Reflection: Week 4

Dear All

Last week, I had a class with my thesis writing students. Among 20 students only 14 were present. Among them, only 5 students had e-mail and other nine did not have e-mails.

When I shared some websites including www.noodletools.com my students were really excited to go through them and find the topic and related literature for their research. They were excited because that was the first time in their life they have been exploring what they wanted to read with through technology. At least, they have started writing e-mails to me asking for the materials they need. Presently, they are going to cyber café (although we have 12-hour load-shedding) to download the materials and explore more materials for their research. Now, 8 students are in regular contact with me and sharing their ideas actively. However, some students are not able to manage to use technology.

In the same line, last week, we shared specific issues with our students and how these issues can be solved with technology. The major issues we discussed were as follows:

•Lack of motivation and research related knowledge.
•Use of mother tongue while learning English.
•Lack of access to technology.
•Lack of exposure to authentic materials.
•Low reading ability of students.
•Lack of responsibility for doing assignments.
•Lack of creativeness, critical thinking and skill to elaborate longer texts.
•Students do not have same level of English.
•Listening and reading texts may not be relevant to the interest of students.
•Issue of feedback.

Regarding the lesson plan, I could see some significant differences between the technology-integrated lesson plan and the one without technology. In the former, teachers have to mention the websites where the materials, which teachers use in the classroom, are available. The lesson plans we shared in the last week were all relevant to address the issues mentioned above. Overall, I learned how to prepare a lesson plan to teach different aspects and skills of language by using technology.
The important thing: we had an insightful discussion on how technology helps to develop reading and writing skills. The discussion was mainly on the ideas of Jarek (2000), Liao (1999), Belisle (1996) and Liang (2004). The most important thing I learned was the importance of e-mail to enhance reading and writing skills which I had never realised before. Through e-mails, students also share their culture with the friends from other cultures. At the same time, it helps them to develop free writing ability.

Moreover, I also learned how internet helps to develop extensive reading skill. It has been argued that since internet provides access to various texts like essays, book reviews, stories and so on, we can ask the students to go through them and analyse them from various perspectives. For example, we can ask them to read e-books and write the summary.

However, there are some fundamental issues emerged from the discussion. First, there is an issue of providing feedback (immediate feedback) to the students in their written work. This is a serious issue in the large class contexts. Another issue is the use of local culture – to what extent we can use local cultural texts in order to develop reading and writing skills of the students. Likewise, the debate of accuracy vs. fluency is there.

I had a wonderful week. What about you?
Cheers
Prem