An interesting visit and English language learning

A visit to the Hong Kong Museum of History has been so informative to me and made me think about some task-based approaches of teaching English through this visit. Let me give a brief account of my visiting experience before moving on to the teaching reflection.

The tour to the museum was quite pressed with time as I had not finished all parts of exhibition on the two floors. Yet I did focused on some bits of the items such as the wedding costumes of the early 20th century, the fishermen’s life on boats, and the downtown life of people in between the 1930’s and 1970’s, and so on.

We can actually do an exercise of recounting a story with photos and text support. The students select one favorite historical event or object, recounting the history presented on the photos or in the instructions. Also, we can connect the history with our present life by comparing similar places, objects and the like. For example, the old tram presented in the museum is an early model of those still in service on the Hong Kong Island. They have similarity in the double-deck structure, and enormous differences in the internal design.

Another example is the bank notes issued in the old days. See the 500-dollar bill by HSBC in the 1930’s and the one used today, how are they different from each other?

Students can also work in groups to make a presentation of their discovery in the museum. Of course, the novel things they found and the ways they presented their findings will be marked.

The Risky Sports in the Winter Olympics

This is another good topic for learning English. I myself watched all video clips about the total 15 sports on http://www.vancouver2010.com/. What I can do with the video clips is to introduce one sport to my classmates in my own words. For example, skeleton, as well as luge and bobsleigh, are dangerous sports in which the racers ride at a speed as high as 140 km/h! This speed can cause fatal accident! And as I know, the young Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili died in a luge crash as a result of just a slightly late action. So I believe that the whole track should be equipped with protective facilities to protect the participants.

Why not Both

The dichotomy of proceduralist’s and formalist’s views of CALL evaluated in Levy’s article should be carefully applied to practice. The fact is that while many ESL/EFL classrooms in China or in Hong Kong are poorly supported by computers, and students may spend plenty of time in front of computer screens at home or elsewhere. Obviously, computer games have a special charm to the youths, but also take away a lot of their precious time. Both proceduralists and formalists should take into account the fact that no single theory or programme can cope with the needs of the diversified characteristics of the learners. Some students, for example, can be easily distracted by sounds, images and so on, because they have more interest in receiving information from the computer screens than in producing information. These students can easily get adapted to tasks that require less productive skills than receptive tactics.


I would encourage a flexible way of language learning by both productive and receptive tasks, given that the latter can be more important for the students’ future development. By assigning a task of playing second life, for example, I would like to keep a travel journal, narrating the places I visited in the virtual world. The narration, together with screen prints, can be uploaded onto my blog, or Voicethread where all students in my class share their own experiences. I can also evaluate the work of my classmates on the Voicethread, and give comments to their work. That can be a lot fun! In a word, theories are indispensible for CALL practice, while new technologies should also be tried in ESL/EFL teaching plans.

A thorough literature review on computer games
Liberman (2006) is a thorough review of the literature regarding the effects of playing computer games. The author categorizes the literature from nine perspectives: motivation to learn, perception and coordination, thinking and problem solving, knowledge, skills and behaviours, self-regulation and therapy, self-concepts, social relationships, and attitudes and values. Under each category, he gives a detailed review of relevant studies and articles.


I would like to take a closer look at what have been done on analysing how games influence players’ thinking and problem-solving abilities. Prensky suggests that ‘games with puzzles and complex questions may improve player’s ability to think logically and tactically. Simulation games can enhance scientific thinking,…and adventure games may increase…skills in observation, analysis of systems, and coaching of others’ (Liberman, 2006, p.384) Studies also found the effects of games on self-directed learning. Players pay attention, monitor and evaluate their own actions. Besides, games also have the backwash of self-monitoring, pattern recognizing, and so on.


All these studies seem to have pointed to the promising future of games as a new revolution of learning and teaching. But is it computer games facilitate learning and self-development, or those available people just demonstrate their various abilities through playing games? It is not uncommon that clever boys and girls are more skilful in not only school performance, but also a good variety of off-curriculum activities. Games are a platform for those youngsters to show off their talent. There are still so many students underperformed in school study because of their addiction to computer games. This means that, although games are potential means of education, more efforts should be made by researchers and educators on how and when to use games for teaching purposes.

Reference

Lieberman, D. (2006) What can we learn from playing interactive games? In Vorderer & Bryant(eds.) Playing video games: Motives, responses and consequences. p.379-397. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,Inc.,Publishers.

Bloom’s taxonomy model at Texas A&M University

A short visit to the Second Life Virtual Texas A&M University (Aggieland) last night was quite informative and exciting to me, as I encountered a model block pile of the Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, teaching and assessing. This block was located in the northeast corner of the virtual campus. It demonstrates clearly how knowledge and cognitive progress accumulate in our mind. Knowledge can be divided into four levels: factual, conceptual, procedural and metacognitive, while the cognitive progress is composed with the six stages of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. A view from the knowledge dimension shows that remembering a fact can be exemplified with listing primary and secondary colors, and as the tier goes higher, evaluating a fact can be interpreted as checking the consistency of sources, so on so forth.
This model, including the examples for each block piece, can be used as an elicitation of further discussion by more advanced ESL learning students. They can be given a task of reflecting upon their own experience of learning, based on which they will identify the stages corresponding to those of the Bloom’s taxonomy model. Most important of all, the students may want to analyze why their knowledge or cognitive process stays at that level, and how, if possible, can they upgrade this knowledge to a higher level. This is very much a class of learning reflection taught in English, for which more possible resources can be found online for the students. For example, two resources at the Wikipedia websites are for further reading.
http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_Taxonomy

More wonderful experience
In my second visit to this place, I saw the person called Jim. He is in real life a faculty member and administrator at A&M. He and his friend spent more than two months creating the two islands of A&M campuses. He talked with me via ‘public voice’, and showed me how to add a landmark for a place. So, I learned that the landmark for Bloom’s taxonomy model is ‘Texas A&M University Second Life, 12th Man (157, 227, 26)’. And you are most welcome to visit this amazing model.

Review of Liang (2010)

The advantage of ‘prewriting and drafting’ (p.48) is that group members can discuss over their topic of writing and search resources online. With the immediate access to the Internet, brainstormed ideas can be further analysed or developed without delaying. Also, the group members are able to evaluate their peers’ idea lists, as well as the outlines of their issue paper. This activity is effective in the way that peer feedback and evaluation provide an opportunity for each student to think more deeply about their issue paper.
A phenomenon with synchronic computer mediated communication (SCMC) is that the students went off the topic of their task when talking online, as the three tables in Liang’s study (2010, p.51-53) show that the amount of exchanges on social talk and technical action is high across all groups of students. This means that a significant proportion of online communication is used for non-task purposes. For the purpose of revision teaching, the teacher should pull the students back onto the tasks by observing their communication, setting specific objectives for the discussion, and imposing time limits on their tasks. Another useful method for facilitating efficient communication is provided in the check list of questions (p.49-50). But the teacher should present different questions for checking at different stages. For example, questions on paper topic, titling, keywords, etc. can be given for prewriting checking, while questions about the content and language of the paper should be provided later.
The course in Liang’s study can also be simplified as a group project for advanced students. The target of the project is basically to strengthen the students’ writing ability through online collaboration. While the communicative tool can be chosen by different groups, the students’ revision-related and non-revision related discourse should be kept as records by the teacher. The teacher can evaluate the extent to which the students internalised the peers’ good use of language into their writing. Also, the peer students can share with each other their paper proposals or outlines so as to exchange ideas.

Reference
Liang,(2010),USING SYNCHRONOUS ONLINE PEER RESPONSE GROUPS IN EFL WRITING: REVISION-RELATED DISCOURSE. in Language Learning and Technology, 14(1), p45-64.

Roed's (2003) study and imporvement

Roed’s (2003) exploratory study on the text-based online communication is informative because a lot of merits can be found with such new approach of teaching English. One of the strength with virtual communication is obviously its absence of accents of the speakers. I well remember my fellow students in high school told me that they felt their accented English ‘unpleasant’ to the listeners, and thus unconfident to speak. Also, they felt that grammatical errors in their speech can be mocked at by their classmates. That is why many Chinese EFL learners spend most of the time listening in a spoken English training session.
While traditional classroom teaching may offer little help with this respect, Roed’s online communication treatment may be effective in eliciting more response from introvert students. What we can learn from Roed’s experiment is that teachers can provide the students with tasks that require information gap filling by text-based online communication.
However, several points need to be considered in the conducting of such activities. First, the students might easily go off the topic and talk about something irrelevant. Although a slight deviation from the task may be acceptable, this should not last for too long. The teacher should set a proper time limit to the task in this respect. Second, it is uncertain from Roed’s study as to whether more advanced students would try to focus the communication on form, that is, pointing out grammatical errors in the responses by the peers. Corrective feedback on forms can be helpful for the slower students to learn grammar, but it can also be a frustrating impediment to the smooth interaction. What the teacher can do before hand is to establish the rule that grammar errors may not be treated as long as they do not impede the meaning. Third, there will certainly be some freeloaders who simply read but not engage in the activity. It might be practical to make it compulsory for all students to participate by telling them that a minimal level of engagement is required.

Reference:
Roed, J. (2003) Language learner behaviour in a virtual environment. in Computer Assisted Language Learning, 16(2), 155-172.

About Siemens's (2004) suggestion on CALL

Seimens’ suggestion of the factors necessary for creating a virtual learning environment provides us with a guideline of how to establish quality virtual learning communities. In the current educational system, the problem with classroom instruction include a lack of opportunities of information source. Teachers, textbooks and other printed materials are still the major source of information input. Students work on a position that passively receive information. However, new tools for interaction like webquest, wikis or RSS feed readers provide a wider network of information sharing, with which students can get access easily to peers’ discussion or comments. Another question is how the students receive the feedback that is beneficiary for their language learning. The virtual community of poetry archive and children’s poetry archive, for example, are what the students need in learning authentic English through poems. An example of poem, A Room in the Past read by the poet Ted Kooser himself can be heard on this website: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=8689 A lecture by the poet can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuoWarhWFXw
For younger learners, the Children’s Poetry Archive at
http://www.poetryarchive.org/childrensarchive/home.do is more suitable. Besides the audio recording of the poem, some questions answered by the poets are also accessible on the web pages (e.g. http://www.poetryarchive.org/childrensarchive/singleInterview.do?interviewId=761# ) If I were teaching a poem to the students, I would ask them to ask some questions first, and try to find answers on the website.