Evaluations of Technology in Teaching English

I find the following resources from the internet useful:

(1) Online dictionary

Students are reluctant to look up words in the dictionary because they find the procedure of going to the right alphabet tedious and time-consuming. Although nearly all secondary school students know A-Z, a few do have problems with locating the word in question in the dictionary.

On the other hand, online dictionary is handy and users can just key in the word in question and then with a few other clicks, they can learn about the different parts of speech of that word or even their synonyms or anonyms.

Go to Longman Online Dictionary

(2) Online pronunciation dictionary

One reason why Hong Kong people do not pronounce perfect English is that they lack a good example or sample of pronunciation. Their teachers might learn from older teachers who did not get the most accurate pronunciation. As a result, wrong pronunciations were passed on from generation to generation. With an online pronunciation dictionary, students are able to pronounce a word accurate without the help of the teacher.

Go to Online Pronunciation Dictionary

(3) Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes are user-friendly, easy-to-use and efficient software for making quizzes. There are matching, filling in gaps, multiple-choice questions, etc. Photos can be added so that users can drag the picture to match a certain word item.

However, a drawback of Hot Potatoes is technicality. If the path to a certain picture is not clear or accurate, it will not be shown on the HTML page. This has caused trouble to new users and even cost learners much time in figuring out the correct path of the picture.

Go to Filling-in-gaps

Go to Matching

Learner Concordancing

(1) Many people think that concordancing should be useful for revealing grammatical patterns and yet concordance-based grammar tutoring presents some challenges that vocabulary does not.

(2) Even if we know the structures a learner is ready to acquire at a particular moment, such learning is notoriously impervious to declarative information.

(3) While concordances for lexical and even collocational information are quite easy for learners to interpret and for instructors to set up, grammatical concordances may be less so.

I find the following desiderata useful:

(1) its syllabus should be feedback rather than tutorially driven.

(2) the instructional presentation should be non-declarative as possible.

(3) a teacher should set up the concordance outputs for the learners, at least initially, and should offer a period of training in their interpretation.

Virtual Classroom

Mark also states that

the majority of students under observation in a project use internet connections at home to access the virtual classroom. The highly interactive site includes an announcement space, a message board, a forum and a chat room where the teacher and the students meet at designated times.

In my view, this innovate the environment where a teacher interacts with his students and where the students interact with their peers. In the past, rarely could teachers ask students to voice out in a classroom but now in the virtual classroom, students are more free to express their opinions and they take this chance positively.

Webfolios

Mark Warschauer and his group suggest that

students pursued a variety of strategies in creating the elements of their Webfolios. SOme wrote directly on the screen, and the others prepared their writing at home.

they are highly motivated and they are learning English and computer skills simultaneously.

In my view, it is boring to learn a specific thing during a lesson without a context. Conventionally, students only learn English in an English lesson and only learn computer skills in a computer lesson.

In fact, they can learn English through

- browsing the internet

- posting blogposts

- commenting on others' posts

- quoting from internet sources

Moreover, they can learn computer skills when setting up a quiz for their peers on a grammar item they have just learnt.

Questions in CALL 2

Another interesting aspect lies in

'What evidence indicates that learners focused on form during the CALL task?'

'What evidence suggests that learners see the connection between the CALL task and tasks outside the classroom?

In my view, this is thought-provoking and learners may not focus on form during the task and hardly does any learner see the relation between the CALL task and the tasks beyond the classroom.

Questions in CALL 1

Philip Hubbard suggests that

the computer potentially interacts with all the key variables in language learning - teachers, methods, materials and environments.

AND

there is value in assisting these newcomers in making sense of the field and understanding what experienced members of the CALL community consider important questions to answer.

In my opinion, although computers are now very common in many families, workplaces and government amenities, quite a number of people are suffering from computer-phobia / technology fobia.

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First Blog Post

When I first entered the teaching profession, the use of the computer or information technology was restricted to typing notes and setting test papers.

As time went, with the introduction of a screen, a projector and a computer into each classroom, I started to incorporate powerpoint presentation into my lessons. It has now nearly replaced the chalk-and-talk teaching mode prevalent in the traditional classroom.

Among the multitude of websites on the Internet, I frequently use Longman Online Dictionary, which I file in 'My favourites', whenever I want to present the exact meaning and usage of a word or phrase in front of the class. Some schools have developed their curriculum with an elearning system, but so far I have just heard of e-class, which has yet to be fully utilised in my school.

In the last semester, I have learnt extensively from the course 'Corpus Development in ESP', which exposed me to a wide range of concordancers. I am sure I will benefit from this course, 'New Technologies in Language Teaching'.