Week 3: Delicious Food - a Feast for all

I started this week quite late as I enjoyed a 9 day holiday of Tet traveling around, visiting relatives and friends, going to pagodas with best wishes for a Lunar New Year full of happiness.

The workload I need to do in 3 days was huge but I did love this week assignments. CALL is great when integrating technology and internet in teaching and learning languages.

As Gong has quoted in his article "In second/foreign language classrooms, the CALL environment creates situations that stimulate interest, allows dialogue and communication, enhances reactivity, fosters a sense of personal worth, facilitates collaboration among students working together, permits rich learning experiences for all students and strengthens communication skills" (Borras 1993; Pennington 1995, 1996; Cameron 1999; Hardisty et al. 1989; Inoue 1999; Kohn et al. 1997; Powell 1998)

It is no doubt CALL will enhance the effectiveness of language learning in our technology Age.

I also created my own page to save link on http://www.delicious.com/. The first time ever I have my own stack without worrying of losing my bookmarks when my laptop goes wrong. It was amazing to visit my friends' pages. They introduced dozens of interesting and useful websites those I have been looking for long. I tried some especially on teaching pronunciation. "http://www.howjsay.com" introduced by Ky Nguyen is very useful for Vietnamese students as researches showed that one of the biggest problems we have in Vietnam is pronunciation. This could be explainable as Vietnamese pronunciation is something similar to French and Russian language when looking at the words people know how to speak them correctly. And in pronouncing a word, consonant endings and consonant cluster endings are not heard while in English it is very important factor to recognize the words. To pronounce these following words, for instance,:

wife /waif/

while /wail/

wise /waiz/

wine /wain/

white /wait/

wild /waild/

My non English major students tend to make it only as /WAI/ for all the above words. The comment:

- "Your /WAI/ tastes nice" could be very confusing as I often joked my students.

"http://www.howjsay.com" will be more than helpful to my students to self teach their pronunciation.

The hardest job of the week was making comments on the past project report. It was really hard but also very interesting. I could somehow imagine what my final report could be after reading all of the 8 reports. I did enjoy the one of Camelia "Final Project for Teens at the School with Classes I-VIII, Academician Marin Voiculescu, Giurgiu, Romania". I learned a lot from the way of integrating technology and web-skills into language learning, the way of motivating and encouraging the students to collaborate in learning.

I am eager to try some new ideas on the coming week as I am enjoying the last day of a long TET holiday in Vietnam.

Nice weekend to all,

Week 2: ABCD: measurable objectives

Jones, 1997 – "Clear objectives can help the instructor design lessons that will be easier for the student to comprehend and the teacher to evaluate".

Our course is getting more interesting in week 2. ABCD model offers a good way of setting and evaluating my objectives. At times, I expected too much from the students and forget a very simple thing: "What do I really expect the students to have after each lesson?". To teach a very first lesson, Was I too greedy to talk over on what to be called "contrastive analysis" of greetings between cultures?. My lessons were like preaches on MY understanding of greetings of those countries I have been to or read somewhere. As the result, the students were listening "eye-opened" and had almost no chance to practise. I thought it was a successful lesson. By that way, I make them admire me with the experiences I had not the way I give them the tool to survive in the English speaking world.

I just forget a simple thing that the KEY objective of the lesson is to give them the ways of greetings and motivate them to practice, to create a safe "swimming pool" in the heat of summer for first time "swimmers" to jump into. Analysis and Positive comments could go after the last person in the class has raised her voice.

The Condition plays a very important part to the Behavior of the Audience in making the Degree of Master. Teachers should be the catalysts that help make good learners. 

Well, this is somewhat I understood from ABCD model and I do hope to have your sharing.

Week 1: New experience

Here, in Vietnam, it is not surprising to see a person with 2 or even more smart phones, an ipad and a laptop. And it is also a shock to a lot of foreigners to know that they can access free wireless Internet at every corner of the big cities. In my university, free wireless connection was offered since 2006 to provide the students with the best conditions of searching and browsing our Libol (library online). I was told about blogging dozens of times with lots of invitations to join some social communities like yahoo 360, twitter, facebook... from my students and friends.

Yet, I never thought about joining one before registered this webskills course.  I thought it would be a waste of time sitting in front of the laptop talking to people I do not know much. My key prupose of surfing was to look for the teaching resources and reading articles and news.

A bit funny when I started to creat my own blog today as I did what I assumed nonsense just a few days ago. To be honest, the feeling of my first date was recalled. I am excited with a bit nervous writing the first blog of my life.

Well, This is my New Experience.

Personally, I suppose that blogging could be a good way to approach students. Why I use the term of "Approach"? There has been a GAP between the students and the teachers for long in Vietnam. In some schools in big cities, "student-centeredness" was talked, new methods were applied, "prolem-based learning" was introduced and brought into practice elsewhere. However, in most parts, "Grammar-focused", "teacher-centered" "Teacher - students - Board and Chalk" ... are still dominant. Reluctant speakers, Grammar-contented tests, exam-passing motivation.... are the issues and topics of thousands of talks, discussions. The situation of English teaching is gradually improved. And if we look at the bright side, there have been a number of positively remarkable changes. And since the students can share and can be shared with the blogs, it helps teachers to have a closer look on "need analysis" and "learners' psychology" to form flexible teaching methods that suit both the core curriculum with the institution's objectives and the expectations from the learners' perspectives.

It is a little bit too much for a new blogger right? Hope to have your frank comments.