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Discussion and Summary
Through these two experiments, we figure out the relation between the
language that the learners use and the learning activities/acquirement of
knowledge as follows.
From case 1 we find that translation of non-mother tongue technical terms
contained in the class contents into their mother tongue is useful for acquisition
of knowledge Usually, however, non-mother tongue and mother tongue
substitution is achieved using dictionaries. Hence, as a precondition for this
translation to work, learners should have sufficient knowledge about technical
terms in the mother tongue as a context-reduced language.
From case 2 we think that there are two important aspects in developing
collaboration study between students having different mother tongues: (1)
training common language (English) and (2) training general communication
skill so that students can express their own opinion.In the context of PBL
the main focus is on the second point, i.e. our educational goal is to enhance
communication skills. For this purpose the use of mother tongues is more
appropriate than obliging students to study common language. This is proven
by our experiments: dramatic increase of the amount of conversation, appearing
a leader in the group, and effective use of support tools.
To summarize, to provide collaborative education smoothly in multilingual
environment it is desirable to support mother tongues for enhancing both
learning activities and acquirement of knowledge. Although this is too difficult
to achieve in the usual face-to-face environment, we demonstrated that we can
support the use of mother tongues in multilingual environment by introducing
ICT. It was proven to be one of useful ways to connect an online dictionary
or an online translator with class contents and a chat tool. However, such
tools have performance boundary, especially if students’ mother tongues lack
required technical terms. In that case, to support those students, a little more
extra effort is required: one possibility is to neoterize these technical terms.
However, such new technical terms tend to get widely spread quite rapidly
in accordance with the permeation of education. In future, we will be able
to automatically enrich the online dictionary/translator function using the
feedback of observing new phrases or knowledge through, say, web crawling.
Acknowledgement
We are thankful to the Center for e-Learning Research and Application
(Nagaoka University of Technology) and Hideyuki Kanematsu (Suzuka
National College of Technology) for providing many valuable data. We also
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