1. Introduction

Advances in computer technology, such as memory size, storage capacity and speed, together with development in multimedia authoring software, have empowered people involved in foreign / second language teaching and learning, both teachers and learners. They also engage language teachers and learners with new challenges. More and more professionals as well as amateurs are trying to find out how to make effective use of this ever-developing new form of medium- multimedia. At the same time, CALL materials are experiencing a development with unprecedented growth and experiments. More and more CALL materials are designed to accommodate users with special needs and interests.

This paper describes the design of a language learning and reinforcing package Pre-U. Experience, which tries to make use of text, graphics, audio recordings and videos - in a multimedia format. Before going into details about the design features of the package in terms of user interface, navigation, tasks, video and text-based information, the paper first defines the target users and the pedagogic aims of it. Finally the essay makes a few reflective points concerning multimedia design for language teaching and learning in general.

Figure 1: Menu page of Pre-U. Experience

2. Target users

This section defines the target users of Pre-U. Experience. It begins with an introduction of the initial idea of a multimedia program for this special group of people.

Pre-U. Experience originated from my own experience as a Chinese student studying in Brighton, U. K., and also from the long-hour discussions with other fellow students from China about problems and difficulties concerning language encountered by many Chinese students and scholars who have newly arrived in the U. K. There are some common characteristics among this group of people. First of all, it is the first time for most of them to be in an English-speaking country. Although most of them have been learning English since they were in the secondary school, many still faced initial language problems like listening comprehension, oral interaction with local people, following lectures or instructions, taking notes, asking questions in class, interacting with supervisors, etc. (Cortazzi and Jin, 1996). Puzzled by the way people speak in daily life here, they were asking questions like "Why are they talking so fast? and "How come can’t I follow what they were talking about?" --- they felt that the English language they had learned before they came across the sea were very different from what/how people actually speak to each other over here. They found there was this urgent need for them to pick up as soon as possible the conversational skills in everyday life. For example, Wang, one of the Electronics MSc students said: "I don’t know how to respond when people say to me ‘Morning. How are you?’ Because I want to tell them exactly how I feel, but when I actually began to tell them how I lost my glasses, they didn’t seem to be very interested at all." Zhuang, a girl who’s studying Interior Design, said: "It is always difficult for me to start a conversation or ask for information. I’m not sure how I shall ask these questions." These are only a couple out of the many language frustrations these Chinese students have experienced. It is the awareness of these language problems that motivates me to author this piece of multimedia package Pre-U. Experience that can deal with these particular language problems.

The title Pre-U. Experience is selected after careful consideration. It is used in two senses: Pre-United Kingdom and Pre-university. By so titling, it is my intention to appeal to those Chinese students and scholars who plan to further their education in the U. K. In China, it is true that one can see some books like A Guide to Study in America and A Guide to Study in the U. K. But as far as I know, there has not been any multimedia package which provides both opportunities for language practice and background information about studying and living in the U. K. Pre-U. Experience is specially designed for this large group of people who are planing and preparing to come to the U. K. for a period of study. It is for them to use before they leave China.

3. Pedagogic aims

There are two general aims for Pre-U. Experience. One is to provide opportunities for users to practise their daily conversational skill, especially the fundamental interactional skill of asking and answering questions. The other is to provide background information about studying and living in the U. K.

The principal orientation of Pre-U. Experience is to offer users an opportunity to experience how English language functions in different daily situations, particularly to sensitise the users to the many different ways of asking and answering questions under certain circumstances. This conversational skill, I believe is ‘fundamental’ (O’Brien, 1997:300) once they come over to a U. K. university. In their analysis of "English Teaching and Learning in China", Cortazzi and Jin (1996:67) point out the weakness in English teaching in China. According to them, English learning is treated ‘in terms of knowledge of form rather than awareness of function or acquisition of skills’ and ‘oral skills remaining under-developed’.

Related to the shortage of information packages about studying in the U. K. especially in multimedia format inside China, the other purpose, which is at least as important as the first one, of Pre-U. Experience, is to provide users a platform to read about, to see and to hear the real situations of living and studying in the U. K. This background information is hoped to make the users mentally prepared to what they are going to experience when they come across the ocean, and to reduce the degree of the so-called cultural shock.

So far we have defined the target users and the pedagogic aims of the package. How these aims are to be implemented is dealt with in the next section.

4. Development of the Project

This section focuses on the design features and decision-making involved in the production process. It describes these features in terms of screen layout, navigation, tasks, video and the text-based information.

Having decided who the project is for and what it is aimed to provide, then my next step was to make out the detailed plan of how the pedagogic objectives are going to be realised, that is, what exactly is going to be on the screen, the interface where users are going to interact with the machine. I needed to answer a long series of questions:

"What kinds of media - text, graphics, audio, video - are going to be used?"

"What colours are going to be used?"

"How to navigate, a flowchart?"

"What kinds of tasks are needed?"

"Which authorising tool to use?"

And I listed all the issues that need consideration: from screen layout, choice of colours, interactivity, learner control, buttons and icons, navigation , user friendliness, feedback mechanism, hyper links, etc., to small fine details like the fonts and size of text, bigger or smaller the video window should be, etc. I first planned everything on paper, with the flowchart, hoping that I could move whatever I put down on paper onto the screen. Then when I actually sat down before the computer screen, experiencing with texts, colours and pictures, I found things were far from what I had expected. For example, for the colour and size of the text and the colour of the background, the position of the buttons and icons and almost everything on the screen, I had to experiment many times before finally making my decision.

After some initial experimenting with Mediator 4.0 and Toolbook 4.0, I decided to use the former though if time and other practicality permits, I would probably have chosen the latter. Basically, Mediator 4.0 was chosen because of practical reasons, namely, to me, it is much more user-friendly. At the same time, Mediator 4.0 is supportive of what I want to do:

1. be able to import text, graphics, audio recordings and videos;
2. be able to support flexible manipulation of these various input.

Having said that, it still took me a much longer period of time than I had expected to familiarise myself with the basic facilities and some further potentialities Mediator 4.0 offers.

4.1 User interface

Figure 2 shows the General layout of the computer screen. The computer interface, where users interact with the machine, was designed to be as simple, as user-friendly as possible. This screen layout was kept in consistency, in all the tasks pages, the screen is divided into three parts: the left half, right half and the bottom line. The left side is the text input or tasks; the right side is video or picture input on the upper part and on-line feedback for the tasks on the lower part; the bottom line contains the navigation buttons, which are put into two groups according to their colours and function, and they are kept consistently in the same position throughout the whole program. Basically there is only one screen for learners to get familiar with. Once it’s done, they know what to expect on each button and where to look for a particular feature. As Kristof and Amy (1995) put it:

There is a reason why the text input or the tasks are put on the left side and the video window is put on the right side of the screen. My argument is: if the video window is put on the left side, users would most probably go to the video first without considering carefully the text or tasks because the video is already much more attention-grabbing. Also, modern Chinese runs the same way as English from left to right, but different from the traditional Chinese which runs from the right top down to the bottom, then from top down to the bottom again, until the left bottom at last.

Simplicity is another feature of the screen layout, which is the result of careful consideration. It is to do with the target users. In China, multimedia language learning packages are just beginning to appear and CALL is only in its infancy. People are not so well adapted to the buttons and icons on the screen yet. That is why the screen design looks much like a page, a quiet friendly platform where users can navigate about, without being fascinated by the fanciful features like animated movement as some funny figures or colourful graphics or text styles which may turn out to be distracting rather than enhancing users’ learning experience. What I was trying to do was to ‘make their job as easy as possible and get out of their way’ (Kristof and Amy, 1995:49), and I believe that if we can get rid of every feature ‘that is not critical and aim for complete simplicity, the number of people who thank you will outnumber those who say they would have liked more features’ (Ibid, p.49).

4.2 Navigation

There are three groups of buttons in the program. They are grouped according to their functions. One group are for controlling the video: play / replay, pause / stop and rewind. Another group are for the linear navigation: forward and backward. The help button, which is a question mark, is also put in this group because of its colour. The other group are for multi-directional navigation: to the menu page, to the information pages and exit.

There are two navigation routes in the program: one linear and the other multi-directional. The two green arrows can carry users forward and backward in a linear way. If they keep on clicking on either one, they can come back to where they started in a big round. Or they can also click the menu button and from there go to wherever they want straightaway. For the information part which has been completed now - Study- Information, there is only a linear navigation route. There could have been some more buttons directing to sub-topics within study, for example: seminars, tutorials, lectures, etc. Users, then, could have a more direct access to these sub-topics. There is always an exit button on the pages, so whenever users want to quit the program, they can just simply click to end it.

4.3 Video and audio

The core language resource of the planned program would include 12 video clips, each portraying some different aspects within the four general topics and some audio-recordings of asking and answering questions, how lecturers give assignments, how students ask/give clarification, what a seminal sounds like and how to give a presentation/report… etc. For the finished part, the video material is edited from A Guide to Great Britain (BBC). Due to time and other practical constraints, the audio recording has not been done yet.

There are three buttons for the control of the video: play / repaly, rewind and pause/stop and the buttons are the same icons as on every home Video Cassette Recorder. Users have the control of when to play, pause/stop, rewind and replay the video. Unfortunately, Mediators 4.0 does not allow the programming to rewind the video sentence by sentence or wherever users want to. It can only rewind to the very beginning of the whole clip. However, because the video clips are all very short, the facility available has achieved the purpose of providing these authentic situations, the language functions to the user through the medium of video.

4.4 Tasks

Designing the language tasks for the users has been the most effort-making work in the design process. As mentioned in Target users, those people, for whom this project has been aimed at, have some special characteristics: 1. They can be grouped as intermediate or advanced level; 2. Due to the language teaching and learning practice, their reading skill is much better than listening and speaking (do not forget, the main English course in China for college students is still called Intensive English Reading). Based on the analysis of their characteristics and their need to practise and improve everyday conversational interaction skill, the tasks are designed to provide opportunities for users, first and for most to remind themselves of and to sensitise themselves to the language and its functions in different everyday situations, and then, particularly, to practise the skills of asking and answering questions.

The kinds of tasks designed are crucial in implementing the above-mentioned language practice. Instead of the usual practice of providing questions and asking users to choose appropriate answers from the given options, I chose to provide users with some specific information in a certain situation and ask users to either choose or provide the possible questions within a certain interaction. By so doing, the rationale behind is as follows. In the latter case, most probably, users can be more cognitively involved, and they would put more effort into the thinking process before clicking a choice, because obviously the same piece of information may have been a response to many different questions within the same contexts, and similarly, even the same question can be put in many different ways. In most cases, the options given are all correct questions, the difference is in the appropriateness of each question in the given circumstance. Users have to decide which is the most suitable one in the situation, it is not simply a right or wrong choice, but a question of socially acceptable and pragmatically appropriate forms.

The kinds of tasks in the completed part of the program include Multiple choice, True or false, Ordering of phrases, Dialogue Building and writing. All the tasks are based on the language input in the videos. Users are repeatedly exposed to this comprehensible input in similar situations as in the video class and asked to produce comprehensible output. The rubrics of the tasks are kept as clear as possible and also set to start users’ thinking process, to avoid users’ simply clicking on all the choices available. In some of the multiple-choice tasks, there are deliberately more than one right answers. The reason for this is as follows. If there is only one correct answer, users may neglect the other options if they have found the right one for the first try. They may not consider further why the others are wrong. By telling them there may be more than one answer and actually the input box for the page score shows exactly how many right answers there should be, the program demands some extra work from the user. They need to look carefully at every option. In fact, in some tasks, all the options given are both grammatically and socio-pragmatically well-formed sentences. Users have to weigh the appropriateness of each option in the given situation before making a correct choice. Again, this is aimed to get users more cognitively involved in the language learning experience.

Besides listening comprehension, the program offers users chances to write their own dialogues in the given situations. This is hoped to help users put what they have seen in the video and heard in the audio recordings into comprehensible output, and turn the language input and their effort into a piece of work they can actually see and take pride in.

4.5 Feedback

Pre-U. Experience is different from many other language learning packages in that it tries to offer instant and constructive feedback to every effort users make to complete a task. The feedback is not simply in the form of ‘a green tick’ for ‘right’ and ‘ a red cross’ for ‘wrong’, but responses to what users do and think when they have a go at the questions, tasks or activities. There are, mainly, three kinds of feedbacks in the completed part of the program:

1. Explaining to users what to do when they can’t yet answer a question;

2. Helping users to feel a glow when they do something correctly;

3. Helping users find out exactly what was wrong when they failed

(After Race, 1994:46).

Most of the feedback responses refer users back to the original material and sometimes even without telling them directly whether they did it right or wrong. Hopefully, as with high motivation and determination (Cortazzi and Jin, 1996) as this target group of users are, they will always go back to the materials and find out themselves why one option is more suitable than another.

In order that users can be fully involved in their learning experience, some tasks are specially designed for it’s interactivity like the one in Train tickets. The idea is that users have some control over the materials the computer is going to present to them. If they make a different choice, the dialogue would go in a different direction.

4.6 Text-based information

As mentioned previously, the second purpose in designing this package is to provide background information about studying and living in Britain. Generally speaking, this information, is text-based, with hyper links, directing users to either texts, pictures, audio recordings or video clips describing and portraying the different aspects within the four broad topics. Due to practical constraints, I haven’t found a more satisfactory way of displaying this long text of information. I will come back to this in the next section.

5. Conclusion

Having finished the first design period of Pre-U. Experience, I have two points to make here in the paper. First of all, multimedia design is time-consuming and labour-taking, and it should be a team project rather than individual work. Due to the difference in individual perceptions of the computer interface, it may inevitably be personal taste or style and might also be unbalanced if it is all done by a single person regarding colours, text, pictures and buttons and icons. Secondly, for a CALL project like this, the first thing to do is a clearly defined pedagogic aim plus a clear navigation chart before the actual design process begins. It saves time and energy. These are only two points about multimedia design in general.

There are also some points about this particular piece of software. As mentioned earlier, the Information part about Study (in the U. K.) is not very satisfactory. Due to its nature, it is inevitably with long text. I tried to divide the text into suitable sizes to put on each page according to the sub-topics. In order to avoid scrolling text box, there turned out to be more pages. And also, this is aimed to give some background information, the text itself is not specially designed for language practice. Only in the case of some difficult words or special information like what a lecture sounds like, there are some hyper links or pop-ups to give an illustration or further explanation.

Another thing is the activity in Train ticket where users are given a choice between Manchester and Cambridge to make their own dialogues. The activity was designed for its interactiveness. The present state of it is that when a user finishes choosing a whole dialogue, the program sticks there. If s/he wants to make a new series of choices, s/he has to go to another page and come back again. I was going to put a button like NEXT DIALOGUE at the bottom to hide the lines, but could not because it was only after I finished all the dialogues that I realised this problem and I could not remember which text goes with which dialogue (all the text boxes are hidden). For time’s sake, I could not have gone over and done the whole page again.

It will be a very interesting idea if I can carry on the designing process when I go back to China. Perhaps it will be more desirable and more helpful if audio and video recordings of Chinese students studying and living in Britain can be included in the package. The easy identification with the people in the software then would certainly result in more active involvement, which in turn would bring about more enhanced language learning experience. Also, audio recordings of sample lectures, seminars and tutorials will be an important part of the background information.

As an inexperienced CALL materials developer, this amateur design process has been and surely will be a valuable experience for me, a Chinese English teacher who is always frustrated at trying to find suitable language materials for his students. Now that I know the strengths and weaknesses of Mediator 4.0, I hope this superficial knowledge will help me understand and learn to use other authoring tools and bring me one step forward into the vast field of multimedia design.

Reference