Task 2----Drawing on your experience at your university, where do the language learning tasks (ideally that involve IT) fall on the flexibility continuum? Give one or more examples to illustrate. Can tasks that are "liberated" or "free" be easily incorporated into your teaching?
As far as my university---Xianyang Teachers' College is concerned, we have equipped quite a lot of multimedia rooms, but the traditional classroom with blackboards and chalk still dominate.
For our English department, we are required to lecture in the multi-media rooms. But the fact is we are using IT for the sake of it. In considering the 4-point flexibility continuum, it seems to me that point 1 is far beyond our reach and concern. We are now at point 3, only few of the courses are at point 2.
To be specific, I give the following examples.
1. In listening class, the teachers use tapes and CD-ROMs , while students passively listen to the contents. The teacher would repeatedly play the difficult part. This is the typical listening class in my school. The main purpose is to finish the listening material.
2. In reading and writing class, quite often the teachers don't use computer instead of the writing the notes in the board. Sometimes, the PPT slides are prestented for the main contents
3. We have the video-audio-speaking course in which I think IT is integrated fully to add value to the language teaching. In class, the teacher plays the video, students listen to it and respond to the questions and discuss with classmates based on the video.
However, on the whole, the class is more closed and teachers have more power control. Therefore, the 'free' and "liberate' tasks are difficult to incorporate in the teaching.
6 comments:
I agree with you that "the 'free' and 'liberate' tasks are difficult to incorporate" in our prestent teaching practice, but i don think your university at least several footsteps in front of us. Therefore, i suppose both teachers and students in your school could have,comparatively speaking, more flexibility in teaching and learning than teachers and students in our university, where we only have access to some language labs. It is really a great pity we even don't have any access to Internet in our office, which indeed I feel great shameful in talking about it since almost all the teachers in our class not only access to Internet but have Internet a part of their teaching and lives.
I see how far our school lag behind others. What I, as an individul and ordinary teacher can do is trying making best use of language lab and classrooms to make my classroom activities and tasks interesting and effective.
On the other hand, it is not such a bad thing that we don't have all those modern facilities. As I posted in my blog, our students get used to relying on teachers, though this is not good. Thus we need to take time to adjust ourselves into teaching and learning in a more flexible way as mentioned in the textbook.
You needn't feel ashamed. This is not your problem, at least you are trying your best to teach your students.
What's more, everything is changing. It will not take a long time for your school to keep up with the other schools. At that time, you will become the expert in your school. Something bad will become good again, do you think so?
Yes, even though we can't use the technology now, it's really good for us to keep pace with the development. After all, we all know in the near future, we can get access to all these modern technology.
I still remember that when I just began my work as ta teacher, we only have blackboard and chalks in the classroom. But now we must use computer.
That is the situation that we face in our daily teaching at universities in China. This is not because we teachers do not accept these new things, it's mainly because of the limitation of money. At least for me, i like to make my class interesting and informative with the help of IT. Hope we can realize this soon.
Sorry, I haven't finished my comments.
I want to say that at the very begining, some of the old teachers in my university can not use PPT well, but now they all use it in the classroom teaching. I mean, the important thing is we all want to learn and we know that could benefit us and our students.
So dear Yanping, you should not feel sad by saying your school lag behind others. As long as we keep learning, I am sure we all could make it.
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