Designing Foreign Language Instruction Delivered at a Distance: Learner Considerations

摘要

Distance education has been developing rapidly in the past decade.According to "the Tenth Five Year Plan" made by China's Ministry of Education (MOE) (2002), foreign language teaching/ education in China, in the five years to come, would take on several developmental trends, one of which is distance education with the help of multi-media and network technology. In this new coutext, distance education professionals would take on multiple roles, one of which is the instructional designer (Thach, Murphy & Korhonen, 1994). In order to ensure that the optimal learning outcomes take place, distance education instructors need to understand and apply appropriate instructional design elements in their distance teaching practice (Zheng & Smaldino, 2003). The author argues that foreign language teachers need to understand and apply this important instructional design element, learner considerations, when they teach at a distance.This article will review recent literature pertaining to how instructional design incorporating learner considerations into the design process and offer some suggestions that may help to direct instructors' efforts in meeting challenges when teaching at a distance. Specifically, the instructors who teach foreign languages at a distance need to consider general learner characteristics such as attitude or interest,prior skins, knowledge, experience, and learning styles, as well as demographic and situational characteristics of distance learners such as age, gender, ethnic background, disability, location, and life roles. In addition, they need to take into account three types of interaction which are learner-content interaction, learner-instructor interaction and leamer-learner interaction and know how faculty support distance learners and meet their needs and how faculty help students get comfortable with distance learning.