Online Courses of Portuguese as a Second Language

Closing the Gap with Blended Learning in Mainstream Education

Carla Barros Lourenço

and Ana Sousa Martins

2,3

Directorate-General for Education, Ministry of Education and Science, Av. 24 de Julho, 1399-025, Lisboa, Portugal

Ciberescola da Língua Portuguesa Association, Rua Coelho da Rocha, nº. 81A - 1º. Dto, 1335- 073, Lisboa, Portugal

FCSH-CLUNL, Av. de Berna 26-C / 1069-061, Lisboa, Portugal

Keywords: Online Learning Courses, Videoconferencing Classes, Autonomous Learning, Mainstream Education,

Institutional Engagement.

Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to describe an on-going educational project of online courses of Portuguese as

a second language (PL2) for immigrant students attending primary and secondary schools run in Portugal

through a blended learning environment as an effective way to support mainstream education. Focus will be

given to the collaborative work developed between institutional partners, i.e., General Directorate for

Education, schools’ headmasters and Ciberescola Association, in order to adequate the courses to

mainstream education and to continually iron out daily practical problems. The authors will also explain the

functioning of the courses tools and outline the option in matching two different services - Ciberescola

platform and FM EA-TEL- as a way to tackle the educational handicap immigrant students face when they

arrive to the hosting country. Particular attention will be given to describe the functioning of the materials

created from scratch for this project, stressing some features shared with OER, namely (i) free use by

learners and reuse by teachers; (ii) integration of all types of digital media. Eventually, an account of the

current impact of the project will also be unfolded.

1 INTRODUCTION

The project Ciberescola Online Courses of

Portuguese as a Second Language (PL2) is being

implemented with the close collaboration of the

General Directorate for Education (Direção-Geral da

Educação-DGE) of the Ministry of Education and

Science (www.dge.mec.pt), the Ciberescola

Association (www.ciberescola.com) and the

headmasters of the schools involved. Ciberescola

platform specialized in the Portuguese language

learning by immigrant students has became the

starting point of the creation of a blended learning

environment in mainstream education in several

schools from different regions of Portugal, as well as

a platform for a free use of educational resources

for both students and teachers.

This paper will present the steps taken to adapt the

Ciberescola platform to the specific needs of migrant

students who are attending the Portuguese national

system, namely by supplying specific PL2 classes

and resources to students from the 2

grade school

year to the 12

school year and to the teachers from

these schools who are working with these target

groups.

This paper will also present the process of building a

database of PL2 learning resources, displaying full

course materials, open textbooks, interactive tests,

lesson plans, targeting the specific needs of

immigrant students who are attending the courses as

well as their respective teachers.

Furthermore, within this paper we aim to identify the

main difficulties found during the implementation of

the project and the means of overcoming them in

every specific school context - grounded in a very

close relationship between institutional partners.

Methodology adopted and the impact of this project

in schools are also unfolded in this paper.

The online option of this project had an immediate

motivation, i.e. having the possibility to reach as

many students and teachers as possible scattered all

over the country. Even in schools which have

already been implementing a PL2 programme as a

consequence of receiving a high rate of immigrants

every year, organizational problems and particular

situations can occur that prevent a small number of

their students from being suitably assisted in their

Portuguese language learning. Therefore, the

General Directorate for Education accepted the

invitation addressed by Ciberescola Association in

380

Barros Lourenço C. and Sousa Martins A..

Online Courses of Portuguese as a Second Language - Closing the Gap with Blended Learning in Mainstream Education.

DOI: 10.5220/0005453303800385

In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2015), pages 380-385

ISBN: 978-989-758-107-6

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

order to create blended-learning courses that could

fill this gap in mainstream education. However, due

to the organizational complexity involved in the

adjustment of these courses to the primary and

secondary education, the implementation of these

courses is running as a pilot project in some public

schools from different parts of Portugal.

Ciberescola online materials, organized in several

levelled courses to be used by all students and

teachers associated with the project was the first step

towards the shortage of these particular kind of

resources. But it soon became clear that the simple

provision of a set of resources, no matter how large

and diverse databases were, fell short of the

expectations. On one hand the big challenge relied

on how to make these materials actually used by

teachers in their classes and, on the other hand, how

to control and regulate the adequacy of these

resources to the user´s needs.

Therefore, Ciberescola staff, composed of teachers

and researchers post-graduated in PL2, not only

produces continually new resource items but also

give real-time online classes to children throughout

the school year and also prepares to run professional

training courses to teachers combining Ciberescola

platform with FM EA-TEL service. This enables the

teachers of Ciberescola to address in the same

session/class, at the same time, on a regular basis,

students/teachers from different parts of the country

in relatively small groups previously scheduled.

While working with restrictive access to users, in the

sense that students and teachers are given a login,

the platform is at the disposal of the schools

involved in this project – with the real-time online

classes component (conditioned by Ciberescola

human resources available for each school year).

The Ciberescola platform, only by itself, is also

available for teachers and students from all schools

after receiving a login. Therefore, one can say that

the project fits well the aim of OER as it provides

texts, pictures, sound files and video streaming

openly licensed.

2 CIBERESCOLA ONLINE

COURSES OF PL2

2.1 Identifying Students´and

Teachers´Needs

In the scope of mainstream education, schools have

to address unique challenges whenever they need to

find the best paths to make all of their students

achieve the national learning outcomes. In fact, the

Portuguese educational system is inclusive, so that

the access to Education of all the students, namely

the migrants, the foreigners and members of ethnic

and racial minorities, is based on a set of educational

policies that aim not only their integration in the

school community but also their educational success.

For this purpose, a PL2 curriculum subject was

created, according to Common European

Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

However, to make the national policies effective, the

process of choosing suitable paths towards school

success demands a closer look at students´ learning

needs in order to ensure the implementation of

effective educational measures and strategies. The

application of educational policies requests therefore

an active role of schools and of their teachers

regarding the shaping of learning activities to tackle

the students´ needs.

The project concerned to answer the learning needs

of students newly arrived in the Portuguese

educational system non-native speakers of

Portuguese and also of schools addressing the

challenge of offering effective measures to promote

their school success.

On one hand, immigrant students face several

obstacles due to the insufficient proficiency in

Portuguese, not only concerning Portuguese as an

object of study, but also Portuguese for academic

purposes used in other curricular subjects. These

students are for that reason at a disadvantage

compared to their peers.

On the other hand, primary and secondary schools

have been trying to implement specific measures

regarding the development of the Portuguese

language. Nevertheless, teachers sometimes have

difficulties offering these specialized and systematic

teaching activities on PL2 for several reasons,

namely the lack of a specialized qualification in

PL2, which may imply that these students may not

benefit from the educational measures defined for

them.

In this context, it became imperative to think about

how to make it possible for these students to have

access to specialized PL2 classes no matter where

they were or where they came from.

2.2 Starting up the Project Through

Institutional Partnership

To implement this project, special attention was

given to institutional collaboration. In fact, the

invitation Ciberescola Association addressed to the

DGE led to a close relationship between these two

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institutions aimed at making the implementation of

the project at mainstream education possible. In

what concerns DGE, it was firstly necessary to

choose the schools to be involved in the project as

institutional partners. The project development

relied on the necessity to adapt the Ciberescola

learning platform to the students learning process

and to the schools´ needs. It was also necessary to

choose the schools to be involved in the project as

institutional partners. For this purpose, DGE invited

two schools from different regions of Portugal to

join the project. The two schools which were chosen

had not been able to offer specialized teaching

activities on PL2 to all immigrant students and their

headmasters had a strong sense of leadership. The

Internet speed and the number of devices/computers

available for students were also taken into account

when choosing the schools.

The strategy followed aimed at the healthy growth

of the project and its increasing implementation was

boosted by the important role given to each

stakeholder, so that they would feel free to nurture

and to support the project. Above all, it was made

possible for each institutional partner to advocate the

project, to treat it as its own and to become a co-

inventor of its implementation. In this joint process

of project building, supported by a close interaction

between institutions, a higher level of commitment

from each stakeholder and consequently a more

effective impact of the project in each context were

achieved.

2.3 Ciberescola Website:

From a Self Study Set of Materials

to a Teaching Platform

Initially, in 2009, the main aim of the core-project

was to offer a wide array of interactive exercises,

where a server automatically grades the answers and

stores the results of the exercises both for

Portuguese as 1st language and Portuguese as

second language. All activities were (and still are)

student-centred, mainly. The student can pick one

exercise by himself, do it and check out scores and

correct answers.

The website was set in a simple HTML solution with

a rich text option: the input has specific codes for the

question´s spaces, which means that the question

itself contains the answer within it. These codes are

entered in a back office which could be a really

handcrafted procedure, but it also broadens the

chances of matching different local solutions - and

improvise a bit.

Although the models are simple, the HTML

environment allows the Ciberescola teachers to

publish video, audio, images, etc. in their exercises,

which means that with a bit of creativity, most types

of exercises can be modelled in the engine. The

score obtained for each exercise is stored in a

database, so that the student can see his/her scores

for all questions of the given level.

All exercises, texts and audios, apart from authentic

input selected, are originally produced by the team

of Ciberescola teachers and displayed under a

Creative Commons Licence.

By that time the main aim had therefore become

only one: to reduce the severe shortage of online

Portuguese learning resources, systematically

displayed, built by specialized teachers and with a

recurrent core-structure. Basically, a large and

consistent set of activities, a sort of a big interactive

multimedia text book.

At this initial stage, two kinds of audiences were

targeted: native students of elementary and

secondary schools and non-native learners of

Portuguese as a Foreign Language, either enrolled in

Portuguese schools and universities or studying

abroad. Both were supposed, at this stage, to use the

website resources autonomously, without teacher

guidance.

Later in 2011, Ciberescola took the first step in the

distance teaching realm, by opening PL2 courses

addressed to adult learners living in Europe and the

US. Instead of feeding a new teaching platform, like

Moodle, as Ciberescola DB gathered already 1000

entries approximately, the option was to combine it

with a videoconferencing service, the FM EA-TEL,

from UK Open University. For that purpose, some

changes were to be done on the Ciberescola

platform: thereafter each HTML page displayed not

just one, as initially, but a set of exercises. Each one

of these webpages currently displays all the

materials specifically re-organized in order to

support a video-class session. Currently, when the

student signs in he/she immediately has access to a

list of webpages/classes corresponding to his/her

course/level, where he/she also finds the links for

his/her course of videoconferencing sessions/classes.

FM EA-TEL is a web-based conferencing service

intended for education. Unlike other video

conferencing services, like Skype or Google

Hangout, FM is a one-direction streaming tool,

which means that one attendee speaks at a time.

Consequently, oral interaction may turn out to be

more artificial and time-consuming, somehow due to

the milliseconds spent in turn in/off the broadcasting

button. But, in return, the internet speed required is

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far below that of other live streaming services, and

supports up to 10 attendees. From the pedagogical

point of view, the turn-determined interaction fully

matches the goal of stimulating student´s autonomy

in undertaking the tasks assigned to him/her during

the class/meeting, since teacher may intervene only

when he/she is asked to. Besides, with the younger

students, the interaction is much easier, since by

using FM, attendees do not keep interrupting each

other.

Combining autonomous activities of the Ciberescola

platform with real-time interaction guided by a

language teacher has proved to be a very functional

solution to solve particular grammar and vocabulary

issues as well as to practise punctual pronunciation

and spelling problems, by using text chatting.

2.4 Tailoring the Project to

Mainstream Education

In 2012 Ciberescola Association addressed Ministry

of Education and Science an invitation in order to

import its teaching model, already tested with adults,

to Portuguese public schools likely to receive

foreign students but not in a significant amount that

could allow them to form a class. 10 students is the

minimum number legally required to open a regular

class of non-Portuguese speaking students for all

proficiency levels. Ciberescola courses could in fact

fill this gap, gathering students from each school,

located in different parts of the country, in the same

videoconference class. The advantages were clear-

cut: count on specialized professionals to provide

and control the quality of the resources presented,

create classes for each proficiency level, control

avoidable costs.

In the 2012/2013 school year, Ciberescola courses

targeting children and teens began for the first time

at the school clusters of Mira-Sintra and Porto. The

Table 1: Total number of students involved in the project.

Source: Ciberescola.

following school year the project was spread out to

all the primary schools of these same clusters. In

2014/2015 the project is fully running in 5 school

clusters: apart from Mira-Sintra and Porto, 3 more

school clusters have joined: Arrentela, Faro and

Olhão. The number of students involved in the

project increase as reported in the Table below.

Students attend classes with their Ciberescola

teacher during two or three hours a week using FM

plus Ciberescola platform. Students are in a

computer´s room, at their schools, having one

computer with a webcam and a headset per student

at their disposal. Schools´ headmasters need to

allocate a school staff member to be in the classroom

where video-classes take place to oversee the normal

development of classes in the field. This way

students and Ciberescola teachers interact in real

time classes, using camera, microphone and chat,

and develop all language skills - speaking, listening,

reading, grammar, spelling, new vocabulary

acquisition, etc. As mentioned, students are gathered

according to their proficiency level and in the same

class it is possible to gather students from different

school clusters. DGE and Ciberescola pay a visit to

each school in the beginning of the project to meet

the school directors, the coordinators of the project,

the school teacher´s that work with the students and

the students. Ciberescola also visit schools each time

a test is given.

So far, under the pedagogical point of view, it is not

difficult to point out the advantages of a model such

as this. First of all, classes are very small - usually 5

or 7 students per class. This means that students get

more attention from the teacher and have more

opportunities to talk. Besides they are levelled

classes, enabling the teacher to iron out similar

problems across the class. Notice that regular PL2

classes can be composed by students of all levels of

proficiency. Besides, as explained, by using the

Ciberescola platform teachers actually develop a

task-based pedagogy. What is more, students are

required to develop writing tasks since the very

beginning of the course, not only while filling words

or sentences to complete the exercises, and later on

undertaking text-structured complex tasks (also

inserted in the platform by the student), but also for

communicative purposes, on the chat, in order to

interact with the teacher and their colleagues when

they do not want to take their turn to speak, for

various reasons. It is worth stressing that autonomy

is highly reinforced since the teacher is seen as an

assistant during the process of solving a task or a

problem presented during the class. Finally, one

great advantage of these online real-time classes is

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having an opportunity to call an interpreter to join

the class with absolute beginners. Currently

Ciberescola´s teachers work together with a team of

interpreters, namely, Turkish, Chinese, Ukrainian

and Romanian native-speakers - interpreters. The

presence of these professionals is particularly useful

when it comes to giving practical instructions or

institutional information, or to clarify different

shades of meaning of a word or an idiom, but it also

has a positive emotional impact on children, who

know they can count on someone who once dealt

with the same language barriers.

2.5 DGE, Ciberescola

and Schools Staff:

A Broader Team

Within the implementation of the online Portuguese

as a second language courses, DGE staff is

responsible for the organization of the courses, as

well as for monitoring their development, not only

by building bridges between the different actors

involved in the project, but also by regulating the

adequacy of the pedagogical model adopted.

These online PL2 courses allow teachers of

Ciberescola to understand better not only student´s

learning needs but also the difficulties teachers at

schools experience when trying to tackle academic

hindrances foreign students struggle with. In fact,

the task is huge: teachers must make foreign

students read and write fluently in Portuguese in the

shortest time possible. The most difficult skills

required when learning a new language are those

which are immediately asked from students – even

beginners – to perform, in order to catch up with

their peers in the mainstream class. These

performances are also required even from those

students whose L1 is typically significantly different

from Portuguese and with another writing system.

Recognizing that 3h a week are insufficient to tackle

all these problems, Ciberescola teachers hand in

various learning materials to the teachers of the

schools involved, such as Portuguese for academic

purposes worksheets, extensive reading materials,

properly adapted, and glossaries that they may work

on with their students at schools.

Furthermore, Ciberescola teachers also build a

programme for each student, based on the placement

test made during online classes. These programmes

are the corner-stone of the entire project, in the sense

that students, teachers and parents get an overview

of the contents, options and methodologies

implemented and by these means have the

opportunity to assess and regulate all the learning

process.

Grounded in a close institutional collaboration, DGE

and Ciberescola support school teachers directly,

providing them with theoretical and technical

information and discussing with them new effective

and adaptative strategies according to each particular

learning situation. What is more, DGE and

Ciberescola are preparing a training online course

addressed to all teachers of Portuguese teaching at

schools included in the project, where the

methodology is used, i.e., DGE and Ciberescola

online materials combined with FM service.

2.6 Weighing It Up:

Opportunities and Obstacles

The implementation and the results of any

innovation project are unpredictable. It can imply

simultaneously some risks and some good results.

Therefore, the project monitoring is very important

to regulate its development. In this process, all the

institutional partners – each one with a specific role

– are responsible for re-directing the actions when

something is not right, for making the project grow

with new ideas and for pointing out the successful

activities or results.

Within this project, we can identify some obstacles

related to IT, such as the lack of devices, low speed

Internet connection and some difficulties handling

video and audio devices. These obstacles can affect

the normal functioning of synchronous sessions and

lower students´ and teacher’s motivation for the

project.

On the other hand, the arrangement of a timetable

for all students, given that each group has different

school schedules, can also hinder their integration in

a course.

The implementation of this project has, however,

opened several opportunities for students, teachers

and schools. First of all, students from all schools

seem quite engaged in the language activities

presented on Ciberescola platform. Technologies are

a well-known environment to students and therefore

they understand their language and their ethos. This

brings students closer to the learning activities

offered, building bridges between formal education

and the technological environments. It is also

important to mention the performance of children

attending the 2

, 3

and 4

grades. After some

weeks of online/videoconferencing classes, they are

already autonomous in using the Ciberescola

platform, as well as typing the words in the

computer. That happens also with newly arrived

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children from countries where IT are not available or

with those who already began school using a

different alphabet.

During the visits to schools made by DGE and

Ciberescola it was possible to contact teachers,

students and headmasters and witness how highly

motivated students were. Additionally, teachers rate

the direct and practical support that is given to them

respecting all the pedagogical and evaluation

process development with theirs students throughout

the school year as an invaluable asset.

From the headmasters’ point of view, the

implementation of this project in their schools has

been an important factor for teachers’ professional

development and for organizational development.

The project was also assessed by an external entity

(Instituto de Linguística Teórica e Computacional -

ILTEC) and was regarded as a highly valuable

modus operandi in order to deliver a high quality

educational service to immigrant students. It was

also pointed that under the cost-benefit perspective

the teaching model practiced was highly

recommendable.

Test results for the school year of 2013/2014 also

show a positive impact of the project.

Table 2: Placement test results (%).

Scale: 0% to 100% Source: Ciberescola.

Table 3: Final test results (%).

Scale: 0% to 100% Source: Ciberescola.

4 CONCLUSIONS

The project described in this paper shows that a

blended learning environment can be a way to close

the gap between students´ learning needs in

mainstream education and the educational measures

offered. In fact, students are very engaged in the

activities proposed in these courses and

consequently can develop more effortlessly their

Portuguese language proficiency.

This project shows that very few aspects of the

language learning process are left out. Therefore, it

is worth noting the general strengths of the project,

namely (i) the chance to gather different students of

the same proficiency level from different schools

where they are asked to share their personal

experiences along with language acquisition

difficulties; (ii) text based pedagogy supported by

interactive exercises, leading to a progressive

autonomous work; (iii) writing performance

continually prompted by communicative purposes.

The implementation of this project has also showed

that this is just one side of the effect caused by the

distance learning PL2 courses of Ciberescola. The

digital literacy that its implementation promotes in

students has become one major result of these

courses, and consequently an important factor

regarding the students´ motivation for learning.

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