The following useful websites are listed for English learning
1. English Daily : the website provides different kinds of categories for English learning such as conversation, vocabulary and some American idioms
2.BBC learning English : interesting topics for training listening
3.Guide to grammar and writing : it includes lots of components that are helpful to English writing
4. Everyday English in Conversation : the website focus on learning idiomatic and everyday expressions
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
by Benjamin Franklin
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
by William Arthur Ward
As an English teacher, I hope my students not just follow what I told them. Through actively participate in class activities and discussions, students could develop their own critical thinking ability to become independent learners. The role of the teacher is to engage students in learning by incorporating their life experiences into teaching to make the language input meaningful rather than discrete things to students. In my opinion, learning by doing is a significant method for them to get knowledge effectively.
Kern, R. (2006). Perspectives on technology in learning and teaching languages. TESOL Quarterly, 40 (1), 183-210.
Some theories and critical issues are raised in the journal to discuss the status of technology in language learning and teaching. In the beginning, the definition of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) was confined to “applications of the computer.” Then the role of computer-assisted language learning changes to a broader one that it refers to the relationship between computer technologies and language learning. However, Zhao (2003) pointed out some questions of effectiveness of technology such as definition of technology and influence of other mediating factors by doing meta-analysis. The responses to these issues are that it is not the technology itself that is effective or ineffective but the particular ways in which the technology is used. Based on the description, the key point is that how we use technologies effectively and efficiently to facilitate our teaching and learning. In recent years, the research of CALL has been primarily on concordance and corpus analysis.
After reading the article, I get some reflection about computer-assisted language learning. Corpus is a very useful tool that can help learners to check some collocation and word frequency. However, it is not widely applied into our English classes in Taiwan. In my opinion, English teachers should not be confined to materials that are designed by publishers but have to provide more authentic contexts and materials for students to know. In that case, corpus would be helpful. Nowadays, because technologies develop rapidly, learners easily have access to a variety of multimedia and websites. Technologies serve as a main channel for them to have instantaneous communication and receive feedback. Therefore, language learning will not only occur in the classroom but also exist in daily life interaction. Nevertheless, the Internet is full of too much information regardless of positive or negative. Sometimes the information on the Internet may mislead their learning. In short, technology would assist language learning but we should determine how to employ it carefully.
Goh, C.,& Taib, Y. (2006). Metacognitive instruction in listening for young learners.ELT Journal,60(3), 222-232
The article describes how the process-based activities are used to elicit the primary school pupils’ metacognitive knowledge in listening. Metacognition involves some elements such as person knowledge, task knowledge and strategy knowledge. It also contains sequence of activities to engage students in planning, monitoring and evaluating some strategies that are developed to complete the listening tasks. There are three stages of conducting process-based listening. The first stage is to think aloud what they have already known about the topics. It could activate students’ background knowledge to help their listening comprehension. The second stage is individual reflection regarding mental process of listening. The last part is students’ self-report and group discussion about their use of various strategies to cope with listening tasks. Through metacognitive instruction, students’ anxiety could be reduced and self confidence would be promoted. However, more self-introspection and teachers’ modeling are recommended to benefit those young learners.
According to my role as an English learner or an English teacher, listening is not taught explicitly by teachers in junior and senior high schools. Generally speaking, teachers just train students’ listening ability by giving lots of input and asking them to do listening tests without providing some useful skills or strategies for students to follow. Thus, students have no ideas about how to master the content to catch the main gist. To help students with listening difficulties, teachers can lead students to do pre-listening, listening and post-listening activities. For example, in pre-listening phase, teachers could introduce some relevant background of the topic to have them prepared. In listening phase, teachers could provide top-down and bottom-up strategies like take notes to help them deal with the content. Different kinds of listening would focus on various aspects so it is important for students to learn how to get main points efficiently and pay attention to specific information at the same time. It really takes time to practice such skills. In post-listening phase, students can discuss and share their own reflection with others. By examining their process of listening activities, students may find and employ a suitable way to improve listening ability.
James, H., (2011). 'Small Talk': developing fluency, accuracy, and complexity in speaking.ELT Journal, 66(1), 30-41.
The struggling situation of contemporary language teaching in speaking is that how to foster students’ oral ability by focusing on both accuracy and fluency. From the perspectives of Communicative Language Teaching, teachers paying attention to authentic communication will not emphasize the accuracy. However, too much corrective feedback may cause students’ anxiety. The study proposes “small talk” to solve the dilemma of teachers. It is a learner-centered methodology that develops accuracy, fluency and complexity in oral production. During the process, the teacher just observes the communication of small groups and provides some suggestions without intervention. “Small talk” gives students a relaxing and low-stress environment to practice their oral ability particularly for those non-fluent students. After small talk, students are encouraged to do self-correction. Finally, the results show that learners not only speak more but also make fewer errors than those teacher-controlled activities.
The English learning environment in Taiwan is academic-oriented and students’ oral production is always ignored by English teachers. Therefore, students seldom have opportunities to practice and interact with classmates in formal classes. It also leads to some low proficiency students are afraid of speaking English. They have high anxiety and lack motivation to face challenge. In my opinion, in order to help those learners, teachers could adopt the way suggested in the article. Teachers can assign students to different heterogeneous groups to have discussion with higher level students. Through cooperative learning, maybe students are more willing to share their ideas and opinions with peers. In addition, interesting discussion topics could be used to attract students’ attention. The role of teacher is a facilitator to monitor the activities and provide any guidance when they need. In terms of accuracy and fluency in speaking, if English is used for daily life communication, teachers could put more emphasis on fluency to develop students’ confidence. In contrast, for some academic purposes or advanced learners, accuracy would become important. However, there are also some limitations that teachers would encounter when implementing small talk. It takes a lot of time to conduct this activity so probably other factors should be taken into consideration and schedule arrangement becomes more crucial.
Firkins, A., Forey, G., & Sengupta, S. (2007). Teaching writing to low proficiency EFL students. ELT Journal,61(4), 341-352.
The article talks about the combination of two explicit methodologies-genre-based and activity-based instructions to teach students with learning disabilities in EFL context in Hong Kong. The students with LD have difficulties in organizing texts and generating ideas of writing. Therefore, the genre-based approach was applied to provide students with an open dynamic system that language was presented in contexts. Thus, it could enhance low proficiency level students’ English writing ability. The teaching-learning cycle was introduced for teachers to help students’ learning through guidance and interaction. The cycle is consisted of modeling a text, joint construction of a text and independent construction of a text. The purpose of this cycle is to shift the responsibility from the teacher to the learners. By doing this way, students could gradually take care of their own learning. The activity-based approach was also developed to involve students in developing metacognitive awareness by doing role plays or physical activities. In addition, authentic materials are used as models because they relate to students’ life experiences. Through genre-based and activity-based approaches, students were able to construct procedural and information texts.
In the study, a clear teaching-learning cycle of genre-based instruction provides teachers a good method to assist those low proficiency students in writing. On my perspectives, I especially like the idea that teachers incorporate physical activities and authentic materials into students’ writing classes. Most of students in Taiwan are always asked to product an essay directly with little scaffolding from teachers or out of real life contexts. It will make them more anxious about writing and reduce their learning motivation. Furthermore, the proficiency gaps of students becomes wider and wider in a class, so it is challenging for teachers to design the writing materials to meet the needs of all students. Therefore, two ways of instruction shown in the study for teaching writing can be another choice for teachers. From the heterogeneous groups, students have opportunities to interact and discuss with peers. It would be easier for them to product their own work after teachers’ modeling and discussion.
Rupley, W. H., Blair, T. R. & Nichols, W. D. (2009). "Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: the role of direct/explicit teaching". Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25:125-138.
The article proposes that direct/explicit instruction is an effective way for struggling readers. The heart of direct/explicit instruction is that teachers provide some modeling or demonstration, guided practice and meaningful teacher-student interactions to guide students’ learning. A number of studies have claimed the importance of explicit instruction. The effective instruction recommended several components such as imparting new information to past learning, explaining useful skills and cognitive strategies to students, providing step-by-step explanations of modeling to engage students in reading texts. The active communication and interaction between teachers and students is integral part of the approach. During the process, by giving modeling and guided practice to students, teachers could conceptualize important reading skills and cognitive strategies to students. In this way, students could practice their reading ability in a variety of texts and groupings independently. Scaffolding in direct instruction allows teachers to transfer responsibility of learning to students gradually.
The majority of learning outcomes can be classified into skills and cognitive strategies. Skills consist of lower level cognitive processing and decoding methods like phonics, context analysis and sequential development. Cognitive strategies involve higher level processing such as predictions, summary and inference. Moreover, it is crucial for teachers to use appropriate materials to provide students opportunities to apply their skills and strategies into different kinds of reading texts. There is another point stated in the article that learning the ability of various word identification skills is necessary for comprehension. In addition to accuracy of identifying words, fluency of word identification is also important. Fluency is developed through abundant teacher-directed practice and successive exposure to reading. However, there is no formula for teachers to follow that how much time or instruction should be given to individual students. The answer to this question is that teachers have to understand individual differences to determine the amount of explicit instruction to students.
From this journal, I get some reflection about reading instruction. The article provides clear steps and some important features of explicit instruction. I think it is important for teachers to teach students some reading skills and strategies to master different reading texts especially for those low achievers. How to make active communication to students by providing scaffolding and develop them to become independent readers is a great challenge for teachers. Moreover, teachers should also pay attention to students’ individual differences to adjust their teaching formula to fit various types of students.
The teaching practice provided us a chance to rethink about the teaching materials design and how to achieve the goals and to meet the different needs of learners. The target students of our teaching are seven graders in junior high schools. Because of the tight schedule, we decided to use their textbooks as materials. The aim of the class is to teach students present progressive pattern to make them familiar with it through practices.We followed the procedure of 2W3P-warm up, presentation, practice, production and wrap up. The practices involved worksheets with the sentence pattern and oral production. The purpose of the worksheet is to check students’ comprehension about grammar usage. The activity is served as oral production and students could have more opportunities to communicate with their peers.
To be different from traditional instructions, we put the pattern into contexts to elicit students’ comprehension inductively. In my opinion, it is beneficial for learners to discover knowledge by themselves rather than making instructions directly. Therefore, a song with blanks regarding the target feature may activate students’ motivation. It is also a chance to train learners’ listening ability. However, some students with low proficiency felt that it was too difficult. To solve the problem, we divided students into several heterogeneous groups and then those high achievers could provide some scaffolding for the low achievers. From the evaluation of students, some of them said that they hoped the teachers could use more Chinese in the classroom. In this way, they could easily understand what they had to do. However, there were still a lot of students expressed their positive attitudes toward using English in the classroom. They could accept that the teacher used English to explain the sentence patterns and rules of the activity. Moreover, they were also willing to communicate and perform in English. The different attitudes toward English use from the students may relate to their previous English learning experiences.
The impressive part of the class was the activity. Because the tight schedule of the school, students seldom have opportunities to do activities in their regular classes. It was a good chance for them to practice their English and cooperate with other classmates. But here comes another problem. Not all students in the class could communicate with their group members effectively. Some students may feel shy or anxious when they worked with peers they were not very familiar with. After the practice teaching, I find it is difficult and challenging for teachers to design a class integrating four skills. The materials should be arranged in a logical sequence and everything should be well-prepared. Something unexpected may happen in your teaching process so teachers had better prepare another plan in advance. It is very important for teachers to have good ability in time arrangement. We prepared a variety of activities to do but time was limited. At the end of the class, we did not have enough time to complete the activity and it forced us to extend our teaching time. Thus, we ended the class in a hurry. From students’ feedback, they hoped that teachers could spend more time doing activities and provide more classes with interaction.
For me, it is really a special teaching experience by designing materials and some class activities. Students also have positive feedback of this class. However, some disadvantages need to be improved such as time management, interaction between students and materials design. I think that I need more practice to accumulate my teaching experiences.
1. What is AntConc or AntWordProfiler (or other software) you found on Prof. Anthony’s website?
AntCons is a corpus tool that includes various functions such as word frequency, cluster and lexical bundle analysis and word distribution plot. Moreover, unlike other corpora aimed at researchers or only some specific tasks, AntConc is designed for use in the classroom and it is a freeware application. It also provides a powerful concordancer and is easy for users to familiarize the interface.
2. How can we use them in our English teaching?
AntConc involves a concordancer could be applied to language teaching in learning vocabulary, collocations, grammar and writing. We can search for certain keywords or phrases that we want from lots of data and to find how frequent they appear in different contexts. It is very useful and important for teachers and students to get several collocations and patterns to facilitate their knowledge in reading and writing. For advanced learners, they could acquire some practical patterns for academic writing in specified field through searching files by concordancer.
Define these two terms & What are the differences between the two approaches?
1.The distinction between "focus on form" and "focus on formS" was first made by Michael Long (1988, 1991), a professor of second language acquisition at the University of Maryland. Focus on forms means that teachers focus learning on formal linguistic features and isolate from context or communicative activities. On the other hand, focus on form entails a focus on formal elements of language within communicative language teaching environment.
2.Ellis (2001) also claimed that students view themselves as learners of a language and the language as an object of the study in focus on fromS approach. However, learners view themselves as language users and the language is viewed as a tool for communication in focus on form approach.
3.Focus on fromS approach provides learners with explicit and isolated grammar instruction to master linguistic items to reach native speakers’ levels. Focus on form provides some types of corrective feedback which is arisen incidentally to remain learners’ attention on meaning in a communicative context.
Community learning is a new concept in Taiwan which switches the class focus from teachers to learners and develops learning autonomy of students. The role of teachers becomes a facilitator rather than just an instructor. Teachers provide some basic and important concepts for students in the beginning of the class and then divide them into several groups to discuss and exchange ideas or experiences with each other. Through this way, students will not escape from learning and low-achievers have chances to promote their abilities or sense of achievement by cooperating with others. In addition, schools are shared by students, teachers and even parents. Learning community puts more emphasis on interactions between peers to form a dynamic learning process.
PISA ( Programme for International Student Assessment ) is a cross countries assessment that takes place every three years to evaluate worldwide of 15-year-old students in the field of reading, mathematics and sciences. The purpose of the assessment is to test students’ abilities to deal with problems and to incorporate what they have learned into authentic situations. The results are provided for countries to reflect their own educational systems and effectiveness.
Community learning provides us some implications about teaching. Teachers should give more space to students for problem-solving and critical thinking not just showing them principles to follow. Education can create a variety of possibilities so teacher-centered instruction may confine learners’ creativity and innovation. For teachers, interaction with students is another way of learning. With regard to PISA, it is a way for us to reflect our teaching including materials, methods and assessment. Most of students in Taiwan just study for exams, not actually thinking about what they have learned and what should be learned.
