新文科背景下外语教学过程性数据数字化建设:设计与实践

Digitalization of Formative Assessment Data in Foreign Language Teaching:Design and Practice

现代信息技术赋能文科教育是新文科建设的重要要求。本研究聚焦外语教学信息化建设,重点探索外语教学环境下有效收集、存储和使用教学过程性数据的方法和途径,探索如何有效运用数字资源助力高校外语教学与研究。研究设计并创建"外语教学数据数字化平台",实时采集多元教学过程性数据并对数据进行结构化、半结构化存储,实现教学过程的实时监测和历时分析,有效发挥过程性数据在促学、促教和促研中的积极作用,为外语教学过程智能管理、精准施策提供数据支持。

The study discusses the application of modern technology to foreign language teaching and research,focusing on the digitalization of foreign language teaching/learning data,specifically the collection,storage and retrieval of formative assessment data and the effective use of digital data in foreign language teaching and research. To achieve the aims, we design and build"Formative Assessment Data Platform for Foreign Language Teaching " to automatically collect and store data produced in the process of foreign language teaching.According to the design, the platform collects both students’ in-class and after-class learning data, and teachers’ teaching and assessment data as well. And the multi-layered data are stored structured or semi-structured with the metadata describing student identity, class,course and grade,which ensures the efficient and accurate retrieval of data.The accumulated teaching/learning data will growinto big diachronic education data,which makes possible the description of a student’s or a group of students’ performances at a specific period time from multiple perspectives. More importantly, it supports the quick access to data for students and teachers and makes their communication efficient and effective. Moreover, it provides quality and quick teaching/learning feedback for teachers and students,and in this way,enables real-time and diachronic monitoring of foreign language teaching/learning.So far,the platform has been used by teachers in more than 30 foreign language courses in five universities,and it has played an active role in promoting languagelearning,teaching and research. Firstly,it makes highquality teaching feedback possible. With the support of large authentic formative data,teachers could observe and analyze students’ performance regularly and make flexible adjustment to their teaching according to their observation. Secondly,it enhances students’ motivation and learning outcome. The platform makes it convenient for students to keep track of their learning styles and readjust their learning strategies;in this way, it technologically ensures students’ long-term learning motivation. In addition,the data accumulated by the platform could also provide sufficient data for SLA( Second Language Acquisition) research.With the support of the accumulated diachronic data source for foreign language education, the platform enables both teachers and learners to observe the results of their performance comprehensively and consecutively.And the data could be used to build a smart model for the diagnosis of learning problems, by referring to which teachers could give their students personalized guidance and assistance in learning. Compared with the traditional learner performance evaluation, the digitalization of evaluation boosts the potency of building more reliable and flexible formative assessment models in foreign language education, and it will help to substantially enhance the effectiveness of foreign language teaching and learning.