Farewell to Google.cn

Google.cn has said goodbye to everyone this morning. For the millions of netizens in the mainland, 'google it' has to be used in past tense form. How long do we need to wait till the next ray of hope come?

Mark My Words

The Mark My Words toolbar installed on MS Word is convenient for teachers to comment on students' work. One of the merits is that lists of comments and explanations are ready for selection, and thus saving a lot of time for teachers. Another handy function is the resources links, which provides Google and other useful links for the learners. A third advantage is that the teachers can give marks on the grammar of the writing by clicking the 'comment summary' link, which shows all categories of grammar errors with frequencies.

But there are some points to be aware of. First, weaker students may probably need training in how to make use of the resources in a quick and efficient way, because these students tend to copy the sample sentences word by word, they would in an attempt to memorise its usage. This is not recommended since it is too time-consuming and inefficient. So, when using the resource links, the students need to know quick referencing skills.

Three model lessons

Three model lessons of English language are presented on TVB education channel this morning, which are quite inspirational for teachers of English to consider integrating images, video clips, Windows Movie Maker and films in their classroom.

Lesson one: teach English with films (S 3 students)
The teacher plays a film to the class and let the students work on the PLOT and CHARACTERS analyses. The plot of the film is described in separate sentences, and jumbled up. All the students have to do is to work within groups, sorting out the correct order of the sentences. For the character analysis, students are given a matching exercise (maybe, did not understand clearly) to match the description of characters with their names. Another exercise of this part is to describe the characters with three words. The teacher also gives explanation to the film and the characters in order to help the students understand better.

Lesson two: vocabulary building with light and color (S 6 students)
The first section of the class is devoted to the description of facial expressions. The teacher shows a few photos of real people with various facial expressions, and asks the students to work out the emotions of these people. For example, the turned-down mouth corners suggest the person’s unhappiness. After the short discussion, the teacher moves on to putting a single light source on different positions around a volunteer’s face, so as to generate various effects of the person’s emotions.
This lesson teaches vocabulary of facial expressions and emotions in a straightforward way. By seeing the photos and the model student, the class has a better understanding of the meanings of the words. The teacher writes down the new vocabulary on the white board after the students learned them.

Lesson three: a project-based English language lesson (S 6 students)
The students do a project on one of a list of topics that include environmental pollution, work pressure, people’s health, and so on. The project requires the learners to collect a wide variety of resources such as photos, video clips, research reports, and statistics. After all information is collected, the students trim and edit the resources with Windows Movie Maker, integrating the materials into a project digital presentation. In the creation of the digital presentation, the learners are encouraged to use resources such as music, pictures, to make the presentation attractive to the audience.
The strength of this project is that it consolidates the learner’s English language in a practical way. The learners acquire English naturally in the process of doing their group work.

Liou's (1994) IVD-based model and application : From a non-courseware supported perspective

Generally speaking, Liou’s IVD project has good implementation for CALL in classroom. This project is suitable for individual learning in front of a PC workstation, which provides a language learning courseware particularly designed for a movie. This IVD-based learning project weighs a lot because it gives students sufficient exposure to authentic English used in daily life. In her experiment, Liou has developed a four-unit teaching model to explore a movie. Admittedly, it is highly efficient to have readily available software assisting the learning, yet a more common fact is that many IVD resources are ‘original’, with no readily made learning software embedded in them. Then, how do we English language teachers make use of good movies for our teaching?

First, the plot of the movie should be made clear to the students. Instead of the embedded questions as shown in Figure 4 of Liou’s paper (p. 60), the teacher can show the students with prepared questions on a separate PowerPoint slide or Word document, to give the learners contextual hints or guidance for understanding the synopsis. It is worth mentioning that, as the movie is played to the whole class, each student should also be able to play the movie on their workstations. Wherever the teacher stops the movie and raises relevant questions, the students are going to rewind the film and look for the answers.

Second, the content of the movie needs to be ‘comprehensible’ to the students. By 'comprehensible' I mean that learners need to know the intended meaning of the speaker not only by consulting a dictionary, but more importantly, by reflecting how the learners themselves would have expressed the same meaning. For example, the students may hear a movie character say ‘Tom has been capped for his school rugby team for twice’. They’ve got to understand the past participle ‘capped’ in this utterance, and come up with their own interpretation like ‘Tom played for his school rugby team for twice’. Then the students are going to look at the context in which the word ‘capped’ is employed. At this point, the teacher can provide as much supporting information as possible, such as asking questions like ‘Is it used in a dialogue or a monologue? ’, ‘Is it a formal speech or a casual talk?’, or ‘What is the social identity of the speaker?’ and so on.

Last but not least, the students should be given access to online resources such as google.com, Google Dictionary, Wikipedia, and so on, whenever they have difficulty understanding the movie.

Victory of the England rugby team, 2003: A listening comprehension activity

Clive Woodward and his brilliant team won the world cup in 2003, after a fierce ‘battle’ against Australia. The dramatic, fluent deliver of the ball in the last minute, or the deadly minute for the Australians, brought England to the world champion. Woodward’s brilliant young men did have the correct and cool mind in pressure: when 17 points drawn even, the players finished the smooth zigzag delivery and a final beautiful kick to beat Australians. Back in England, the heroes were warmly welcomed by tens of thousands of people as they sat on the bus parading down the streets. This was the glory for the whole country!
This topic can be used as a listening comprehension activity of 20 minutes, which starts with a brief introduction to the background of the match. Then the teacher plays the BBC radio programme to the whole class, based on which a few questions can be raised to facilitate the learners’ understanding of the radio interview. After that, the Youtube video clip of England rugby team’s playing the game in the last minute and their victory parade can be played to the class. The cooperation between the players in the match is elaborated in the radio programme. Video clip here facilitates learners’ comprehension of the radio interview.

For the radio programme, please see 'Sir Clive Woodward' section on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr Only listen to from 6.20 to 10.20

Video clip on Youtube