THIRD REFLECTIVE JOURNEY...

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.  ~Clay P. Bedford

 

The third week for me was a very busy week. I were busy on completing all the assignments of second's and third's week. While talking about the third week's assignments, we had three assignments: creating delicious page, Oral/Aural skill building discussion and at last project work step two. www.delicious.com is a site where we can add many link of the websites. For me, it is very helpful as I were worried of bookmarking things. I couldn't remember important websites for the long time. That's why, I would add those websites whether in my favorite page or pin to start but it would make my Laptop slow. So, delicious site is worthy for me, I learnt important and new things.

Then, in the next step we had discussion on oral/aural skill building. It was about reading the articles about CALL for listening, speaking and pronunciation skills. I read two articles "The pedagogy-technology interface in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training" by A. Neri, C. Cucchiarini, H. Strik, L. Boves and "Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials" by Lindsay Miller. The first article examines the relationship between pedagogy and technology in computer assisted Pronunciation Training, its limitations and some recommendations. I like the way this article propose of practicing CAPT through Input, output, and feedback. It is obvious that the more we get input the more we learn. The more we are competent the more we feel easy for the output. And definitely feedback is the most of making our learning effective and to be competent in our area. In my view, CAPT helps to learn in a private and stress free environment where pupils can practice as many time as they want. It is accessible for unlimited input. The Students get feedback by ASR and improve next time as this article believes. It is one of the most important way of improving pronunciation of non-native speakers as they face many problems in giving stress, intonation and pronunciation.

The second article "Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials" by Lindsay Miller is one very important article. I felt like I share it with my friends who are conducting research on listening. It would be great source for their literature review. It is true that if we go for the literature on listening, we can rarely find it. Very few researches have been done in this field. In my country, especially secondary level students are week in listening test. They don't practice listening skills in their classroom. Teachers seem not aware of its importance. Very few workshops and trainings address the issues of listening. According to Millar (2003) "It is indeed interesting that listening has not received wider attention in the past given that it is the language skill most often used in everyday life. In further discussion, more than forty percent of our daily communication time is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, sixteen percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing (Burely-Allen 1995 as cited in Miller, 2003)". It shows that how important is listening in our life but why is it neglected?

In the same way, as a third assignment we had to read one sample project report and comment on that report in nicenet. I found all reports useful for us to understand the situation of different countries. Among the articles, I chose the article of Prem Phyak because it was a report of Nepal. I'm grown up facing the same problems as Mr. Phayak said in his report; problems of load shedding, no easily accessible of Internet, huge numbers of students, lecture methods of teaching learning etc. The overarching goal of this research was to help students develop their academic writing and research skills. It includes: identifying research problem, specifying a research topic, identifying and reviewing the literature, designing appropriate research methodology and tools, collecting and analyzing data, writing a thesis and preparing bibliography. Likewise, the specific goals of this research was going through various websites, reading the articles and review them , reading the chapter on research design method, going through the readings from different websites he has included in his report, reading APA style at noodle Tools. To address the goals of the above objectives different websites are necessary which we can find in his report. First of all he surveyed the students need and conducted the focus group discussion before designing the course. Based on survey he designed research questions which are as follows:
How to help students to access more resources for their research?
Why do they always ask for research topic to the supervisor but do not fix themselves?
Why are they not able to find and review the literature related to their study?
Why they are not motivated to explore more materials for their research?
How can they improve their academic writing and research skills?

At first, he shared the course with the students (20 students under his supervision, 5 of them were in-service teachers, among 15, only 11 students were doing their research work, other 4 students had deferred for the next term). He suggested them to open an e-mail ID either in Google or yahoo. He also taught them how to do it in the classroom by using wireless internet (using modem) for those who did not have e-mail yet. He would meet with students twice a week to review their progresses and for the further plan. Slowly, he taught them to create blog, to update the blog and introduced many useful websites. At the end of the research, he analyzed the outcomes from students' responses and from his reflections. Below are his findings:

Technology used by students: Most of the students started to use email, Google and some started updating the blog of their reflection and started to search ELT related sites.
Usefulness of technology for learning and teaching: Students believed that there are many advantages of technology.
Technology for research skill: All students agreed that technology helps to develop their research skill and started to surf related websites.
Technology for academic writing skill: Phayak that they are doing better in their academic writing.
Changes made: Previously students would feel difficulty following his instruction but at the last of the research they started being familiar with Internet. Some students started blogging, surfing related websites, started to use mail id etc.

In the country like mine only learning to use mail id is also enough for some teachers. I'm blessed with the effort of Mr. Phayak; he contributed a lot for the progression of technology in my country.

He did for twenty ELT Practitioners. Those twenty may do for other twenty. In this way our county may go ahead in technology. One true reality; it was the case of 2010 but after 3 years now in 2013 I think 60% of the village teachers are also aware of such technology because many projects has been implemented in this regarding field. They have a slogan of "A laptop per students" and they are doing well too. They are distributing computers in schools of village. This is one positive aspect to develop technology in my country. I like the research report of Phayak which is very interesting to read, knowledgeable (I got to know many new websites which I wouldn't use) and contextual as well. But he has addressed the objectives of 1, 2 and 6 number. I felt like it would be better and more effective if he had addressed all the objectives of research.

In this way, we came at the end of the third week.

Thank you.