Monday, March 22, 2010

Reflection on My Words

My Words is fabulous to some extent. Here, I want to mention the two parts in it: Say it Right and Mark My Words.
As an English teacher from mainland China, I would recommend my students to make use of Say it Right, as the common problem of Chinese students learning English is their poor pronunciation. There is little opportunity for them to practice oral English with native speakers, and teachers do not have sufficient time to correct their pronunciation problems in class.
As to Mark My Words, I think it can help to share some burden of giving comments to every work. However, it may only be used to correct problems related to vocabulary or some common English usage. In the college, when we give comments to each one's writing, we often firstly judge from the perspective of whole structure and the relevance to the given topic. Vocabulary is lastly commented and often not much is commented on. And I don't think it's a good idea to give students a generalized comment as they may not read it at all. Teachers have to give university students specific comments.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Reflection on Liou's article

http://Liou,H.C (1994).Practical considerations for multimedia courseware development:An EFL IVD experience. CALICO Journal.11(3).47-74. (1994).
Liou addresses the practical considerations for multimedia courseware development through the exploration of the development of a piece of English as a foreign language interactive videodisc (IVD) courseware. The courseware consists of four units: an Introduction, Hyper script, Film Viewing, and Film Viewing with Instruction.

Actually, I agree with Allen's statement that video has a lot of advantages in language teaching. It can give students visual vision, present the students real life and offer variety and entertainment. It can arouse students'interests in language learning. Supported by video, class teaching and learning could be more vivid and fun.

I agree with Liou in that point that constrained by the six year obligatory high school English education has not prepared the students well for the language proficiency. Students have fewer opportunities to use the target language in real way. They are weak at speaking and listening. They are only learning the so-called dumb-English. Besides, the number of students per class in large, thus teachers don't have enough energy to supervise each perfectly well. IVD itself can not improve students’ language skills. It should be companied by a sound lesson plan, etc. Language teachers should keep pace with the changes in language learning; know how to well implement technology into teaching.