Reading Prompt #10

Flickr is another technology which is totally new to me and what Richardson said in his book is really amazing! Using images and programs like Flickr will definitely help language learners. If I am teaching Chinese, I would like to use Flickr as my teaching tool. For language learners, vocabulary and grammar are the most “annoying” parts as learning a new language, especially for adult learners. However, there are situations that the teacher and the students don’t have a language to communicate, for example, I teach Chinese in a none-English speaking country outside China, English doesn’t help, so what am I going to do? I can use Flicker! Such as the word “地球” which mean the globe, if I show my students a picture of the globe, then the problem is solved, I bet every knows the meaning after that. And I can also ask the learners to write a short sentence on the picture, which is the annotation feature of the Flickr, using “…是…”, it means “…is…”, for example, “地球是圆的”(the globe is round). Of course those examples are for the very beginners, but, isn’t that good for both the teachers and students? What’s more, they can subscribe the RSS feed about that picture and know what other students is writing on this picture.

We cannot deny that because of the development of the technology, Computer-mediated language learning is becoming more and more popular. However, we should always bear in mind that teachers are the most important in this learning process, computer technologies are just learning tools; they can never replace the role of teachers. Especially when the language learners are communicate with the natives speakers of the language they are learning, there must have some trouble about the culture, sometimes two totally different kinds of culture may cause misunderstanding. Well, computers or the internet can’t help to solve this problem, only the teachers who know both kinds of culture will make the learners communicate better.

Moreover, lots of students would like the use simple or abbreviation words when write Emails or text messages among peers. But this will cause a big problem to language learners if they receive messages like that. To a language, be aware of the use of formal and informal language is important, especially for the beginners. What the natives do will confuse the learners, taking them extra time to fix these mistakes when they use the target language in the future. That’s another job teachers should do, they should stop the native speakers use such words when they communicate with language learners.