A video from YouTube: Teaching ESL in China, Information on Teaching English Overseas

Crafts for sale - Shaoxing, China - 绍兴 中国

Crafts for sale - Shaoxing, China - 绍兴 中国
Originally uploaded by meckleychina

This is a photo of a person who is drawing pictures on the wine bottles.

Reading Prompt #11

RICHARDSON Ch. 6. The Social Web: Learning Together

BLACKBOARD - Warschauer, M., Knobel, M., & Stone, L. (2004).

Technology and equity in schooling: Deconstructing the Digital Divide. Educational Policy, 18(4), 562-588.

Share an idea of two about how you could use the ideas from Richardson with ESL students.

What is the "digital divide?' And why do Warschauer et al argue that this term may longer be applicable. What are the issues they found regarding differences in technology use with ELLs and other low socioeconomic students. What are some ways you could address this in your own schools or programs?

Twitter is really popular because of the convince, and I think its befit to education is getting more and more obvious, especially in out classroom activities. Like the example Richardson gave in the book, one physics teacher did a field with his students in Wisconsin, and he asked his students to use their cell phones to send journal updates to their Twitter accounts. Then the students who couldn’t make the trip can enjoy a trip through Twitter in real time. So for ESL students, if they have a Twitter account and can access to the internet, wherever they are, they can have the real time learning experience.

However, I personally like the social bookmarking services better, especially the Diigo. Tagging the site is amazing! If I find something related to TESL, I can tag the tags I choose, and see what others have tagged. To see the tags made by others may give me a different perspective to an issue, and the annotation is also awesome. What’s more, the teachers can have their students subscribe the feed of a particular tag he or she created for a subject. Through that way, the students can automatically get the linking or comment which the teachers do on some websites. But teachers can do more specifically, like choosing some students who need the information most to update automatically.

The digital divide is the gap between people who have the access to computers and internet and people who don’t have such access. Warschauer et al argue that “these gaps are gradually being narrowed” because of the development of the society, that computers and internet are more and more common these days. However, there are still differences about how technology is used between high-SES students and low-SES students. For example, in language arts, low-SES students tend to do common things like PowerPoint presentations and essay writing, but for the high-SES students, they do something more such as internet-based research, planning, writing, editing, and analyzing essays. Then we have a new issue about the ELL students. Because of their poor English, they do use grammar checkers which the low-SES don’t to review their writing, but they simply accept the suggestion gave by the checkers, which make their paper works hard to understanding. I would like to say that if in my class there are lots of English language learners, I will suggest them not to use those grammar checkers at first. Those beginners will be given individual instruction about their English. This may be heavy the burden of the teachers, but that’s the essence of “teacher”, to teach. And that will not last a long time ,once the proficient level is improved, teachers can let them start to use grammar or vocabulary checkers gradually.

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.

Reading Prompt #9

Corpus linguistics is defined as the study of language relying on computer-assisted techniques to analyze large, principled databases of naturally occurring language. Because of the development of technology in the 21st century, this computer-assisted corpus linguistics begin to play a important role in pedagogy.

The most well-known use of corpus linguistics in the language classroom is concordance. It will help teachers to look at corpus instances of the searched words or phrases, observing patterns of use that they would not notice otherwise. And as Susan Conrad said in her paper, corpus linguistics made language professionals know that grammatical study needs to take place within the context of a register or by comparing registers. What’s more, the corpus-based research substantially improves the lists which are given by the traditional grammar books. That’s because the information is no longer based on the intuition or anecdotal evidence. These new lists will not omit important items. And in addition, frequency information can help teachers decide which items they should emphasize or what kind of activities are the most appropriate. Corpus linguistics can also make grammar teaching more focused on conditions of use. When teachers use the finding of corpus database, they don’t even have to approach a native speaker.

I never used a corpus database before, so I know nothing about the corpus linguistics. However, I think that with the corpus linguistics, I will know the typical language use patterns of Chinese, without doing the survey myself. And the frustrated situation for language teachers which is mentioned in Susan Conrad’s paper is that something that is grammatically acceptable but doesn’t sound right will be changed by corpus linguistics. That will be a great help.

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Reading Prompt #8

Some kinds of technologies which are used for CMC are introduced in Levy’s book, like Email/SMS, chat, MOOs, conferencing and mailing lists/BBS. They are different from each other, but share some commons at the same time. They can be great helps for language learning.

For learners in the same class or the same time zone, synchronous forms of CAC are good choices. They can use text-based chat or videoconferencing and don’t even have to meet each other. For learners who cannot be online at the same time, they can use asynchronous forms of CMC to facilitate their language learning, such as emails. Researchers also find out that CMC does play a role in second language learning. CMC has a ability to provide learners with a forum through which to negotiate meaning. According to Skehan, “the negotiation of meaning that occurs through interactions is seen as an ideal mechanism through which learners can identify where their interlanguage is limited and needs to be further extended”.

Email is the most often used tool for me. Although I learned English in Chinese for 10 years, I didn’t really have chances to communicate with people in English, either spoken or written English. So when I started to write emails in English, I would spend an average time of 15 min on each email. I would write, think, rewrite, and rethink every sentence. But now, I spend much less time, I can say that this practice does improve my English. Then I want to talk something about chat. Last week, I had the chance to take a virtual class for ESL5013 and that was a disaster for me. Just like Lvey’s book says, in the chat or other synchronous environments, “other participants are not aware when one person starts to type a message and may continue with a topic, or else may change the direction of the discussion while a potential contributor to the discussion types his or her message”. My contribution to the discussion was often “out of step with what has gone before it”. I think my English is not good enough for chatting virtually with native speakers.

Dr. Sauro made a research about the two computer-mediated corrective feedbacks. According to her findings, both of these two types supported gains in target form knowledge in familiar contexts, but in immediate term or over time, neither of them was more effective than the other. And the metalinguistic group in the Time of Test Administration showed much more significant improvement than recast and control. Those help the teacher know what kind of feedbacks work best for their students. We know that feedback is important in language building because feedbacks can facilitate the occurrences of noticing and promote Le processing. With the appropriate feedbacks, learners will make their output work more effective in L2 acquisition than inappropriate or no feedback taken.