Week 4 Teaching The four Skills through the web

Week Four: We have been busy reading various articles related to the four skills, mainly Reading, Writing and also the subskill of teaching vocabulary.

Two of such articles I have read focus respectively on reading and reviewing articles about the teaching of reading and writing. The first article about writing by (Jarek & al), Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction, makes a brief summary of previous reseach done in the field of  writing in C.A.L.L. Then its writers address a few issues that impact on CALL implemention. Those include, the classroom settings, the techology materials available, the classroom teaching hours. With respect to the latter, the writer suggests that 4 to six hours be used to teach writing online to secondary school students.
Some advantages to using C.A.L.L for writing in the classes are manifolds. I do aggree with (Jarek & al), who believe that: First it helps to break from classroom routine. Second it brings authenticity in the class. It can promote peer reviewing and collaboration. The reason is the internet abound with suitable resources and webpages with ready made reading activities. The multi-skill building websites we have been referred to includes many of such examples. The http://www.rong-chang.com/reading.htm website and manythings.org are a few of these. Second, the variety of resources will enable the learners to exploit them individually and share with the class. 

But teaching writing specially with large classes poses that problem of giving approriate and timely feedback to the students. This challenge looms up at the very beginning for the preparation of CALL writing instruction. Most of the time the teacher has to help or set up  accounts for all the studetnts. As this may be daunting the teacher should resort to other methods of managing the accounts. This can be detremental to the amount of practice the students may receive. 

The approach  for the improvement of writing is oriented to the genre. Below is a list of genres mentioned

 

•  Letter writing (Friendly) 
• Formal letter (reaction to an issue) Biography 
• Argumentative Essay writing: (For or against) 
• Festival and ceremony description 
• Book or film review 
• Newspaper report

 

Three techniques that can be used to enhance students' perfomance in writing include: Emailing, key paling and webpublishing, according to the authors' article. I particularly find Key paling very interesting and motivating for student. It involves students to exchange or collaborate with their peers from  different horizons. Howver careful planning can be crucial for the success of such activities.  

The second paper I read is entitled Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books. The article taps through the different possibilites teachers can use ebooks to improve the reading skill. It follows the pattern of choosing, reading and evaluating. 

CHOOSING

1. The teacher provides links to a certain number of ebooks.
2.  The students use a study guide temple to decide on the choice of three books. 
3. The students vote for the three best books to read. 

READING

1. In groups of three, the students use the study guide to exploit book
2.  Students read and report online or in class

EVALUATION

1. Groups review the books according to a standard
2. Groups give feedback online

from  Mei-Ya Liang's article Three Extensive Reading Activities

Note on the readings and my Technology Enhanced Lesson Plan:

Among the assignments this week we were required to compose a lesson plan, using a template. My lesson plan draws many ideas from what I have read. It's a blend of ideas from both articles.  The lesson plan was aimed at teaching writing with a Pre-intermedate class. Following a genre approach I target a website with biographies. Then I tried to use it a first hand resource for the students.  In groups, students  will have to read a biography and complete a chart which will enable them to rewrite the biography without copying whole passage. In a final step, they will have to discuss in group to submit an online survay which will serve as a review for another groups biography. 

Seeing the Big picture of Webskills Projects Building

This third week in our webskills class was the occasion to skim through the previous projects reports to see what has been achieved in terms of teaching through the webskills. 

The Learners:

The target populations of the projects is various diverse. They range from k12 to post graduate students and in service professionals. Likewise the social and educational backgrounds of the students are diverse.

 Below is a recaputilative table of the students target populations

Age group	Number	AGE in years	SCHOOLING
teen	24	15 – 16	Grade 9 technical school
teen	30	12 -13	unspecified
adults	20	unspecified	master
Teens and Adults	80	17-24	Grade 13
adults	16	19-30	undergraduate
adults	22	unspecified	Graduate and post graduate
adults	35	22-23	Master

Common aspects:

The classroom settings is one common feature. Often, teachers who have worked on the project have relatively acceptable numbers of students in the classes. It is far more acceptable compared to Senegalese settings.

Different aspects:

A major difference between the projects can be related to the type of learners needs. When young learners acquire basic level skills (reading, speaking, writing, listening, adults are seeking assistance are more learning for professional needs, hence; the orientation towards more general or meta skills like reseaching, teaching. 

 Issues raised in the projects:

 The issues raised in learning include:

• improving grammar practice inside and outside the class (Linares, Honduras) 
• building  writing skills (Nikiema, Burkina Faso) 
• building speaking and writing skills(zubel, poland) 
• providing distance online support and capacity building for teachers (Reddy, South Africa) 
• building students confident through task based communicative project (Niccolici, Poland) 
• addressing multiple intelligences  through web based actitives (Pagila, Romania) 
• developing research and accademic writing skills (Phyak, Nepal)

After reading the reports, even though few have attempted to integrate the speaking skills in in terms of pronunciation at K12 in the project, it appears that most projects deal more with production reading or writing. This is to consolidate the view that teaching speaking through the web remains a major challenge. 

Approaches:

Two tools that have been mostly used are  blogging  and webquests. Other options include emailing, google website, nicenet discussion,

Projects cycle:

NB: It's interesting to note that the material design and implementation process phases can be sometimes fuzzy as, some projects approached teaching from the "learning by doing" apporach. This made the the students part of the design and implementation process. The teacher is not the only creator.

Week 2: Classroom Action Research

C.A.R. Classroom Action Research
The 3eme class is roughly equivalant to an 8 grade class. In their 4th year at middle school, students of this class  are preparing for a major National Exam called BFEM. The English Exam has 2 parts. A reading comprehension grade which is out of 20 and an oral grade which is out of 20. About 5 points are alloted to writing in the reading comprehension test.  Here is an except or 3 pages out of 4 of the 3eme class syllabus. It follow a functional, notional approach. Only the language items without the mentions of (3eme) are supposed to be dealt with in previous classes. The 3eme students are expected to have an adequate pre-intermediate competence in Engglish. In term of course book use. Teachers use a wide range of books, the most common are Go for English 3eme, Keep in Touch 3eme, Stay Tuned 3eme.

Building linkages between Teaching principles and 21st C Classroom practice

OBJECTIVES IN INSTRUCTION:

Learning Theories and principles aim at bridging the gap between instruction and practice. In lesson planning, objective statements play a major part. By analogy we can say that clear objectives writing in lesson planning is to classroom instruction what a constitution is to a republic. They both throw a light on the foundations of good practices upon which actions are to be validated and disfunctioning or misapplications to be assessed.

There are many arguments that support clear and appropriate statements of objectives in instruction. This is being discussed by the article the "best choice according ... to experts".  Objective statement helps  to match teaching practice and final outcomes.    It can help learning less alienating as students enter in a classroom with some expectations, and learners, specially adults can gain more focus and attention  by knowing the lessons ojectives 

The ABDC objective model is mainly centered around four criteria, however there are some essential principles of Blooms taxonomy that underlie the conception and application of this model .

 A for Audience: When writing objectives, it is essential to mention who each lesson is intented for. Instruction content is based on students' needs. Also, according to type of students, the teacher will have to focus teaching on specific aspect. This is particularly important because in some teaching contexts some teachers are left to design courses from scrcatch with little or no information about syllabus. This is when Bloom's taxonomy or one of its revised form" come into play. Bloom's taxonomy helps to categories the learning domains into: Afective, Psychomotor and Cognitive. Therefore, the teacher can tally the students needs to the different learning domains and project the effective instructional materials and evaluations.

B for Behavior. Understanding Bloom's taxonomy is also key to the second criterion of the ABDC model.
 Whenever writing objectives, the teacher must ensure to include the behavior which the students should be performing. Accoording to Bloom's taxonomy, for learning to take place, the learner should be performing certain task which can be categories into LOT ( low thinking orders and HOT  (high thinking order). This is expressed in terms of verbs which the process can be (seen or smell, or heard). From a behaviorist point of view learning has not taken place until behavior is change. Adding a behavior criterion helps to track progress an change in action.

C for condition: One assumption of the ABDC model is that any learning that has to take place is subject to certain conditions. These can be the enrironmental, time, number of activities.

D refers to the level of performance at which the teacher expects the learner to succeed a given task after instruction. This has to do judging a successful teaching practice. It's important to state to what extent the students are expected to succeed with respect to the targeted learning outcomes.

The cornerstone of many approaches to learning is Bloom's taxonomy. One of its merits is to map out the learning domain and categorize learning behaviors in observable active processes. Through the years, the orignal taxonomy has been revised  in the 1990s by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) and more recently revisited by A Churches to encompass the new trends and learning behaviours. These have been referred to as Bloom's revised Taxonmy and Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. If we look at the behaviors describes in the three taxonomies we remark that besides the previously stated learning processes, the digital digital taxonomy offers a great deal of new skills and behaviors to explore. Being apple to succesfully integrate these new learning dimensions in teaching  is the stake in learning and teaching. As a teacher who is enrolled in this course the challenge is to integrate these technology related behaviors and processes in our teaching to meet our learners needs and our educational phylosophies in this century.