 It is the great pleasure that I introduce Dr. Paul Mandel to you, who is here from the University of Houston downtown. And I will give you a little bit of information about him. He is an assistant professor of Spanish at University of Houston downtown. He holds a PhD in Spanish applied linguistics, as well as a certificate in second language acquisition and teacher education from the University of Illinois, Urbana, Champaign. His research includes questions regarding universal grammar, its accessibility and adult second language acquisition, verb movement, and the processing and morphology by L2 Learners in Spanish, which I saw on your website. And I actually invited Dr. Mandel to come and speak to us about his online Spanish course. I saw a presentation by him at the SoCal conference back in April of this year, 2016. And I just was so impressed by his presentation and so interested and fascinated by what he is doing with his online course and all of the different techniques he's employed, and of course the research behind it, which interests us all very much as we're all trying to create our own online courses here at UT. So without further ado, Dr. Mandel. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so very much. And thank you for the invitation to come up here, especially during this dead time in between the end of the semester and finals. I've got a question for you. What languages are represented in here? Russian? Chinese? Spanish? Portuguese? And French? Is the majority of the folks here French? Okay. Okay. I was just curious. One of the things I was sharing a little bit earlier, I'm very honored to be invited to come here because I actually went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specifically to study with a number of people who actually started here and for whom I hold a great deal of respect and regard because I was saying earlier that to me UT Austin in the early 1980s was actually a site in which a number of graduate students and faculty were really became interested in applied linguistics with a notion of, okay, what's going on up here? And instead of comparing our language learners to native speakers, let's look at the systematicity with which they're doing what they're doing. And so that's the reason actually I went to the University of Illinois to study with a number of them that were here, Bill Van Patten and Jim Lee being two of them, but they came from here and I hold UT Austin with great esteem because of the role that this university and your departments have played in what we now consider applied linguistics. What I would like to talk about with Dr. Giotto's invitation is input and meaning in online language instruction. Now I'll also tell you that I'm a novice when it comes to online language instruction. I came to this because our university was insisting upon it. And you may find yourselves in similar straits where this seems to be the thing to do, let's do it. And initially when I was serving as an assistant professor at the time and the coordinator for the basic language program, I said I want to go at this from a research-driven and theoretically sound reason. I'm not buying a package just because it's a package. And so it so happened that I had invited Bill Van Patten and Jason Rothman to give a talk at our campus in February of 2014. And I told Bill I'm working on this, I need some help. And he said I'll help you with this because of some work that he was doing with his graduate students. And so a lot of what I'm going to be talking about, I owe to him. He allowed us access to these materials. And I understand that through your center, you're working in a group setting because numbers are helpful. I couldn't have done this by myself at all. And so one of the things I've learned is it has to be a team effort. And so when you were talking about team efforts with online education, open education, to do the kind of work that needs to be available online, you have to have a large group of people working together. But my question now is what do they do? Okay, and that's what I'd like to speak about. So with this in mind and this also being the end of the semester, I just like that kind of idyllic scene. What I'd like to talk about this morning is a brief theoretical motivation about language acquisition, which I wanted to bring to bear in what we were providing in our online classes. Secondly, you're going to hear me use the word input, input, input a lot because all of the research indicates that that's necessary. It's not an option. It has to be there. And then I want to talk a little bit about the vocabulary, grammar, and film project that we're using in our online classes, the delivery of input online, the method of student response, how they respond to the input, and then three types of activities, the grades, and then finally student feedback and at the end questions and comments. Now, one of the things I also like about this is that anytime you have a question, please don't feel like you have to wait to the end. I'm very much into conversation about this because this is a project in progress. So underlying assumptions of language acquisition. For starters, we all know that the primary reason that most students want to study language is because they want to be able to hear and understand it and have a conversation with it. I have had students over and over and over say that, that this is the reason because I want to go there or I want to hear or I want to be able to talk with somebody that I either work with or I'm in love with or I want to be in love with. But I have a connection with that community and I want to be able to use the language. And one of the things I have come to strongly believe about a lot of pedagogical materials is they're not designed to do that. They're designed to teach people how to read and write. And so I can teach somebody how to read and write Spanish in a semester. I can't teach somebody how to be able to have a conversation respond appropriately and interact with somebody that speaks Spanish in one semester. That's going to take much more time. And so what I wanted to do with this online course is set it up to be the beginning of what's going to be necessary so that they can hear, understand and express themselves in the language. The second principle is that in order to be able to communicate it requires the development of some type of underlying underlying mental grammatical representation of the language. And I'm going to make a number of comparisons between what adults do with language development and what infants do with language development. How many of you have been around an infant acquiring a first language? How many hours or better yet days or perhaps weeks or if not months are they receiving input meaningful input in the language before they produce their first word? I'm thinking perhaps a year. There's some evidence now that they're actually processing input in utero before they're even born. However, those of us that have been around small children they understand before they can produce their first language or produce their first words. And there are some studies going on right now actually many of you may be familiar with them where they're actually teaching children infants to sign before they actually produce. Which is to say that we now know that they're different languages stored in different ways in the brain. And so this is one fact that comes into bearing when we're talking about language development because it turns out it's the same thing with adults. That adults have to have time to process language and make these sound meaning or visual meaning connections before they ever ask to produce a word. And so how can we use online instruction to help facilitate the development of this mental grammatical system? Furthermore the food for this system is the gradual accrual of these sound meaning associations or symbol meaning associations or gesture meaning associations. There's now a growing body of research about people that are hearing impaired and what they're doing in terms of the signs and meanings. So they have to develop this. We talk about that in terms of the lexicon, in terms of the development of vocabulary and those of us that teach language. You know, of course, one of the focal components of teaching language is words and teaching words, but there's more and more data showing that you have to do the same thing with grammatical structures and grammatical morphemes, developing those same kinds of associations the same way you do it with lexical items. And then finally, again, what I was referring to earlier, adult L2 acquisition patterns very similarly in many ways parallels the development of L1 acquisition. And so how can we incorporate this into what we're developing online? Now, one of the interesting paradoxes to this is that adults already know that they're units. One of the questions that I started out with in graduate school and I wanted to learn about was how does a child ever realize there's such a thing as a word? Think about it. Because an adult A already knows where you can talk to an adult what a word is and then you can talk up to an adult about, well, there's a difference between a noun and a verb. And then you can, I mean, if you want to get there, you can talk about the difference between morphemes and phonemes and whatnot. But an infant consistently, infants consistently develop this ability to realize that there's such a thing as words and to put these units together. How do they do it? Adults already know that they're words and yet when they start speaking, their speech is very similar to what infants are doing. It may be actually a little bit more developed but they're still starting out with one word utterances or two word utterances and those two word utterances are not always subject verb depending upon the languages. And so it should be easier for adults. And yet I and others strongly believe that this input and the need to be processing input is a necessary part of language acquisition. So to that end, you've got this brain up here that has to, within which part of the information that's developing has to be how to develop these systems. So you've got input, which is a combination of vocabulary, grammatical morphemes, cultural information that bears meaning and to which the learners have to respond. I use Van Patten's definition for input as being meaning bearing language to which a learner has to respond. Otherwise it's noise. A subset and I can give you the bibliographic information if you want afterwards but a subset of that becomes what Van Patten refers to as intake. Many of you may be familiar with Stephen Crashing's work where he said that comprehensible input leads to acquisition. Bill has done a lot of work to elucidate that model and so you've got now input, a subset of which becomes intake which are these meaning structure associations that are incorporated into this developing mental grammar, mental system. So what we're trying to do is get these into there and without that in there output is meaningless. You can get people to produce things. I can teach somebody to sing Italian opera. It sounds beautiful and they may not have a clue as to what they're saying. In the absence of having these kinds of sign meaning associations that's what you've got. You've got people doing this production in the absence with any kind of meaningful substructure. So what we're using is Bill, Michael and Greg's Soliviento text in order to, we're using and again I have to give him credit. Bill allowed us access to the materials that he had developed with his graduate students at MSU to in conjunction with the materials that come with Soliviento to work with this input. And so all of our beginning first and second semester activities are a series of different types of input activities. And so those involve three different or two different types in each chapter vocabulary focus activities with a very, very circumspect grouping of vocabulary. It's not expansive and the presentation of vocabulary is always on meaning. What does it mean? The explanation especially for online, the explanations are in English. So that even for second semester your explanations are in English because you've got somebody sitting at home in front of their computer that and that needs to be as helpful as possible. It's the same reason that I also include instruction lines on tests in English because I don't want their confusion from I don't understand the instruction line to come forward as I can't do this activity. And so online explanations for vocabulary and grammar are always going to be in English focusing on the meaning of either lexical items or grammatical items. The type of input are both oral and visual and you get that both with the presentation and then you also get it back with the different types of activities that they're doing with them so that they're getting both types of activity or activities, both types of input and they're getting it repetitively but also with a focus on meaning. In conjunction with this and his colleagues have put together a film that's called Soliviento in this program. It's Soliviento I'll talk about in a little bit. It's similar to the it follows the model that he established with Distinos if you knew what Distinos. So you've got both video and oral input based on the structure about this film. So here you have, for example, again each lesson is going to be divided into three parts and in each part there are going to be activities back and forth focusing on either vocabulary or a grammatical structure. So you've got a picture. Now if I were doing this face to face and I use the same materials in our program for face to face that I do for online if I were doing the face to face I would I first use that visual but I don't have the English words in there and I'm going to describe the items in this particular presentation I'm going to describe them in Spanish and then I'm going to do a number of confirmation checks in Spanish and I'm also not going to have the words in Spanish initially but if you've got somebody sitting at home by themselves looking at this they need something to guide together and so I leave the words in there So what they're getting is an opportunity to produce phonetically but again it's I mean and when I say phonetically that's part of the repetition of the word but it's also focusing on what they mean that's going to start out with this then the follow-up activities are going to be based on the same items but different types of questions about them So for example if I were doing this face to face I would turn around and I'd say okay I would be doing this in Spanish but I would point at that and say that's a door yes or no and is it a door? yes or no and I would get confirmation checks by that the online input activities are doing those same type of activities but it's actually automatically scored by the system so that is providing the input that the person in a face to face and the confirmation check that a person face to face would be providing so that for example there might be three different pictures and they see the word el relo and they have to decide A, B, and C which is the right one okay or they can do it orally as well because a lot of it's multiple choice and a lot of it is and you can do the same thing actually online with a es una pantalla with a picture and they do see or no but the whole notion is confirmation checks and those and that and so that's initially what they're providing so that they're doing it meaningfully and they can either do it orally or they can do some of them are oral some of them are visual but it's the whole thing of making those associations and checking that they've made the right associations okay that's the same thing actually it's going to happen with the with the grammar the grammar is going to focus on one particular item so in this case it's donde está la biblioteca an introduction de estar where we have more than one copular verb in Spanish actually based on the research and the stages of acquisition of the copula that we already know about this is going to start out using assuming that let's make a distinction based on what they're doing with the first and second stages the first stage is that they don't use a copula at all the second stage is that you say it in all context the third is that they're actually using a start with the gerund so if you know that they're going to do that automatically the instruction here is focusing on the introduction of this copula based on that this is using the copula actually with place okay and again it's focusing on one and it focuses on one use and then there are follow-up input activities comprehension activity based on that and again it's a combination of visual and audio input based on this particular grammatical structure the film that I mentioned is called Soliviento it's focused on a young man Jaime Talabera who is out of Los Angeles who works for a company essentially wants to buy a large piece of property in Chile to build a hydroelectric dam and in order to do that if they're successful it's actually going to back up some waterworks and flood of vineyard that's called Soliviento which actually exists in the Vida and Maipo so you've got throughout the lessons at the end of every six less six lesson there's actually an opportunity to view or actually every fourth lesson there's an opportunity to view a segment of the film with previewing activities in order to activate background schema about the language or about the film itself both from a lexical and a grammatical standpoint so you've got Jaime Talabera then you've got Maria Sanchez who's an anthropologist in Santiago and then you've got Carlos Sanchez who operates the family vineyard one of the things I like about all of these activities is not only through the film and students get involved with the film they've got access to the film on their own they can see it as many times as they want the different episodes but also throughout the film and then also the activities they're the speakers that are providing input are from a number of different dialectical areas so they're getting you're looking at for example one particular grouping of lexical items but they're hearing it produced by a speaker from a young woman from Madrid somebody from Puerto Rico somebody else from Argentina so that they're getting that kind or sensitive developing a sensitivity to that dialectical variation on this of the but using the same lexical items here we've got the same thing Jaime actually is a heritage speaker of Spanish from California who is sent to Chile primarily because his boss realizes that he grew up near vineyards and because he speaks Spanish and so the boss kind of naively says well in that case you can go you're the perfect person to go to Chile and Jaime says in the first episode that doesn't qualify me to do this and so you're also developing an interesting notion of cultural sensitivity on the part of the character but then you've also got a number of different speech variations in Chile involved in this and there's a love story and and whatnot and develop family a 10 connections and whatnot so you've got this developing system and you're you're trying to get all of these different types of input in there the question that many people ask is what about the output and where are they going to do the output well the output that they're getting and that they're producing initially from the first half of my first of the first semester is basically confirmation checks they are producing phonetically as we saw with the lexical items but in terms of anything meaningful it's the comprehension checks do you understand this can you pick the right one are you making the right associations at about the midpoint of the semester we start doing what we call the adios and the adios are journal entries that they get a prompt question that's related to the topic of what they've been communicating about and so the first one could be something like in Spanish of course describe your describe a typical Monday what do you do on a typical Monday and one of the things I also tell them at the beginning of before assigning this is that you're going to be frustrated by doing this because you're all our young adult most native speakers of English or native speakers of another language you could write multi-causal treatises about anything in your L1 or L1 and L2 depending I've got I've got people studying Spanish with me that speak four languages and are from small countries in Africa and they get the same frustration you're going to find though that initially in Spanish you're going to find yourself writing single-causal sentences and it's going to sound kind of stilted and it's going to sound very elementary school don't worry about it and so I reassure them and I say here write to me about answer this question tell me something about yourself and use the structures the lexical items we've been using or the grammatical items to explain explain or to address this question I will respond to your journal entry according to content I'm not going to make it bleed red I'm not checking the grammar one the only way I'd respond to the grammars if it's unintelligible and then I'll ask a question but then I respond in Spanish to their journal entries I ask them some questions I make some comments about what they've written so for example and this is a second semester course where they were asked what do you like to do in your free time and this student writes a second semester and me tiempo libre me gusta de bojar I like drawing do I need to do the translation yes okay in my free time I like drawing I also like watching video games I also like going to the gym to do exercises in the gym I run on a treadmill thank you and I also and I also lift weights okay that I'm pretty impressed with that for a second semester Spanish learner whose first language is English okay so my response is bueno en fin de cuentas que le diis okay at the end of the day what would you say do you lead a sedentary life or an act of life and I say that because that was actually the initial question that was prompted of okay using these activities he never really got around to doing that but I'm not going to say bad student no I'm just going to say let's let's go back and think about the question shall we and I and then I say I'm me to okay I like to go to the gym regularly too I go to the gym three or four times a week there I walk or I run three miles a day to do exercise aerobic exercise afterwards I lift weights a little bit sometimes I go to an aerobics exercise class just to just to change things up a little and at times I run or but times running or walking bores me do you go to an aerobic exercise class from time to time and what I enter into with these students is actually a dialogue in writing now this they can control a little bit better than they could if it was just all all so I encourage them use the structures and use the grammar that we've been studying the way I score these are one or zero one if you have used the structures that we've been focusing on to express yourself in a meaningful way I am not interested in how well you can use a dictionary so if I see any kind of terminology that's not part of the then and that usually takes care of that that translator the online translator because it can come up with all sorts of structures that they've never been exposed to exactly exactly and I'm also telling them and I am expecting language coming out of a second first or second semester Spanish learner I don't care what your friend Maria and Guadamala can write about so if I get for example si hubiera podido ir al supermercado habría compra uh uh if I'm getting those kind of structures no and I tell them to get credit for this it has you have to have something where it's you're expressing yourself with the grammatical items and the lexical items that we've been studying what I know that our first or second Spanish learner can do and if it's out of that you're not going to get credit the interesting thing is and I don't know if you all come up with this as well and we're trying to work with this every once in a while you get a heritage speaker of Spanish is like this is going to be DCA it's not it what they they do what they get frustrated because part of this is also content they're a series of notas cultural and they're expected I mean that's they're responsible for that information as well it's very difficult to take somebody with a very advanced develop mental grammar and force them to write like they were in first grade and according to the way this rubric is set up if you turn into something it's something into me that is not really likely you're not going to get credit for it and that's what and so and that's in the syllabus that's not me being me to you and so that kind of takes care of it sort of and I tell students at the beginning we've also got a structure set up in ours that if you're a heritage speaker we've got other courses for you you can take this placement exam for free and if you pass this course you're going to get the credit from all of these so why are you sitting in this class so we're trying we're trying to do with it that way okay so that's the kind of way I'm that's that's the kind of response I'm going to give then here's another one this was again what kind of exercises do you do are you and these this was the prop here okay that for the same and it's and this the student was in the same class and she comes back with I say she because I know who it is I don't like exercising much I walk to the refrigerator for a beer and maybe something to snack on my son likes to play golf and I look to I like to too but I'm bad at it my boyfriend and I go scuba diving I don't know the words for scuba diving in Espanol and that's safe I'm okay with that no say como se dice I'm like okay sometimes I do stationary bike but because I like burning calories and I like sweating I'm but I'm not but I'm not an athlete I really love football South American football with a lot of beer and food we watch it on television especially the the world cup what I really like I'm like to two paragraphs I like go this is the second semester two paragraphs my favorite exercise is traveling my boyfriend and I on April are going to Guatemala I'm happy because I I've traveled to Guatemala in the past parenthetical I was mugged in the first two hours there but that's another long story we have friends that have a big house there in Antigua and they said come visit our house free the house is is being or would sell for 1.2 million dollars in the state but it hasn't sold yet et cetera I'm really impressed with that from a second and this particular student I also happen to know is a non-traditional student who was terrified and this was the second semester she had taken this class with me she told she sent me a long email message at the very beginning of first semester of I'm not a traditional student I'm terrified about this it's been years since I've taken a language and I'm very afraid this is the last these are the last two classes I have to take to finish my degree and I'm afraid I'm going to fail them and then I'm getting this out of her in her second semester and not only and so I respond to her similarly but then she also includes pictures of of her travels and so this is where I see them engaging meaningfully in this kind of output that they can produce and that they can they can control and they can work with and so from a very beginning that's what I'm looking for for output and meaningful output their language their oral language is going to be stilted at best you're going you're getting something meaningful here that they can that that that that they are using what that this mental system that they're developing in order to express themselves meaningfully again like I said most of these materials there's no way I could have done all of this by myself as an assistant professor and so I'm very thankful to to to to Bill and his graduate students to be able to develop these what I'm trying to add now are opportunities to for the student the student part and both orally and visually I'll show you what we're working on with that but not yet not right now however I do want I don't want you to get away they'll go away thinking well the students are just sitting there by themselves what they're getting in the way of input they're getting input from a number of different speakers oral input that they have to respond to so they're not just getting me but they're getting within the confirmation checks they're getting a young woman from Spain who's who's providing some of the input they're getting another young man from Mexico who's providing so they are getting input it's not like they're sitting there totally by themselves and not getting anything at all and so it's not just me and them but it's me and then these other people that have provided this this type of input they're not yet interacting with other people in class and there's and there's a reason why I want to get more of that but it's more from the structure of online instruction and the online community data than it is necessarily from the SLA data for the four types of scars okay we've got three different types of input activities Parthea, Parthebe and Tarea activities and these are all based on either a vocabulary focus or a grammatical focus and they're all actually self scored so they get automatic response now one of the things I realized when I started thinking about teaching online I actually have some friends that are at different universities around Texas and I started talking to them about how they how they interact with their classes and you may already know about this it was news to me they the people that are doing classes online frequently are interacting with them in a completely different way than if they're coming to a face-to-face class in a face-to-face class I've got a very structure thing we're going to do this on Monday and we're going to do this on Wednesday and we're going to do this on Friday and we're going to continue that for 15 weeks a lot of the students I learned a lot of the students that are doing the online classes are sitting down and doing long stretches and they're and they want to get into it which really gets and you may have one student that's following you that you've got it set up on a regular basis but you've got other students that may be three weeks ahead which that's one of the things I learned when I was trying to think about how do you do the synchronous versus asynchronous kind of work and I for to do online like this I'd rather make it right now asynchronous of you can do it and you can made up to it there'll be certain points where you have to provide some kind of feedback but trying to do that synchronous part right now for this type of class it's different if I were doing a content course and we were all going to get together and we all had parts of some type of research projects and we're all going to bring them together because we need to do something that's not what they have to do with this that's not the nature of this and so I'm trying to allow for that because I've also had students express frustration when they can't work ahead on their own space especially with this another thing that we have at least at UHD with first and second semester students is we may have students that had two years of high school Spanish this is helping refresh and and read connect all of the connections and the lexical connections in this underlying system so that they don't need that much time and so it allows for some kind of flexibility this way the other thing when I first set this course up and piloted it I had it very structured such that a lesson would come live on a Monday morning at midnight and it would stay live until Wednesday at noon another lesson would come live at Wednesday at midnight and stay live until Friday at noon etc so that they'd have 60 hours to do potentially each lesson 98% of what I did that first semester was deal with extensions and that kind of aspect of reconfiguring the course from a calendar standpoint had nothing to do with content and so after going to a couple of other national conferences and talking to other folks using similar materials it's all open on day one all the way to the end of the semester and I've told them that from day one you could do to the end of the semester in a week if you wouldn't advise it I don't think it's a good idea but you could theoretically however things are going to close on a consistent basis and they close Monday, Wednesday, Friday Monday, Wednesday, Friday and the dates are available to them from the very beginning and they're all due by noon and there will be no extensions so if you know something's coming up you can work ahead but don't ask for an extension because it's not happening because it's been open to you from the first day of the semester all the way through and the responses as far as accessing requesting extensions this past semester I had two and that was for a second semester course and so that seems to work out much better if there is an extenuating circumstance and every once in a while there is and there has to be some type of evidence to support it I can go into the system and recheck and re-extend it but that what I was getting beforehand was what I would call superfluous I didn't feel well this morning no that's not happening I'm sorry you didn't feel well this morning but this has been open for three weeks so so the other thing about these activities is that they get automatic response to them and so they're self-scored in the system they have three chances to do each input activity so what they do is they focus on the presentation that we saw at the beginning with the explanation in English work with that then they they have three opportunities to do these input activities the first time and all three will be scored the first time the feedback that they get are the number that they got right the second time is the number that they got right the third and final time is the number that they got right and all the right answers so what I'm encouraged them to do is if you didn't get 100% go back and look at the initial presentation and check yourself there and what the way this is the system is set up is and we the system will take your highest score so even if you start out with a C in terms of the number of things you got right you have an opportunity to go back and look and check and and and read do it and the final time you'll it will tell you what the responses are and initially I mean at the beginning of the semester there may be some questions about that and what I do is I respond to them and say keep an eye on this and don't forget to go back and look at this and this and that this is different from and actually they get more opportunities to do this online than they would if it was face to face and face to face you get one time to turn it in and here you've got some opportunity to work with it and every time they do it it's providing more input visual and oral so that I mean it's designed to develop this now with this in mind are you all sitting down there are no tests the way this is structured is that they're going to get so many points for each one of these activities and the final grade is the accrual of the relative number of points scored over the full amount possible across the semester now you're going to say well how do you know that they know what they're doing if you think about it all especially at a beginning language level everything that they're getting in Spanish is dependent upon and relative to what they've already had so that a lot of these input activities become definition activities of can you define this according to the other language that you or can you check so you have to be able to understand what you're doing in order to do this and so the test is in the system in the accrual of points it's a different notion of how to how to grade per se so instead of having a here can you produce this one no as you go across you're not if you're not paying attention to what things mean it's going to show long before you you would have a test anyway okay this is the reason why the lexical items or the collection of lexical items are very focused so that it's building on what it's what you've already had I remember once years ago when a student asked me Dr. Mandel is the final exam in first semester Spanish comprehensive and I said I would be hard pressed to give you a final exam that didn't involve stuff from the first lesson I'm not sure I could do that yes but the same the same notion is expressed through here that the whole thing is I mean it's building on itself okay then the diarios again they get two scores a one or zero one if you've addressed the question one if it's language if you've used the language to express yourself and I've learned something about you and one if it doesn't sound like somebody else did it even if it and I don't really grammatically there are things I can I'm expecting to see problem to be problematic and if they're not then I'm like wondering about that but so I'm it's not bleeding red it's not a grammar exercise and I'm not I'm not rewriting things all I'm doing is responding to the content of what they've written and the students really get into it again does the entry address the question is this language to be expected from a beginning beginning language student okay and I actually end up getting into a conversation with students because they'll get a new prompt every other week they're they're assigned every other week and so the first semester they do four of them after midterm the second semester they think I think they do seven total but then again as you saw I'm putting questions in there so many of the students are responding to the questions that I've asked before some of them send them as follow-ups even before the next journalists do and I respond and we get into a conversation that way so they're getting input meaningful input back and forth from they're learning something about me I'm learning something about them and we're developing a rapport that way it's interesting one of the things I also I remember years ago doing a family tree activity and so I'm describing my family tree and they're drawing it and suddenly I heard one student in English say to another student he's actually describing his real family yeah and they were surprised by this and to me it's important to be real and so I'm telling them about my family I'm telling them about my dog I'm telling them about what I do and they're and and which leads them to invest even more which is if you think about it languages about community it's about culture it's about connections actual five scenes so that's what we're doing by doing this I'm not creating some other world that's a fictitious world about what Senor Mandel does no I'm telling you this is what my family's like and my parents are divorced and my father died and this that and the other and what that does is it gives them the the the lexical items necessary to talk about their families and also to realize wait a minute I'm not the only one that my parents are divorced so that's important to me when it comes to input and language development and again so you get the total numbers of scores accrued now one of the questions that comes up with this and I've talked to a number of colleagues about this I don't know about y'all but yes I'm from Georgia I don't know about y'all but every once in a while the technical aspect of what I'm doing online doesn't work and I get a student who writes a message of oh my god is this going to it's just going to sacrifice my A because this didn't work on the online so what I do is I tell them at the beginning okay we know that there'll be technical glitches from time to time because that's just in the nature of the beast so at the end of the semester what I'm going to do is on each one of those parts that's online I'm going to add 10 points to each one of them with us and I mean percentages so that if you scored a 73 I'm going to count that as an 83 that alleviates this frustration and concern when something doesn't work technically because before I was doing that they would get angry and I'd get these furious this is gonna my great suffering from this and it's your fault no and what I do is I mean I proactively tell them sometimes there are glitches in the technical system no matter how perfect it is so don't worry about them let me know when it happens so that I can address it and look into it but also rest assured that at the end of the semester there will be 10 percentage points added to these scores so that to make up for that and for your inconvenience with a ceiling of 100 I'm not going to give somebody 110, 120 percent no that's not going to happen but that alleviates that concern and students are like oh okay fine and so Dr. Mandel this didn't work on this particular activity could you look not sure and it completely alleviates the anger that I was getting online so again plus 10 percent to adjust for technical glitches and I do that at the end of the semester yes yes yes because I just I haven't seen anything that's 100 percent working totally and I don't want that frustration to get in the way in the effect of the effectiveness of the course I don't want that to get in the way and it's been well received by students nobody's gotten 175 percent yet and if that I mean if that happens I'll come back and revisit that but right now that serves a purpose okay now student responses how have students responded to this course well this is the end of the semester comments that I got from one one semester I enjoyed this class I find the use of the movie to be a valuable tool in hearing the language and being able to see what the actors were doing while speaking in Spanish this made it easier to decipher words that might have been unfamiliar I'm looking forward to taking Spanish 14-02 like chaching okay good second Dr. Mandel was as engaged in this course as I thought he would be he had a look at the syllabus response to all the questions I had my other professor another course really want you to learn I didn't get that feeling from Dr. Mandel this is a very difficult course for someone who never spoke Spanish and his response was always look at the syllabus I know who did that and I'm I'm including this on purpose because he didn't look at the syllabus and he didn't actually engage this course until about the seventh week and so when the questions he was asking I was explaining but I was also saying go back and look at the syllabus one of the reasons I said that is that part of what they're supposed to do then the first three days of course of class and their step by step instructions online is look at the syllabus do this and this and this in order to be able to engage online activities and also we use Blackboard as our as our platform and our activities are in connect if they don't do this it doesn't sink the two things together and none of the work that they do will show up in their Blackboard grades I can't do that and so he obsessed on that and stopped on that and I'm really sorry about that but I'm also going to be real and I'm not going to erase that I mean it happened it happens I'll own it okay third one awesome instructor made up for the second one fourth one I really enjoyed this class I learned a lot I look forward to taking you next semester in 1402 this is my first time taking professor this time taking professor Mandela and I must say I really enjoyed taking his online Spanish class he made it really interesting and made learning Spanish a little easier I'll be I'll be taking this course spring great professor I really enjoyed taking this course I'm really pleased with those I don't know about I mean and so this tells me this that this is working for these students and we're interfacing and this is give and so I'm pleased with this kind of feedback being extra thoughts one of the things I've learned is the importance of immediate feedback with face-to-face classes I tell students send me an email message and you'll get a response within 36 hours email I don't know about y'all but email to me is not a telephone I also tell students that if you've got a question five minutes before class begins or even a half an hour before class begins bring it to class because if you've got it so do other people and we need to talk about it in a group but if you send me a message five minutes before class I'm probably not going to see it online is different online I feel a need that I will respond to those those email messages within 12 hours if not faster within 12 because if you think about it they're sitting at home in front of the computer wherever and I don't want them to feel like they're there by themselves and so I actually screwed up that was the second semester we were doing this I got behind and those evaluations that I showed you just before got real because students felt like he's not here we don't know who we're talking and we're in this room by ourselves and so that's important to me okay I also have I use specific forms of address when I'm interacting with students in these email messages when I'm thinking about the research that's been done about incidental learning that they're not even focused on so I start out with things like Estimado Juan or Estimado Elena and I whatever they respond to and they also learned something about Spanish e-communication etiquette this way but I'm always going to respond this way and then the first for sentence is always gracias por tu mensaje and then I'll respond depending on the level I make respond continue responding in Spanish or I'll respond in English but I'm always going to start out with Estimado or Estimada gracias por tu mensaje they learned that and they also look what they're also picking up they're picking up things like punctuation okay this isn't the focus of the lesson but they're getting it okay and then I sign it cordialmente un saludo cordial or what have you and they start by the end of the semester that's the way they are addressing me in email messages and I'm like cool and then what we're working on now as I mentioned before is the addition of oral feedback through voice thread thanks to George de de Beau okay so what we're what we're working on structuring is visual prompt audio prompt and studio audio prompt so we've got something like this there will be one of these per lesson okay and it's I'll edit that out at your term answer the question you you hear about Anastasia's family and then ask another for a classmate to answer you'll receive one point for an accurate answer and one point for oh wealth one pardon me well formed appropriate question notice again that the instruction lines are in English but the activity is going to be in Spanish okay and you'll forgive me for this because I was doing this on the fly and it's a kind of stilted but I'm still getting used to the idea of being videoed I'm stilted that way but again if you don't speak Spanish what I'm basically saying is okay now it's your turn look at this look at this family tree and ask answer the question I'm asking and then ask leave a question for somebody else and so the question was what is the relationship between Fausto and Anastasia and they can come back with Fausto is the grandfather of Anastasia or Anastasia is the granddaughter of Fausto doesn't matter as long as it makes sense and then they'll leave another question one of the and so you'll end up with a string of of these which will be scored essentially that you did it and that your question that your answer is right and that your question is right I'm not looking for perfect phonology or or anything like that that the structuring it this way actually encourages students to do it faster even if there's a longer deadline because the number of potential questions gets smaller and smaller and smaller as you go down the list because you can't repeat the question and so you you'll get students like immediately they're on that like got to get on there because okay this it's because it's easier at the beginning than it is later on so they won't I will jump in but they also they won't get that because they're going to be a number of the point to the the the scoring is that you asked answered the question accurately and that you asked a question so you've got a possibility of zero one or two and so I'm going to score that and then step in and periodically I'm going to look through them you can't repeat the question so you have to go back and find out which questions which relations have already been asked so I know which one I can because you're not going to get points for it if you go back to the vocabulary presentation this is the family that's used to to initially talk about terminology about family and so it goes back to it's tying back into the text they can't do this directly with a text open because there are other relationships involved here but I mean these are people that they're getting to know and then it starts out with a nuclear family and it grows and then there's also their pets involved and whatnot you know but um but you know so this is what we're working on in order to get some moral but again there'll be one of these per per lesson so I think they're like six for first semester and six for second semester and I'm actually working with a couple of my colleagues to do this so it's not just one person doing it and again this is the idea of dialectical differences because my Spanish is not the same as my colleagues from El Salvador or from Spain okay many thanks I've got some references and thank you for your time and if there are questions I'm happy to answer them so thank you