Shortly after the launch of Arrivals in English in April 2024, project leader Katie Stokes conducted a webinar with librarians across Australia and New Zealand. The webinar covers the goals and pedagogical underpinning of Arrivals in English, presents a program overview, and outlines how the developers addressed issues around accessibility and devices. If you are considering adopting the program for your institution, this video will tell you everything you need to know.
The final stage of the webinar saw some thought-provoking questions from participants. Here are five of them.
Question: What level of English and what tech skills does the program require?
Answer: As with all teaching materials, the first step in designing Arrivals in English was to define our assumptions. We assumed that users would be familiar with the roman alphabet and that their level of English would be CEFR Pre-A1 to A1 (or ASCF Level 1). Learners should also have, as a minimum, very basic computer skills: confidence in operating keyboard and mouse / tap functions.
For learners whose base level of English might not meet our assumed level, we created HELP videos as an additional support function for more complex tasks (e.g. building a short conversation).These are located alongside the written instructions. Interestingly, we have observed that learners who have a lower digital literacy gain confidence from the HELP videos and become happy to experiment with the navigation and task types, and generally to try things out themselves. This spirit of enquiry transfers well to the main task of language learning.
Question: Why don’t you include bilingual support?
Answer: Another good point, which we thought about carefully. The three primary issues are:
a) Which languages? Our research showed that the dominant language of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is constantly changing, depending on what is going on in the world. So, while we can be reasonably confident of the dominant support languages this year, it’s impossible to know how this will change next year or the year after.
b) So why not auto-translate? A significant number of refugees speak minority languages. The quality of automatic translation, particularly for minority languages, is variable and we did not want to risk sacrificing accuracy and quality.
c) But most importantly, in the real-life situations we are preparing learners for translation on the part of the interlocutor will not be an option. One of the objectives of the program is to simulate those situations, albeit in a very controlled way, in order to help learners build their confidence.
Having said that, we recognise that at this level, translation is sometimes essential. The solution, we think, is to empower users to use tools like Google Translate. This is an absolutely fundamental skill and it’s addressed in the Learning section of Unit 1. There are reminders of this, with links scattered through the program.
Question: I think the program needs even more vocabulary. Do you agree?
Answer: It’s another interesting point which we considered carefully. Let’s look at two units with lots of potential vocabulary: Food shopping and Talking to a doctor. There is effectively an unlimited amount of vocab in these lexical fields, so we concluded that a reasonable objective would be to provide learners with enough to feel confident, without overwhelming them, and to enable them to find more esoteric words they may need.
a) Food shopping. The key objective is to enable users to ask for things. (‘Excuse me, do you have ___?’) Thereafter, we want to empower them to use tools such as Translate to substitute the particular item they want to buy (marmalade, blueberries, bath plugs…). In terms of the vocab we do teach, as well as food items in the Practice zone, we additionally cover, in the Vocab zone, household items (batteries, soap, toilet paper etc) as well as containers (carton, box, bag). So, given that we don’t want to overwhelm the learners, the content creators felt that we are giving them about as much as we can reasonably expect them to take in a single unit of study. Again, we are trying to strike a balance.
b) Talking to a doctor. It’s not possible in a program like this to enable learners at this level to talk to a doctor in English about any complex medical matter. What we can do is help them feel confident and comfortable in talking to a doctor about simple matters such as aches and pains, allergies and so on, but that’s the limit of what this unit can aim to achieve. The unit covers parts of the body in some detail (external parts, anyway) as well as medical appliances (crutches, wheelchair, bandage) and medicine (paracetamol, ibuprofen, etc). The key functional language includes: ‘My ___ hurts’, ‘I need ___’, ‘I’m allergic to ___.’ Again they can use Translate or equivalent to insert the word they need, or in some cases can use other strategies, like pointing.
Question: Could the tutor in these classes use “Arrivals in English” within their classes, or promote them to students for further use within the library when they sign in on library PCs?
Answer: Yes, like the other Clarity programs, Arrivals in English will be very useful in class, whether for teacher presentations, pairwork, group work or individual study as a change of focus in a lesson. And of course it’s equally useful for homework or self study more generally. (I should add that in the library context, the licence covers classes run by the library, but not by third party institutions.)
Question: Does the program give feedback?
Answer: Feedback is an essential part of the learning process, and Arrivals in English provides learner-specific feedback in the following areas:
a) Exercises are graded, so that learners know which items they got right and wrong.
b) Individual exercises have feedback where the target language is exemplified in related but different contexts.
c) The Clarity Recorder generates an audio from the learner’s voice which can be compared with the model within the same screen.
d) The Progress panels give detailed stats to learners on their activity and progress.
And finally, it’s important to note that above all, Arrivals in English is a responsive community project. As developers and publishers, we love to get feedback from real learners, teachers and administrators to better shape the program for the future. If you’d like to try Arrivals in English, you can here. If you’d like to chat about the program or share some feedback, we’d love to hear from you here: info@clarityenglish.com
