Hello everybody,

Welcome to the course week 4 blog, After learning about the pedagogic status and the value of CALL in many dimensions with Julia Gong and Lindsay Miller last week, Mei-Ya-Liang and Jarek Krajka are teaching me practical and adequate approach to CALL integration in EFL teaching with concrete examples and references for resources building. I am implementing the procedure of use of CALL to enhance an EFL lesson in the lesson plan template and I moved forward in my perspective of the final project as I am detecting the issues at the origin of my courses that could be fixed with CALL.

Best Regards,
Mariam

week 3 program

Hello everybody,

At the end of week 3 we grew in internet search skill and knowledge about the universe of most recent technological means of teaching such CALL and many others.
The creation and use of blog and delicious and reading lot of final projects of the course former participants contribute to widen our minds in regards to our views about EFL.
I like the projects I read, each of them is unique as it addresses specific needs and target different environment. It help me understand the amount of work am expected to produce.
Reddy from South Africa developed online teaching project I found interesting and inspiring for my own final project. I need to have very good knowledge about uses of blogger, delicious, and nicenet in order to associate them to some other existing tools in my university platform.

Cordially,
Mariam

Hello dear bloggers,

Am bringing my perspective of Julia Gong article about the use of CALL in EFL teaching.

The use of computer in classroom opens new horizons for teaching and learning English as a second/foreign language for teacher and students.

The computer software and internet provide a more comfortable and universal access to learning resources that offers authentic language input for the users (Kataoka, 2000) , however the optimal exploitation of CALL ( Computer Assisted Language Learning) at teaching ends should not be taken for granted. (Levy 1997, 1) “Voice” dictionary for teaching pronunciation is a good reference so far.

“Computer intervenes as an added tool or resource, as a model or real world phenomenon, or system as a training environment to prepare users for real world experience” (Pennington 1995, 11) The appropriate computer use and software packages sound like a panacea to many issues related to the weaknesses of foreign language learning and brings responses to teachers complaints all over the world. With the right use of CALL we are likely to produce a generation of English teachers and speakers with better skills in performance and competence than ourselves.

Call materials are used both to improve the quality of fluency and accuracy in regard of prosody and employment of software oriented in use of discourse genre and topical area in order to stimulate verbal interaction. This is the appropriate situation of teaching EFL that meets teachers need as mentioned by: Runganayagie Nalini Reddy in his final project ETSP Spring 2010 final project” Thematic integration of the four language skills which incorporates issues of grammar (so it is not taught in a vacuum) are an eternal challenge not just to the TEACH Ambassadors but to many ESL teachers in South Africa (SA)”.

As far as mechanical part (phonetics, prosody, and segmental) is concern the following are available: extensive texts, graphics, animation, audio, digital, audio, digitized audio video clips as well as synthesis –by-rule that can convert text to speech (Pennington 1995).The drawback of computer issued speech (technical issues) can be compensate by digitized or video speech even though the latter is less flexible.  No less important option are the speech recognition technology (Healey 1999, 127) and Aist (1999, 133) three dimensions approach to teaching pronunciation.

Another good example of CALL application is SLIM (Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software) used in the University of Venice (Delmonte, 2000). One difficulty about this technology is its price. For now it is expensive and is not affordable by the general public.   

A common software designed for use of CALL meaningful side is the CONVERSATION where the students can learn by interacting with computer through record of own speech and machine feedbacks. CALL provides students with broader and personal use of resource to learn at their convenient pace with CD-Roms, web documents and BBC News through RealPlayer. The video and audio conferencing, CU SeeMe and Microsoft networkmeeting. Email discussion forum, synchronous discussions are helpful for the development of the learners’ speaking skills. Written chat sessions are also very efficient according to (Pennington 1995, 155), and Phinney (1995) Multi-user object-oriented domains (MOOs).

Teaching material can be conceived and designed with electronic dictionary such as creating interactive CALL ESL programs. This provides a computer based scoring system of assessment more objective than human judgment in pronunciation errors.

CALL necessitates work of professionals in teaching to extract from the relevant parts suitable for each category of learners. Its great promising potential as a medium for teaching and learning of second/language CALL always requires lot of human intervention. Nothing would replace the human-to-human contact and the physical exposure to the culture of foreign language.

Comments:

CALL is all about what teachers and learners of EFL need to catch up and keep in touch with ongoing transformation of modern world. EFL teachers who are not typically English speakers, originally from less technologically advanced countries might integrate globalized world and familiarize with most recent means of communication for teaching purpose.

I have lot of hope to see more brilliant EFL teachers in the future trained with appropriate use of CALL and offer better quality of teaching.

    

 Best Regards,

Mariam

   

Hello dear bloggers,

One essential activity of the week 3 is the participants exploration of many projects completed by former participants to our course.
I liked reading diverse perspectives mainly of Phyak's and Joanna's works posted by many participants on nicenet. I guess their choices are motivated by proximity of interest with these authors' work though I believe it would be more "correct" to chose projects of authors from various backgrounds.
 I am also victim of the same kind of bias myself and this is the reason why I am sharing my report about the work of Bruno Tendouinde Nikiema with co-bloggers as we are running the risk of losing the chance to know about the contents of some authors.

I. Backgound:
 Bruno is dealing with a class of large number of students 80 13th graders between 17 and 24 years of age. The students are attending their 7th year in EFL learning.

II. Issue or Problem that started the project:
Low productivity of students in English language communication after seven years in attending English classes from 7^th   grade level to 13^th grade

III. Initial solution and expected response:

Pilot project was held about writing business letter while making use of resources found in appropriated links.

Taking the students to computer rooms and introducing them to the world of internet was the first initiative in this regard.

Students visited some URLs related to writing and went through samples of business letters before completing their writing assignment. The business letters were meant to address some US academic institutions in order to create awareness about grant opportunities.

Students responded actively and created emails, the ones that were already initiated supported the others.

IV. Response and reflection

 The author rather developed a reflection on the advantages and the possible outcomes of the students being acquainted with information about American scholarship and grants and pointed out the value of diploma obtained from American educational system.

  V. Change

Students became enthusiastic to collaborative work, and showed interest in carrying out classroom groups’ activities.

  Conclusion

The whole thing was quite new to both teacher and students, and the author justified his study as he defined his project as a pioneer work.

Comment

The author emphasized on research about multiple intelligence and learning style and strategies and also teaching and learning overcrowd classes. I think these references are relevant to his teaching environment.

The section of Response and Reflection do not include the students' reaction to the project implementation, maybe the writer did not have the chance to take into account appreciations from the course instructor; he developed only one side of the points that is the Reflection.

 Comparing this part of his work and these of the other authors I read (Aleyda Linares,   Runganayagie Nalini Reddy) I would say he needed to make a development on both Response and Reflection. He rather commented on the potential outcome of familiarizing students with grant opportunities. Without meaning to belittle this aspect of the students training, I was expecting more effective facts in regard to writing original themes that can make students grasp more about general communication skills. 

Our current instructor Courtney draws our attention on shortcomings of all sorts about our works on Jupiter and our posts on nicenet and this can help us fix our issues so far.

Bruno mentioned the good in giving students  awareness about project based learning, cooperative learning, and autonomous learning in the third paragraph of his conclusion. I believe that could be realized with teaching rubric and using them to orientate and assess students work.

About happy teachers Bruno believes,teaching methods should be dynamic and teacher perpetually questioning their approaches to teaching, this is why I completely agree with the final statement of  his conclusion” Only teachers who question their current ways of teaching and want to do something different – to make student learning effective – will reap that joy”.

Bruno's study occurred in 2006 at a time when internet and ICT was less affordable to the general

public than today 2013. And EFL instructors in Burkina Faso are taught the same way they teach the students i.e just grammar basic not properly writing, speaking, listening and reading skills.

Luckily lot of positive chances are going on, private EFL schools well equipped are opening, virtual universities are training and recruiting, even many government run schools are provided with computer rooms with internet access.  

Kind Regards,

Mariam

week 3 news

After creating and using blog, I discovered the web research tips, and search engine with noodletools, along with many others like educationplanet.com and so on. The framework for designing lesson plan with ABCD was nonetheless important as well as the first step to the final project.
Now am glad to use delicious and also read and reflect on articles about the impact of internet in teaching listening skill with CALL, how each of these radio, video and internet are relatively important.
The difference between pedagogic preconceived input and authentic input in teaching listening.

Thankfully,
Mariam

The week 2 program is fruitful in that within few hours I crossed the line of profane internet user to become a specialist searcher to be with www.noodletools.com, Choose the Best Search for Your Information Needs,

 Web Searching Tech Tip .

With the first one I found the path way to specific research for universal topics and subjects of studies. The second one other than clarifying technical concepts appropriated for internet search provides access to various other interesting links.

Among these, teachers already know what links are likely to interest what students or what specific works.

The massive and diverse posts from participants contributed to display the contents of many other links, allowing everybody to complements and enrich what is found personally.

Writing objectives was not an easy task, for it is not easy to make the right choice about what to publish between the multiple activities and objectives we work with everyday.

Teachers' who are used to be in charge of teaching work don't always feel at ease in front of external observations of their work. 

Best Regards,

Mariam 

Hello Courtney

Hello this is my blog, I enjoyed the process and am happy to join the other bloggers.

Mariam