Using Active Filters to Improve Foreign Language Instruction

By Virginia M. Fichera, Doug Lea, and Joseph Grieco, Languages Across the Curriculum Project, State University of New York at Oswego, Oswego, NY, 13126

Background

The use of existing content-oriented foreign-language web sites as learning resources is an attractive way to help teach foreign languages and cultures while simultaneously providing information to students surrounding the domain at hand. For example, it is far superior to direct students to German web sites discussing environmental policies than for American instructors to prepare their own materials. There are, however, disadvantages: Because these sites are very real, often constantly updated, and not under instructor control, they make no accommodation to students who are reading them in part to become more familiar with a given language or culture. We identified three problems:

• The use of rare foreign terms, difficult grammatical constructions and the like that can make pages impossible to understand without a bit of translation or annotation.
• The lack of guidance about exactly why a certain URL was assigned to be visited.
• The lack of embedded links that help students traverse through web pages that are related for the purposes of their assignments

One way to deal with these problems is to locally copy foreign pages and customize them by hand. However, this can run against copyright conventions, and presents a never-ending obligation to update local versions when the originals change.

Active Filters

There are several ways to implement such a tool. Our current version is based on Meta-HTML, a web server that interprets a lisp-like programming language embedded within specially written web pages. Another in-progress version uses Java Servlets to the same effect. (These implementations are freely available from the authors.) Across implementations, the basic strategy is as follows:

• Users must start out from a specially crafted web page. This page encodes links as special server directives. However, all pages presented from that point on during a session are automatically converted to use encoded links. Because all processing is performed by the proxy HTTP server, the resulting pages can be viewed in any browser.

• Each link within a viewed HTML page is encoded as a directive to the local server to fetch that page itself, to encode its links, and to analyze it for content before sending it to to the client browser. Although the content could be analyzed in just about any fashion, we currently support only two techniques, which have sufficed for our purposes:
  • Site-specific, just based on the URL itself.
  • Term-specific, triggered by the presence of predefined keywords found anywhere in the document..

• All available assistance for the page is provided via links to local web pages; often just small ones providing a few annotations, a concise term definition, or a suggestion about where to go next. These links are issued separately from the main content of the page, in either of two ways:
  • As a list of labeled links appended to the bottom of the original page.
  • As a Java-based popup menu.
  We found it necessary to use such unobtrusive methods. Inserting links or menus into the foreign pages themselves nearly always disrupts the intended formatting of the original document.

• The control information (URLs, keywords and associated links) are maintained in ordinary local files that can be edited by instructors whenever they write new annotations. To simplify this process further, we are adding an HTML form-based utility for use by instructors.

Conclusions

Active filter tools offer new prospects for interactions both between the student and the Web resource and between the student and the instructor, and help in the transformation of the role of the teacher ``from sage on the stage to guide on the side''. Instructors virtually accompany students to the foreign site, providing students with assistance tailored to the filtered site. While we have found active filters to be a necessity for assisting students with Web research involving foreign languages, their uses are obviously extendible to any educational Web site, providing instructor-tailored materials which provide assistance surrounding another site without altering or copying it.