behind the scenes" workings of the programs, practical list of technical needs and knowledge for creating similar exercises, contact info for acquiring template charts for inserting your content.
(For a tour of the 5 sites created through this project check our out: http://vclass.mtsac.edu/llcgrant ) Use Explorer 5 to access this site and all language projects.

Proposed Target Languages: Spanish, French (beginning) and ESL (reading)

Anticipated benefits: Participants will be able to: (1) view the contents of existing sites and immediately integrate them into their own courses if appropriate (2) view and understand the template charts that control the on screen contents (3) receive the contact and resource information for acquiring and using the templates to create their own exercises.