This week, I read two articles about aural/oral skills,"The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Forign Language Speaking Skills" and "New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation."
In terms of teaching and practicing speaking, I think the most beneficial point for learners is that they can learn in stress free environment. My school I work at has a room with 40 computers with the Internet access. Students learn how to use computers in information technology class. However, language teachers are not skilled enough and too busy to design lessons utilizing those computers. Right now I do not use the room with the computers. Usually each teacher have to move around to each classroom to teach. On the other hand, students are familiar with communicating through portable phones with the Internet access. So I believe if I could have knowledge about useful web sites and how to implement them in class, I would have new way of teaching style which will be beneficial to students.
I found a lot of interesting sites for learning language skills. I enjoyed them very much. I need more time to browse and see other ones. In addition, I need to focus my objectives on the project work. I feel I have much to teach and I am confused with objectives and course design. So reading finished project reports is a precious experience for me to know clear image of our project reports.
I found I failed in publishing my comment to another participant's blog. Probably I pressed publish button skipping the previous procedure. I hope I published my comment successfully this week. I feel I am getting better manipulating a computer little by little.
Hello Sawako,
ReplyDeleteyour reflection is very clear and honest. Utilizing PC work without being more computer literate must be very difficult and as you mentioned language teachers are not skilled enough. On the other hand, this course enables us to share our experience and links we visit to find some useful materials for our students, following each other on delicious.com
Particularly, I am interested in what confuses you within objectives and course design.
You are not the only one who failed to comment. I failed to comment on Websearch discussing on Nicenet even though I was pretty sure I had done it. The only problems I have experienced so far have been connected to Nicenet.
You are doing very well and I keep my fingers crossed for you to deal with the challenges of the course.
Monika
P.S. What might have happened to you was that you wrote the comment, pressed the publish button, however you did not realise that you were also supposed to choose: "Comment as: Google Account" and that might be the reason that even though you commented on someone´s blog, since you did not choose the "profile" below the comment, the comment was not published.
Hi Sawako,
ReplyDeleteI like the way you reflected to this third week. I am so happy that you are becoming better in dealing with the computer. As we are experiencing through this course, Technology can do a lot in teaching English. The tasks and readings of this week consisted of many valuable sites and materials that cannot be reached unless we have access to the internet.
Regarding the posts and comments on the blog, I think it is an obvious problem. I am also having a problem in publishing my posts and comments in the blogs, I don't know what is it the problem and how to solve it. But, you can send a notification for the google team asking for help, and provide the error number that they will send you, the problem is going to be solved, I hope.
I wish you all the best for this course.
Happy to comment on your blog.. It looks great!
Khadija
Hi Sawako,
ReplyDeleteWow!! Its similar to my Blog!! You did tremendous. I do agree with you. The Aural & Oral Language skills are really very interactive & wonderful which can help both of us & our students. We can share some links with our colleagues too. This web course is an amazing guideline for us to enhance our technology based reaching-learning skills.
Stay blessed & take care.
Greetings from Bangladesh.....