Absolutely Intercultural Podcast

This week, I find this podcast episode, internationalize yourself at home through simulations in teaching to overcomesocial barriers and culture shock very interesting.  The episode is divided into four parts: Absolutely foreign, absolutely privileged, absolutely real and absolutely simulated. In the first section, absolutely foreign, they have university students to share with audiences their own experience of how to prepare themselves to be internationalized by study abroad or work abroad. In the second section absolutely privileged, the episode focuses on a game called “How far can I get in my society.” The game makes people aware of the social barriers in a society visible. In the third part, absolutely real, it talks about it is very helpful if you have already experienced what you will encounter for intercultural preparation. Zydrune shares her own experience in Germany in this part. In the final part, absolutely simulated, the university lecture intercultural communication helps a lot with interviews about advantages and disadvantages of simulations.

I find this podcast episode is very useful especially for language teaching. In the future, I want to go back to China to teach middle school students English. Since studying abroad is still a very hot issue in China, most of my students will be interested studying abroad, that means most of them will encounter something like cultural shock. I think this podcast is very helpful for them if they could listen to other’s real life experiences and use strategies to get them better prepared to be internationalized. Also, language learning is always about culture learning too, so it is necessary for them to be aware of cultural issues even for those students who do not want to study abroad. It is still a good tool to help them gain a global view.

Kitchen Escape

As I read in 7 Things You Should Know about Gamification, gamification is the application of game elements in non-gaming situations, often to motivate or influence behavior. In academe, gamification typically employs elements like points, badges to engage or motivate students in learning process.

For me, in language teaching, gamification offers an opportunity for students to interact with each other while engaging their imaginations and motivations at the same time. Teachers can enliven their instruction with contests or rewards that encourage students a positive attitude toward language learning.  The game took advantage of human desire to compete and socialize as well as to measure progress toward clear goals. Therefore, through gamification, students can generate unexpected solutions to the course objects.

Among the Escape the Room Games, I found Kitchen Escape very interesting. At first, I totally get lost in this game because I don’t know what I am supposed to do. After I watched the walk through video for the game, I got a clear goal and was familiar with the rules. Then I played the game for three times, it was really fun!

For language teaching, I think this game can be used to facilitate teaching vocabularies and description of objects. So by using this game, students’ learning objectives would be learning vocabularies. In this game, students need to find several objects in order to escape the kitchen. During this process, they will learn words like kettle, battery, leather and so on.  When I learned English, vocabulary memorizing is always a boring process, but through this game, students can remember words easily with vivid visual impact and a lot of fun. What’s more, instead of solely memorize the word, students can get a better understanding of how to use the word, like use kettle to boil water; use boiled water to cook frozen fish, etc. By competing with each other that who escape faster, students can be involved while learning.

As a teacher, the role in this activity is like the walk through, that give students hints and instructions when they have difficulties and guide them towards learning. Game is just to assist learning process, teachers don’t want it to bring negative influences to students. For me, I would definitely use the walk through for the game, because I don’t want my students to be discouraged. And I will consistently give them prompts. After they all played the game, I will arrange a speed answering game to assess whether they acquire the vocabularies by holding pictures and to see who is the first to answer correctly. I will using the images in the game for my assessing part. For example, I will hold the picture of kettle, and student who answer kettle first will be awarded a badge for his/her performance. I could not wait using this kind of game in my class!

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.