NEW YORK, NY and MADISON, WI – (July 6, 2006) – Horizon Wimba announced today that the University of Wisconsin (UW) system has reached an agreement to use Wimba Voice Tools to help teach world languages to students at nine UW universities. Now, hundreds of students learning Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian in UW’s Collaborative Language Program will be able to practice listening to and speaking these languages as part of their online distance programs.
“Students need more situations in which to SPEAK the target language in order to achieve appropriate levels of oral proficiency as defined by ACTFL proficiency guidelines,” said Lauren Rosen of the University of Wisconsin’s Collaborative Language Program. “Wimba Voice Tools will bring additional native speaker speech into student experiences through asynchronous voice-based discussion tools and language acquisition activities to help engage students in meaningful small group oral interactions outside the classroom.”
Besides fostering listening and speaking practice, Wimba Voice Boards and Wimba Voice Direct will provide additional opportunities for students to build learning communities across campuses. Voice Direct – a tool for synchronous online conversation and chat – will also provide a format for online office hours in which instructors can speak live online with individual students on issues of pronunciation and other aspects of language learning that are often too complex to explain via email.
Additionally via Voice Boards, students at UW’s smaller campuses, especially those campuses without a local instructor as a supporting presence, will now have greater access to additional native speaker input for a variety of voices in organized discussions in their target languages. Students will be able to interact with a variety of native speakers, thereby better preparing them to understand target language use and diverse cultures in real life situations.
Further, starting in the fall, UW students will be able to listen to their classmates’ and instructors’ voice postings on their iPods, thanks to Wimba’s iPodÒ compatibility.
Finally, Wimba Voice Tools will help with language assessment. To date, there have been no practical means for UW’s language instructors to regularly assess their students’ oral proficiency. But now, Rosen believes that Wimba’s Oral Assessment Builder tool will be ideal for creating language lab-type activities available over the internet that will allow instructors to regularly assess their students’ work and provide feedback that students can access from their home computers. These online practice sessions will be essential for UW’s distance courses, as they’ll enable instructors to provide feedback to students in different locations that will inevitably help break down the distance walls.