David R. Coughanour and Professor Chuck Bush, Linguistics
When I proposed to undertake this project it was to provide a computer-aided language instruction tutorial for Hebrew 101 students. I was taking Hebrew 101 at the time that the opportunity to apply for an ORCA award came along and I remembered my Hebrew 101 instructor commenting that less than half of those who enroll in the class are able to make it to the end. Most of those who drop out do so after they encounter the first exam. My proposal was to develop a Hypercard-based computer program that would make that first exam more manageable and then to hopefully decrease the rate at which students drop out of Hebrew.
I realize that a project that would actually report whether or not a computer-aided learning program accomplished this goal is the stuff of a master’s thesis or even a doctoral dissertation, but I thought that if I moved quickly enough on the project that I could at least get some feedback from students who used the program as to the success of my goals. I had very little time in which to do this since no Hebrew 101 classes are offered in the spring or summer so there would be no Hebrew 101 students around to test the program on unless I got something ready during the winter semester. I had to begin in January and try to get a usable program up and running before the beginning of April. An ambitious goal for computer program development.
Of course such an ambitious goal would require that I prioritize the several components that I had envisioned for my finished program. If I could get the most helpful component operable first then my efforts might be worthwhile to me and to the Hebrew 101 students I hoped to help. The components that I hoped to include in my finished project were a vocabulary flash-card type exercise, a verb conjugation exercise, and a sentence translation exercise that focused mainly on the Hebrew idioms and constructions that differ the most from English (the trouble spots in translation).
The component that my mentor and my class instructor both said was the most important was the vocabulary exercise. If you don’t know the words of a language then you don’t know the language. I set out to create an exercise that would help both students that were struggling and students that only needed to brush up a little. Since I was now in Hebrew 102 when I began the work on this project I had in my very recent memory an understanding of what kinds of things a person struggles with when trying to become very acquainted with Hebrew words. I was a good person to test my own program on even though I was also the programmer.
As my vocabulary exercise began to take shape I discovered that it was best if the program offered the opportunity to learn from English to Hebrew and also from Hebrew to English. This means that the program presents an English word and challenges the student to come up with the Hebrew word for it or, when the student chooses, the program presents a Hebrew word and challenges the student to come up with the English translation for it. I also discovered that, on the words that I was struggling with, it was helpful if the program offered me several choices to choose from. But then, when I got more familiar with the words, I needed to come up with the correct translation out of my own memory without having the choice somewhere on the page.
To accommodate these varying states of familiarity with the words, I made the program so that the student could choose, by simply pressing a button, between having choices on the screen and having no choices on the screen. And in either case, the program will tell the student the correct translation.
Once I got enough of the vocabulary into the program to prepare students for the first Hebrew 101 exam I had to choose what component to work on next. This is where my project took an unexpected turn. I had been getting input from Dr. Pack, the head of the Hebrew section of the Department of Ancient and Near Eastern Languages, that he had been wanting to develop a comprehensive tutorial for both Hebrew 101 and 102. He hoped that my project might be the foundation for the much larger project he had planned. My mentor agreed that this is probably what should happen with my project since BYU lacks a Hebrew tutorial, one of the few modern languages that BYU doesn’t have a computer-aided tutorial for. So, I continued building the vocabulary tutorial to include all the vocabulary for both 101 and 102. This turned out to be a monumental task when compared to the amount of work I had originally planned to do.
My original plan was to include about 75 vocabulary words. When I got done with the vocabulary for both 101 and 102, the number of words had grown to over 1200. I didn’t have much time at that point to do everything I had proposed to do but I did get the verb conjugation tutorial done up to the point that I had originally planned.
The ultimate results of my project are therefore not yet known, but I did get some feedback from students who used the vocabulary tutorial. They told me that it definitely helped them prepare for the exams. And the Hebrew 101 instructor asked her students to use the program, particularly those that had been struggling. Based on these student’s later test scores she believed that the program gave them the boost that they needed. Not only did they not drop out of the class but they came out of the class with pretty good grades. During the winter semester using the tutorial was optional but now the department is talking about making it mandatory for students to spend a certain amount of time on it.