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 7th grade level to 13th 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
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