Week Three Reflections

Week 3 has been full of tasks and activities  reading, thinking, discussing, reflecting and reviewing. 

Unlike week 1 and 2, I consider week three as a bridge between theory and practice where we explored knowledge about teaching language skills and competencies using technology as well as ways to enhance technology use  skills. 


                 My first reflection is " Our focus should be shifted to receptive skills: reading and listening to build the language reservoir (linguistic competence)

                  Another issue that we explored this week is the importance of selecting authentic materials that fit our learners' level and needs. The ideas were about using CALL, using software to teach pronunciation and teaching listening. the issues were provided through different academic articles:
- New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation by Busa( that was complicated and needs further reading and discussion)
- Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsey Miller  which tackles the issue of
dividing the listening process into 3 phases : pre, during and post.. So as teachers we should be very selective in terms of strategies and materials used ( audio or video or software)
- The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Juila Gong. Through this article, I have discovered some ways for using call to teach speaking skills. Also the author classified speaking skills into mechanical and meaningful and divided using CALL into two types of application to make it easy according to students' level and nature of activities to be done.

                Furthermore, this week was rich with resources for teaching English. I was really lost in what Mr Sean and classmates shared on nicenet and the webskills page. Among the new websites that I decided to use in future and recommend to my colleagues and students are the following:
* http://www.esl-galaxy.com/index.htm
*https://sites.google.com/site/pronunciationstuff/links
*http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/
*  http://www.esl-lab.com/

The websites contain knowledge about all language skills for different levels of learners and that may suit different needs and interested. I am thinking to link these links to my teaching blog and give students home assignments from these sites to motivate them to use and get familiar with them. Also, I will give them free choice of the activity among many activities to be able to explore the sites and different links related to it.

              The special track of the week was discovering and working with Delicious.com.
I was happy to have an end to my problems with saving important and favorite links. After relying only on a word doc with using internet explorer than bookmarks with firefox that needs to be stick to one computer to be able to get easy access to your favorite links and history; now, the problem is solved with delicious accounts. Delicious page will save our time and energy  as it would be our online e.library with links, titles, description and tags as well as ability to follow or be followed by others. As Jurga said on nicenet: ''it is a way to enhance collaboration and cooperation" where students and colleagues can check what resources you discovered and saved.

              The most challenging task of the week was choosing a sample report to read and review! the challenge was how and when to skim all reports because of time constraint. I checked a few of them and just clicked on the one related to language education as it is the field of my research. I just made a click but it was the right click as I learned a lot from the author and the study.              
I have chosen to read Prem Bahadur’s report about action research in education. 
 

           The author of the article is Prem Bhadur Phayak, a lecturer at the Department of English Education, University Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Currently, he is pursuing PhD on Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA.He has an MA TESOL (Institute of Education, University of London, UK) and an M.Ed. English Education (Tribhuvan University, Nepal. In addition to his profession of teaching and training English teachers, he also does some social works to help children from tribal communities for their education (retrieved from his personal blog). 

In his report, he introduced the study background so he explained the nature of his learners, setting and goals using the ABCD model. The context of the project was the department of English education, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. The population if the study where master degree students (around 300 student) who came from different linguistic, socio-cultural and economic background representing all geographical areas of the country. Those students as said by the author do not have knowledge about research and academic writing even though the majority are pre-service and in-service teachers. So, the aim of the project was to plan and conduct action research, which involves a change related to technology use in the classroom. The university had problems of resources, internet access and lack of students’ knowledge about technology. About the situation, Prem (2010) says:” the department itself is under-resourced as there is no internet access, updated library and international journals on language education. This has limited the scope of researches at the department. Moreover, students do not have resources to read and explore new issues for their research works. One bitter reality is that we have 12 hour load, shedding a day”

               The researcher did not deal with the whole population but with a sample of students whom he supervised representing 25 master students who are supposed to learn about research skills and academic writing. The researcher started by a diagnostic survey to conduct needs’ analysis where he discovered 3 main types of needs being : websites, ability to communicate and exchange with their supervisors and ability to observe samples of research works and reports to improve their writing skills. The researchers tried first to provide them with data and knowledge to cover their basic needs in technology, so he taught them issues related to computers, internet and emails. Then, he provided them with sites and search engines that may help them in their research and encouraged them to create emails. 

          

              At the beginning, my choice was only because of the title which carries something about English education which is my field of research and work, but when I read it in detail, I discovered how much this study and report is motivating. The author faced all sorts of problems to create small changes that may bring great difference but he did his best and I think he succeeded in doing so. I liked the study because the author believed in something and reached it by the end; he believed that change can’t be done in one day.

             Finally, the most important and valuable thing I learned from the course is to be well planned and to respect time on one hand and listening and reading others' views on other hand. 

Now speechless but one thing I can say: