Abstract:

This paper examines the effectiveness of the Alelo (TLT) package for teaching Tactical French for the Sahel Africa compared with the traditional modality of classroom language teaching with an instructor at the college level. The role of the educator in learning is a topic of debate between followers of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Piaget (1980) believed that people learn by being immersed in an environment and that knowledge is accumulated from “a structuring activity on the part of the subject.” Piaget believes that learners are individualistic in their learning process and not dependent on a teacher or tutor. On the contrary, Vygotsky believes that the tutor’s role “is central to the learning process (Levy, 1998).

In a modern sense, Piaget’s view on individual learning is represented by a computer program from Alelo company. This computer program uses voice recognition software and simulated scenarios to provide feedback to a user attempting to learn a new language. The Vygotskian view is represented by a traditional classroom environment. The Alelo TLT System for the French language followed the previous computer-based systems produced by Alelo as a blend of human-computer interaction technology and task-based language techniques. The learner engages by clicking the microphone icon and speaking into the headset microphone.

To compare the effectiveness of virtual environment training provided by Alelo to that of a traditional classroom, a teacher is needed to properly teach the material to the class. Using the Alelo software, the teacher created 110 questions. From these questions, the teacher created two 20-question exams with the same format and the same level of difficulty. In addition to creating the exams, the teacher teaches the class for the group of subjects learning Sub-Saharan French in a traditional classroom environment with the same material the Alelo virtual environments software covers, with the same time restrictions as the students using the Alelo software, ten hours of instruction over three days. After the experiment is complete, the teacher grades each subject’s pre-test and post-test and reports the grades for analysis. The study includes two groups with n = 31 for the Alelo group and n = 33 for the classical group to compare exam results through a test of hypothesis.

Analysis of these scores consists of three parts: testing if either method effectively improved the subjects’ French language proficiency, testing if one class type performed better than the other, and testing if the improvement in scores is correlated to any experimental factors (i.e. gender, subject number, and days to complete testing). With a p-value of 0.309, no significant difference was found between the performance of the two test groups. This paper uses a pre-test and post-test regimen on a competitive basis with two approximately equal samples totaling 64 subjects. This quantitative comparative study reaches conclusions at the 95% confidence level using rigorous statistical methods.

Therefore, the hypothesis that the two educational methods were equal cannot be statistically rejected. The result of this experiment is there is no significant difference between the effect the Alelo training had on the subjects’ performance and the effect the classroom training had on the subjects’ performance. However, both training types effectively improved the subjects’ proficiency in French.

Keywords:

Computer Assisted Language Learning, Alelo, Educational Technology, E-learning, Virtual Worlds