As a second language learner, there are more benefits than shortcoming about online learning to me. For a self conscious person like me, it is a torture to speak in front of people or speak publicly or even to answer a question in a second language. You may be afraid of how people react to your non-native accents and the sentences you make. Even thought you know it is a good oppotunity to practice the language, it is difficult for you overcome your fear. Therefore, I welcome the use of online learning and make it as a good learning tool. I have used a chatroom form a useful website to communicate with English learners from other countires. It was fun. They would not tease you or discrimate you if you used bad English. Most important of all, you can learn from them and have a chance to brush up your English.
Yet, a chatroom manager is needed to give technial support and prevent users from using any foul language and giving harsh personal comments to pinpoint anyone in the chatroom.
The paper mentioned about virtaul environment can work as scaffolding: giving anxious students more confidence to embark on conversation in the target language. I think helping anixious students to be confident enough to speak in public is a hard job. Could anyone give us some concrete and vivid examples or activities about how to help those students?
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3 comments:
Sometimes, practice makes perfect.
I still recalled the first day while I spoke to my class. My sound was shivelling. But nowadays, this won't happen anymore. We will just grow more confidence if we could have more time to practice. Why don't we provide students more chances to speak in public? What about inviting them to join the Speech Festival.
I remember I had an assignment which was about chatting in a chatroom. The tutor asked us to chat in ESL cafe and chat with native english speaker and collect information about foreign culture. so during that month, i chatted with many foreigners and they were really helpful. after i finished my assignment, i made some friends. i even keep in touch with one of them for ten years. It's amazing!
Perhaps something that contributed to the success of the assignment that Fiona describes here is the task design - using the chat room to collect information about foreign culture is a very authentic use of technology. As teachers, we should be aware of uses of technology that 'make sense' compared to using technology for its own sake. Often we think that technology is motivational simply because it is technology (new, novel), but this is not really the case. Successful uses of technology provide us and our students with 'affordances' that we don't perceive in other media.
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