Students of the Past: Ameba with Special Needs
We have all
watched classroom scenes out of reproductions of great British classics and
observed the strict authoritarian methods employed. Students, it was believed,
were essentially flawed; errors of creation if you will, their minds full of
“cotton, hay and rags” as Henry Higgins so aptly put it; their minds, it was
thought, were an intellectual vacuum. It was the God given duty of teachers to
remedy the situation by clearing out the rubbish and instilling, in its stead,
“useful “knowledge, “correct” opinions and “appropriate” social skills thus
transforming the little savages into human beings. Teaching, according to this
view of the world, was akin to godliness; students were the grateful recipients
of the modifications made to their mental abilities. Authoritarianism has
retained its grip on teaching for centuries churning out apathetic victims who
are bored witless and in fact know very little. In such a view of teaching, the
horror and fear produced by the perceived “cotton, hay and rags” is so great
that all intellectual curiosity – which is, after all, the first step to the
actual grasping of the content of a lesson, and later creative thinking and
innovation – was successfully stamped out with sheer perseverance; the aim
being to create individuals happy to live on the specific hamster wheel
considered appropriate. This view of teaching has lingered on due, I presume,
to the popularity of authoritarianism in general yet there is change in the
air; not due to the so called “ameba” but to the great strides that have been
made in technology: the World Wide Web and all the modern appliances that
enable maximum use of it. The said technology is being added to every day with
apps becoming ever more readily available and easy to use. Coupled with the
winds of change espousing more liberalism, views towards education have changed
a lot – there is resistance however, as authoritarianism is by nature a
breeding ground for egos as someone once said.
The New Approach: Labels Are for Boxes, Bottles
and Tubes not People
The new
liberal approach removes the master puppeteer and places the learner center
stage. The acquiring and internalizing of knowledge is now viewed as an active
process on the part of the student who is presented with some information and
asked to discover the rest following a set of clues through an obstacle course
and thus learning the route, all the possible pitfalls and ways of avoiding them. This view to learning
and teaching means that students are expected to deduce the rules and
conclusions rather than being fed them and thus remember them better – as they
have been successfully internalized. This method of teaching requires patience
on the part of the teacher who should also learn to observe and not take the
lead marching ahead, sward drawn but walking along side students guiding them
if you will. This view to teaching languages is yet to catch on completely
though, and markets are still littered with very popular books that present
rules in boxes and then demand that students do a set of well structured exercises.
The educational value of this method of teaching is nothing compared to that of
a book in which the exercises lead to the deduction of rules, which are thus
more successfully learnt as effort has been made to do so and the student has
remained actively involved. The same approach is true for the teaching of
vocabulary, where teachers should desist from arming the students with
vocabulary lists including synonyms and allow students to guess words whenever
they can and only allow them to look up key words. Does it really matter if the
student knows the difference between loath and detest so long as he has guessed
they both mean roughly hate? Provided he understands the sentence as a whole,
does he really need to look up every single obscure vocabulary item? If for
example, “the plans have gone agley” and he has worked out that there is
something wrong with the plans, does he need to rush for the dictionary? This
shedding of the shackles allows students to soar, curious and interested. It is,
or should be, a teacher’s greatest pleasure to watch them do so. Modern
technology and the internet now allow students even more autonomy by replacing,
in some instances, the guiding hand of the teacher. The advantages of these new
developments are self evident: there are hundreds of language learners and far
too few good teachers so if part of the load can be shared where is the harm in
that? Another obvious reason why the role of this new route in language
teaching is impossible to deny is that the current generation is very tech
savvy indeed; they have grown up surrounded by technology thus feel happy and comfortable working with it. If
this is the hand we, as language teachers, have been dealt, common sense
dictates that we accompany the students down this route for this reason alone.
The new route involves use of some wonderful sites available on the internet
and the teacher stepping back after initial introductions to let students get
on with the work. In short, we as teachers need to let go of the deductive
approach to teaching, confine it to the archives and embrace this new approach
the inductive approach and technology have made possible. Old habits die hard and
this is true both for generations of students who have learnt to accept the
deductive approach as the one and only way to learn, and for teachers who have
been laying down the law and delivering exercises for years. Complacency and
lack of objectivity about the true value of the way we have been doing things
will lock the door leading to better and more effective ways of teaching so it
is to these innovative, effective and highly enjoyable methods of learning that
we shall now turn.
“Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you
shall find” St Luke
The sheer
number of students seeking to learn what is now the universal language of the
world, English, is staggering. Nowhere is this so evident as in the developing
world, East Asia and the Middle East where Turkey is but one example. The
university where I teach, one of the top English medium universities in the
country, takes on around two thousand new students every year two thirds of
whom have to do a year of prep and pass a proficiency exam which is on a par
with the IELTS and TOEFL. One year being all that we are allowed and having the
same period of time to teach both advanced students and beginners, we know that
we have a formidable task. The job can only be accomplished if we furnish the
students with the necessary study skills to correctly supplement the class
work. This is by no means all; as we cannot – nor should be – holding their
hands twenty four seven, we also need a good and reliable stand in to help
students, provide material, check their answers and provide explanation so
enter the tutor par excellence: the
internet. It is amazing how oblivious both certain teachers and students are of
the depth and breadth of what is available on the internet. I had a student
come into my office a week ago to enquire about the place of adverbs in
sentences upon which I asked her if she had checked on the internet.
Discovering that she hadn’t, we did so together to locate, to her delight, a
wonderful website with some excellent examples. This incident and many others
like it have led me to the conclusion that students, at least those in this
part of the world, need to be introduced to ways they can exploit the internet.
The same is true for some of my colleagues: my jaw dropped a few days ago when
a senior member of staff said she wished there was a website for essay topics.
I didn’t say anything at the time but I did prepare a set of websites detailing
the services they provide and an idiot proof list of study suggestions using
the internet, the latter of which you will find in appendix1. To cut a long
story short, there is an enormous demand which has been met by the internet so
it is to this new source of learning and how various sites can best be
exploited individually and in tandem with others that we shall now turn as St.
Luke’s words are so very true for both the student and the teacher’s new best
friend.
The First Suggestion: Listening, i.e. Videos,
into Writing
It goes
without saying that most students who desire to learn English as a foreign
language do so in foreign countries under the guidance of non native speakers
of English. Well trained and highly proficient though these individuals most
certainly are, there is always the need to hear native speakers of the language
as well. This need first gave rise to cassettes, then CDs but both have now
been replaced by all the wonderful sites on the internet. I remember the
aversion to the use of technology in class many years ago but eventually people
got over their problems with cassettes and later with CDs. Now they will have
to do the same with laptops and use of the internet as a learning tool both in
class and out of class. I feel that the reason this adaptation process is
harder in this part of the world than in others is the limited access to
technology throughout the formative years. These are hurdles we need to come to
grips with as the opportunities on the internet are stunning.
One of my
preferred websites for listening purposes is www.ted.com
, a wonderful website including academic talks by experts in their fields on
practically any subject under the sun. What makes this site so much better than www.keentalks.com and others like it is the availability of
subtitles in English and the text itself should you wish to refer to it; the
former specially is essential for language teaching purposes. Obviously, the
activity I am about to describe is suited to intermediate level and above. What
I like to do is to ask the students to research a topic they are interested in
such as women’s rights or cyber crime and pick out a few videos – the videos
vary greatly in both length and level of lexical difficulty. I then tell them
to listen first without subtitles and take some notes and then to listen a
second time this time with subtitles and check and add to their notes. Then, I
ask them to write up their notes in the form of an essay adding their own
opinions as well. There are various advantages of this activity: first and
foremost, the students adore it, which means they will focus in class, and
there won’t be discipline problems, they will be happy to do it for homework
and they will learn a lot faster than they otherwise would. The resulting essays will be a lot better too
as what the students learn from the listening – all that new vocabulary, those
new structures, collocations and so on – will flow into their essay instead of
input in the form of a similar mental-essay written in their native language.
This business of translating from the native language is the only option that
is left if input in the target language is not provided, and it leads to the
most horrific mistakes and very little improvement. The video into writing
activity does, however, catch on very fast. To see samples of the said essays
go to http://theproproom.blogspot.com
and click on sample essays and paragraphs; you will see the links to the videos
at the end of each essay along with the level of the student who wrote it. The
said essays are all second drafts which the students have produced after
studying the first draft I corrected using correction symbols.
A variation
of this activity would be the teacher seeking out the videos concerning a
topical issue, or an issue students would feel interested in, watching the same
and designing the writing activity to go along with it. The preparation is time
consuming yet the rewards make it worthwhile. Below you will find a writing
activity I prepared after watching a program called “Young and Jobless” on BBC television. Having come across the
program purely by chance and realizing what I had stumbled upon, I took notes
just as I demand the students do. I then designed the following activity which
the students will only be able to complete in a satisfactory manner if they
view the same program and take notes. The number of advantages involved in the
activity makes one’s mouth water: there is all that listening into writing and
all the benefits of that as well as an introduction to a good television
channel and an activity they can do on their own as well.
RESEARCH AND VIDEO BASED ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES ESSAY: ONLINE
RECRUITING
Gone are the days when all recruitment was done with pen and paper and face
to face. Although interviews still exist for some candidates at the end of a
long a grueling process, most of the selection and elimination process now
takes place online. Before looking at the points and starting your research,
access bbc.com/youngandjobless on the BBC website; watch the program,
read and take notes. Advocates of this new trend claim it has
the following advantages:
1.
Online recruiting helps in reducing
the volume in the beginning.
2.
The system is fairer as individuals
use their judgment and could be subjective.
3.
Recruiting agencies keep the data
enabling people to be offered a different job that they didn’t apply for later
on.
However the system does have its
disadvantages too:
1.
The quality of applications is going
down. People send in hundreds of applications and cut corners while doing so.
2.
People sometimes copy paste parts of
good applications so finding really good ones is hard
3.
Hundreds of people applying for the
same job; hard to get noticed.
In the conclusion, you might like to
suggest some solutions:
1.
Think about what you want and target
companies that provide the kind of job you want.
2.
Don’t send exactly the same CV,
cover letter and answers to every company; tailor your answers.
3.
Check the job offer and use the key
words in the job advertisement. Computers are programmed to eliminate by key
word
4.
Take rejection on the chin and be
persistent.
5.
Don’t aim for the top job at the
start; take any reasonable job.
Television and www.ted.com
need not be your only source of
listening activities though; we must not forget YouTube. This site is a mine of
information and is guaranteed to come up with a video to match any topic you
throw at it. One such topic is a very contentious one in this part of the
world: gold mining with cyanide; a process that does untold damage to the
environment, devastating and laying waste whole swathes of land. Mining of gold
takes place in the Aegean region of Turkey and frequently brings locals out
onto the streets in protest. A topic of this kind was, I thought, something the
students could relate to so I discovered the videos and prepared the following
writing activity:
RESEARCH BASED EFFECT
ANALYSIS ESSAY: GOLD MINING OPERATIONS
Before attempting this essay it is recommended that the students be asked to do some research concerning the negative effects of gold
mining operations. The said research could constitute an assignment or
could be done under your watchful eye at a computer lab. This having been done,
it is further recommended that you access
the following on YouTube and watch it as a class: Poison in the Lifeline (27 min.), the 1995 Omai Gold Mine
Disaster. Poison in the Lifeline
lays bare the events and grave consequences of the Omai Gold Mine disaster in Guyana in 1995 tracing the chain of
events that led up to the disaster, the situation of extractive industries and
the suffering of the 40.000 people who inhabit the area. Finally, ask the
students to write a four paragraph essay on the effects of gold mining
operations. Ask them to use the notes below
Introduction
End this
paragraph with the following thesis statement:
Gold mining operations have
serious environmental and social
effects.
First developmental
paragraph
Topic sentence: Gold
mining operations do irreparable damage to the environment.
Highly consumptive, environmentally damaging,
destroys natural environment, toxic waste, acid mine drainage (rock ground up
and exposed to cyanide to extract gold; result: sulphuric acid), heavy metal
poisoning (lead, cadmium, 96% of arsenic emissions), water depletion, uses vast
amounts of energy
Second developmental
paragraph
Gold mining operations
have disastrous effects on local populations and the labor force employed on
site.
Indigenous / community rights disregarded
(mining on native land; natives, hunter-gatherers, subsistence farmers so way
of life threatened; no power so rights ignored), laborers endangered
(environmental violations put workers and locals at risk)
Conclusion
Write a restatement.
Needless to
say, the activity went swimmingly: we went up to the computer lab, did some
research and took notes, we then came back to class and watched the video
together and discussed it, lastly the students wrote the essay using the notes
they had made on all they had watched and learnt. As a result, not only did they
produce some very good essays but they also gained a perspective on a serious
environmental issue. Most importantly, they really enjoyed the lesson, which
meant everyone was a hundred percent focused throughout and expressed a desire
to do more of the same, which we did. The fact that they had such fun also
meant that they were happy to do similar activities completely on their own as
homework or projects and developed an interest in current affairs, which they
proceeded to follow . Should the
students be tackling a listening into writing activity without the teacher’s
guidance, they will need some other method of essay correction and to
accomplish this task, they will need to turn to the internet and access a
wonderful site called www.grammarly.com
. In order to benefit fully from the services offered, they will need to
subscribe but in my view it is worth it. They then need to copy paste their
essay into the space provided and click “academic essay”. The next thing they
need to do is click on “correct the essay” and watch the red pen skimming –
literally – through the essay. Once done, the site provides a very concise list
of all the errors in the essay, both lexical and stylistic in addition to
plagiarism – a reason why so many academics use the site. The student should
then be advised to look back at his essay to try and find the aforementioned
errors before referring back to the site for explanations. In cases where
access to a professional does not exist and even when it does, this site is
invaluable. I recommend that my students use it before handing in essays mainly
to teach them to work on their own and focus on chronic mistakes.
The Second Suggestion: Listening, i.e. Films,
into Writing
Videos
aren’t the only source of listening practice; there are also films. In this
modern world where the film industry has developed to such an extent and where
most films are literally at our finger tips thanks to technology and the
internet, it would be very short sighted indeed not to exploit them. There are
numerous websites that provide access to films; two popular ones being www.filmsforaction.org and www.topdocumentaryfilms.com ;
however, neither of these sights provide English subtitles; a ‘must have’ in my
view. There is a way round this of course: installing the subtitles with a
nifty little program yet how much simpler would it be to have the subtitles
there, ready to go? This is why I like www.imdbfree.com
so much. This wonderful site has the films categorized neatly according to
genre, all with subtitles. One piece of
advice here, if, like me, you need to familiarize yourself with various films
before assigning them to students, I suggest you do what I do and access the
following film blog: http://essiespeaks.blogspot.com.
The advantage of this blog is that there is interpretation and evaluation
without spoilers, which means you can form a very good idea of a film, assign
it to a student and watch it in your own time. Going back to www.imdbfree.com , what can be done is
select a genre, war films for instance, and assign a pair of films as a project
to the students. There are so many choices that you could have different
students dealing with different pairs of films the names of which you will
naturally have made a note of. The students will then be required to watch the
films with the subtitles switched on and make notes – which you should also
demand to see. They can then be asked to compare the two films and their
approach to war adding their own opinions as well. Let us imagine you have
selected “Body of Lies”, “Zero Dark 30” and “The Hurt Locker”; wonderful,
thought provoking films about the same issue and the same war and the latter
two by the same director. The students could compare the films in terms their
handling of the Iraq war, how they approach the topic, what their main focus is
and how successful they are. Alternatively, they could take one epic war
film “Inglorious Bastards” for example, which can’t really be studied in
conjunction with anything, and write a project on that alone. Such a project
would have numerous educational advantages in the short term and the long term:
the amount of actual language practice would be phenomenal considering the amount
of pleasure the students would derive from the activity, the habit of watching films
in the target language would also be formed guaranteeing more of the same
benefits in the future. This activity can be done as an in class activity as
well; the only down side to this would be the fact that it is tremendously time
consuming. This being the case, it is down to the autonomous language learner
to tackle it in his own time. Again, once the essay is complete, the student
should be asked to access www.grammarly.com
to deal with any problems in the same way as described above.
The Third Suggestion: Reading and Listening
into Writing
Reading and
writing are a marriage made in heaven and the latter should not exist without
the former for as I have said before the student requires input in the target
language in the form of both language and ideas to be able to write an essay on
a topic. The failure to provide such background information would lead to
translation and some horrendous problems which need not have existed in the
first place. Couple the reading with listening and follow with an essay and you
have got the perfect learning opportunity. The first way in which these three
activities could be combined would be to hit on a current topic, say gun
control, and research it. Videos being the best place to start, it is suggested
that students be asked to google gun control and click videos upon which they
will discover videos featuring both Piers Morgan and Barack Obama on gun
control. Having listened to the said videos and made notes, they could be directed
to turn their attention to newspapers and similar publications where they could
be asked to tag articles concerning gun control. Having read and made notes on
these as well, they could proceed to write their essays which they should hand
in to you with their notes. If they are, per chance, working on their own, the
next step would be to access www.grammarly.com
and work on any mistakes as described earlier. An alternative would be for the
teacher to do the research and plan the whole task as an in class activity.
Below you will find an example writing handout detailing how the activity would
look:
RESEARCH RELATED PROBLEM SOLUTION ESSAY: THE US GUN DEBATE
The recent school shooting in Newtown and the
horrific death of 27 children sent shock waves through US society and prompted
the administration to act. President Obama set out a list of proposals after
consulting with vice president Joe Biden who had been working with both sides.
A similar shooting in Scotland some years ago prompted the UK government to
introduce some of the toughest gun laws in Europe; the same is true for Norway.
Both countries have since witnessed a sharp decrease in gun crime. Before studying the proposals, google the
following:
·
Piers Morgan on gun laws; access the
videos, listen and make notes
·
Barack Obama on gun laws; access the
videos, listen and take notes
·
Go to www.bbc.co.uk and read the following: US gun debate: Guns in numbers
·
Go to http://onlinewsj.com and http://www.nytimes.com
; read about the new proposals concerning gun laws and reactions to them.
When your research is complete,
consider the points below and any others you can think of to write a problem
solution essay.
Obama’s key proposals are as follows:
·
Reintroduce an expired ban on
“military-style” assault weapons
·
Limit ammunition magazines to ten
rounds
·
Background checks on all gun sales
·
Ban on possession and sale of armour
-piercing bullets
·
Harsher penalties for gun
traffickers, especially unlicensed dealers who buy guns for criminals
·
Approve the appointment of the head
of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and explosives
·
More focus on mental health issues
·
Changing mind sets
This is far
from being the only way reading, listening and writing can be combined; there
are also existing reading tasks available in text books, online or in the form
of handouts prepared by individuals or establishments which should be prefaced
or followed by a listening activity and rounded off with a related essay. To demonstrate how this works, I would like
to turn to my own blog, http://theproproom.blogspot.com,
where the reading activities are grouped in five files according to level of
difficulty – Level* being early intermediate. In the folder marked Level ***,
there is a wonderful reading activity all about how to achieve happiness called
“Finding Flow”. After discussing the ways in which one could achieve happiness,
www.ted.com should be accessed. Were you to search for
Flow or Finding Flow on this site, you would find a talk delivered by the
writer of the article on the same topic. Having listened and taken notes, the
students could turn their attention to the reading task which they should
complete – the key and explanations are available on the site. They should then
be required to write an essay on how to achieve happiness based on all the
information they have gleaned and check their completed work on www.grammarly.com . Naturally, it is also
perfectly possible to consider the whole task as an in class activity as well
in which case it must be taken into account that plenty of time will be
required. The advantage of working in this way is that boredom, discipline
problems, tardiness and laziness in general will become things of the past with
everyone on board and concentrating.
One is not
always lucky enough to find the actual author of an article delivering a talk
but a multitude of videos on any topic are at everyone’s fingertips. If, for
instance, you were covering the reading task “War Against Girls” in Level*, you
could seek out videos on women’s rights – there are plenty on www.ted.com - , listen to a few and then write an
essay. If you were dealing with “Will We Ever Pass the Turing Test for
Computers?”, you could set the ball rolling with a short video detailing the
nature of the Turing test – it is the first link when you google Turing test –
deal with the reading and having checked the answers, you could go to
radiolab.org , to which links are provided on the blog to listen to some
discussion and take notes. Everything could then be rounded off with an essay,
examples of which are available on the blog in the file marked “Sample Student
Essays and Paragraphs”. Naturally, as
with the previous activities discussed so far, the students could perfectly well
do all this on their own provided they check their essays on www.grammarly.com.
The Fourth Suggestion: Reading, i.e. novels and
short stories, into writing
I remember
my first trip to Eastern Anatolia by sleeper in 1979 and being accosted at the station of a
little place called Palu by a group of children all pleading with us to give
them our old newspapers. I was bemused but our guide explained that they had no
access to books and what they yearned for was reading matter. I remember how
guilty I felt when I cast my mind back to one of my fondest childhood memories:
my father taking me to a wonderful large bookstore, Redhouse, and turning me
lose to pick out as many puffins, young puffins and, later, peacocks as I wished.
We would exit the store laden with a couple of dozen books which I would
devour. I have heard recently that various charities are producing simple
tablets for children and distributing them in African countries to provide them
with access to the internet and improve the quality of their learning. This is
an excellent move as the activity I am about to describe requires access to a
couple of wonderful websites which present one with a vast array of short
stories and novels all absolutely scot free. As foreign books are still
enormously expensive for students in this part of the world, this service is
invaluable. The first of these sites is www.classicshorts.com
and it contains original short stories by well known writers. With an
intermediate class, I like to start with Roal Dahl, a universal favorite. There
happen to be three of his short stories on the site all of which could be read
to write a report; an alternative would be to read individual stories and write
about them. A similar website containing short stories is www.americanliterature.com where
you gain access to some of the best examples of American short stories. A story
on this site which I have assigned in the past with roaring success is “The
Lottery”; a highly disturbing story about which much has been written and which
lends itself to some great discussion. If you have not read the story, I
recommend that you do so. Short stories aren’t the only option though; there
are novels as well and a site I suggest for this purpose is www.pagebypagebooks.com . The archive
is truly wonderful with a wide choice of both short stories and novels. The
students could be required to read either one or a few works and write a
report. The activity could be further spiced up with the audio versions of
these popular stories and novels available on numerous websites such as www.openculture.com . One word of warning
though, I would suggest that you ask the students for their notes as well. In
our university, the bulk of a student’s grade is based on exam scores so any
work they do for me, they do because they like it or find it worthwhile. The
proof of how popular these activities are lies in the fact that most students
willingly do the work, which in turn means that stringent controls are never
necessary. This level of cooperation can only be achieved if the students deem
the activities truly beneficial and entertaining; so much so that they are
unaware of how time flies and are mildly disappointed when the class ends.
And Finally: New Horizons in Learning
Wonderful,
educationally worthwhile websites are by no means the only advantage provided
by the World Wide Web; courses and even whole educational establishments have
gone either partly or completely viral signaling the trend of the future:
virtual learning environments. The best known of these sights is www.coursera.org , a wonderful website
established by a Stanford academic working with Google. The organization has
made agreements with a slew of renowned universities the teaching staff of
which offers courses in their fields online, free of charge to a global student
body. There are fixed starting dates, projects, tests and even the possibility
for direct communication with the lecturers via Google hangout. This novel and
highly democratic system is growing in popularity every day. Online graduate
work has been around for a while now and businesses now accept certificates
from these courses too – albeit in pdf form – with Google taking the lead and
skimming off the best of the crop. Another
similar organization is Udacity, which is a completely online university with
no physical campus and has taken the world by storm. EDX is taking its first
baby steps and I am confident there will soon be more such educational
establishments and for the moment at least, they are completely free. This
being the new trend in learning, I feel it is only a matter of time before
online language schools are also established. Technically, I can envision how
this would be possible; I feel it is only too easy and only needs a group of
enterprising teachers and IT specialists to take the lead. This being the way
the wind is blowing, it falls to us teachers to keep up for ours is a
profession where keeping abreast of changes is paramount.
As for how
this trend currently applies to language learning, the opportunities are obvious
especially in the case of university preparatory departments aiming to prepare
students for their freshman year in an English medium university. One problem
our advanced students complain about is being cut off from their departments
proper for a year; a problem that could easily be rectified by introducing them
to www.coursera.org , where they could
take a course in their chosen department, prepare for the year to come and
practice their English in the process. This is something they could continue to
do throughout their university careers improving their CVs to be able to
compete in an ever more selective job market. The advantage of continuing to
take these courses is the obvious edge it will provide in terms of English
proficiency; an important advantage in second and third world countries.
In conclusion: Spoon Feeding is out and Autonomy
is in
Such
methods of study as described above are hard to accept if the students and the
teachers are all products of a more authoritarian educational system but the
students’ future proficiency and welfare demands that we as teachers move with
the times. Making sure our students are presented with the best possible
opportunities to improve themselves and not get left behind is after all our
cherished goal. The only issue we need to be disabused of is that there is only
one good way to accomplish a task and that is what we personally have been
doing all our lives A closed mind of this kind, even with the best of
intentions, does untold damage not only to students but to teachers themselves
as well as student displeasure and dissatisfaction will impact the pleasure the
teacher will derive from his profession leaving him bitter and yearning for
those mythical good old days. After all, as Heraclitus said “There is nothing
permanent except for change” and yes, this is true for language teaching as
well.
APPENDIX 1
THE AUTONOMOUS LANGUAGE LEARNER AT WORK
THE FIRST SUGGESTION:
Select a
topic that you are interested in like slavery in the modern world, women’s
rights or war for example.
1.
Access ted.com
and print your topic into the search section.
2.
When you have discovered the videos related to your
chosen topic, grab a pen and paper
3.
Listen to each video at least twice. If you are intermediate
and above in terms of level, listen first without the script and make notes;
then listen again this time with the script and check your notes. If you are a
pre intermediate student reverse the process. If you feel you need to listen
three times, that is fine too.
4.
Gather your notes together and write them up in the
form of an essay.
5.
Access grammarly.com
and copy paste your essay on to the site. Then select academic essay and hit
“check your essay”.
6.
When you have a list of your mistakes, go back to your
essay and try and locate them yourself.
7.
Finally, take your essay to any of the writing centers
or your teachers for a final correction.
Note to the teacher: this procedure could be
used as a project as well in which case the students should be requested to
hand in their notes and the links to the
videos they watched as well.
THE SECOND SUGGESTION
1.
Access imdbfree.com
and select a category that interests you like war films for example
2.
Select a couple of films in your chosen category and
watch them with English subtitles.
3.
Then write an essay comparing and contrasting the
films and their handling of war for example.
4.
Last of all, access grammarly.com and follow the procedure outlined in steps 6, 7 8 in
the first suggestion.
Note to the teacher: this procedure could used
to write essays in class or as a project. In the case of the latter, students
should be required to state their choice of category and specific films
beforehand to prevent large groups watching the same films.
THE THIRD SUGGESTION
1.
Access theproproom.blogspot.com and select an appropriate
level of reading activity. If you are an intermediate or pre intermediate
student, this would be “Level of
difficulty*”; if you are an advanced student, it would be “Level of difficulty**” to start with.
Level one is lower intermediate in terms of level so should be manageable for
pre intermediate students as well. If you are a remedial student and failed
reading, you follow the same procedure advanced students do. If you passed
reading start with “Level of difficulty
***”.
2.
Select a reading task that looks interesting
3.
Locate the text by googling the title and the author’s
name and get a printout.
4.
Read the text carefully once, looking up key words on dictionary.com, which you need to
download onto your laptops and telephones, and guessing the meanings of other
words.
5.
Now try and answer the questions. While doing so,
write out the answers; do not just underline.
6.
When you have completed the questions, check your
answers. If there is anything you don’t understand, bring it to the writing
centers or ask your teacher.
7.
Now access ted.com
and search for related videos using key words in the text. For instance, if you
have just completed work on “War Against Girls”, search for videos related to
women’s rights; if you have just completed work on “How to Die”, search for
humane end of life practices.
8.
Watch and take notes on the videos as outlined in the
first suggestion.
9.
Now return to the blog and do the writing task.
10. When
you have completed your essay or paragraph, follow the procedure outlined in
steps 6, 7 and 8 in the first suggestion.
Warning: it is important that all this be done
at one sitting to enable flow of information from the reading to the listening
and from both to the writing task. A delay would mean that a valuable learning
opportunity has been wasted.
THE FOURTH SUGGESTION (INTERMEDIATE, ADVANCED
AND REMEDIAL)
- Access the following website: pagebypagebooks.com,
classicshorts.com or americanliterature.com and select
a writer. Roald Dahl or Edgar Allen Poe for example.
- You may select a novel, a single story, a
couple of stories by the same writer or a couple of stories discussing the
same theme by different writers.
- After reading the story or stories you
have selected, write a reaction essay, a comparison or an opinion essay
concerning the ideas in the story.
- Lastly, follow the procedure outlined in
steps 6, 7 and 8 in the first suggestion.
THE FIFTH SUGGESTION (ADVANCED SECOND TERM AND
ANYONE WHO PASSES THE PROFICIENCY, DURING THE SUMMER OR ALONG WITH COURSE WORK IN
INDIVIDUAL DEPARTMENTS)
- Access coursera.org and select a field of study that interests you.
- Select a course and apply for it. The
courses are completely free
- You will get all your material, tests and
projects online and be expected to hold up your side of the bargain.
- The advantage is that you will not only
practice your English but also broaden your horizons and learn subject
specific vocabulary.
Note to the student: use the suggestions listed
here as guidelines to discover additional ways to improve your language skills.
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