Technologies in Language Teaching

Technologies in Language Teaching

Gabriella

With booming development of technologies, people are getting much more access to the Internet anytime and anywhere than we used to be. Thus, people around the world become increasingly closer to each other and the internet becomes a huge data base for everyone to share and communicate. However, according to Will Richardson, as the world is changing around us, educators react very slowly. Today, students are out there using a variety of technologies like blogs, twitter, podcast that they can’t use in school without teacher’s proper guidance. I feel the same way as a student. In China, the class setting is very traditional, although teachers begin to realize applying some technologies in class, mostly they use no more than power point to assist their lectures. There is a lack of interactions and cooperation between students and teachers by letting students experience the advances of technologies in learning themselves. Therefore, internet is more like an entertainment tool for Chinese students and has little function in education.

As a future language teacher, I intend to teach Chinese high school students English, as described on the ACTFL: National Standards for Foreign Language Education, which represent a variety of languages, levels of instruction, program models, and geographic regions, undertook the task of defining content standards — what students should know and be able to do — in foreign language education. Among the standards for foreign language learning, there is a focus on the communication. The description is as follows:

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
• Standard 1.2: Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics
• Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.

Therefore I feel strongly using technologies in my class to give students more valuable resources and more opportunities to share ideas with each other. In the first three chapters in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, the author mainly talks about weblogs. Actually nowadays, there is a very popular social network tool in China called weibo. Its Chinese name means micro-blogs. Everyone can share his or her news within 140 words. The operating model is very like Twitter in America. Weibo has quickly become the hottest way among people in China to communicate in just a few years. People talk about everything like politics, social events, pop news, their lives, etc in weibo. So if I’m going to apply technologies like weblogs in my teaching settings, I will choose weibo to assist my teaching. For example, I can create a public homepage in weibo to share more interesting resources related to culture learning and have students involved in discussion on that homepage. By doing so, I can encourage students who are reticent in class to share their thoughts in writing forms. As I will teach English, I will require my students to communicate in English. And as internet is a double edged sword, by sharing resources and materials using a public homepage, I can set a good example for students to filter what is appropriate to learn and what is unhealthy to follow. Thus, I can do as best as I can to keep my students safe online.

Another way that I can use weblogs is to create a class portal. By putting all materials like syllabus, homework, assignments, reading materials online, it is not only much more time consuming and easy to track student’s minds, but also convenient for parents to get access to our class and supervise their children’s learning process.

Therefore, students get more opportunities and a good platform to communicate in English. Although technology has so many advantages in this digital area, we should never forget that every coin has two sides. As educators, our first priority is the benefit of our students. We can apply technology but not too depend on it. We must do our best to keep balance and make the best choice for our students.