using blogs in english class in mainland, China

This project was conducted in writing class over one semester which met in ten 60 minutes lectures sessions once a week, at a high school in Zhuhai, China. The participants are made up of 30 senior 2 students from two different classes aging 16~17 who are interested in this program with their English proficiency level as intermediate.

At the beginning of the program, students were given introduction to the course content and ultimate goal and also to the internet environment that is blogs, in which they would be working through this semester. Because this coursework aimed to inspire students’ collaborative learning in improving writing skills with the aid of a blog and other online multimedia facilities, these 30 participants were divided into 10 groups with 3 in each group – one was responsible for doing writing assignment after group discussion; one for making comments on others’ assignments (at least two every time); and one for revising the writing based on the feedback from other groups or tutor. There would be two teachers as instructors monitoring and assisting students’ operation and learning process in every lecture.

All of the lectures were conducted in multimedia classroom in campus with enough number of computers and high speed internet access afforded. Besides, all of the participants have internet access at home, and particularly most of them can use mobile phone to get to internet, so that they could do the tasks at any convenient time out of class.

Seven texts would be involved in this program with different topics of which the content completely followed the text books in the curriculum of this course, ranging from robots and traveling abroad to geography and culture (see details in Appendix 1). As the best-known hosting services, tBLOG (www. tblog.com) and BLOGGER (www. blogger.co,) would be good choices, which are free and easy-operated with many degrees of comment controls. Since BLOGGER may not be accessible in mainland, China, tBlog was chosen in this program. What’s more important, English was the only language could be used in group discussion and posting.

Teacher was supposed to give comments on each group blog, and have a collective feedback on grammatical mistakes after reviewing each blog, and it would be posted on tutor blog right after every lesson. Students should revise their writing based on others’ comments. At the beginning of each lesson, the outstanding writing would be presented to everyone as a sample, and teacher’s collective feedback as well in order to reinforce their writing in a correct way.

review on EFL IVD courseware

Practical considerations for multimedia courseware development: An EFL IVD experience

Let’s say, English teaching in high schools of mainland, China, without any difference between CMI and EMI language teaching, all depends on whether the teacher is capable to use English as the only teaching language in class, and also the students are able to follow the lesson only in English. Usually, for convenience and effectiveness, except the open class, teachers use English in a quarter of each lesson, perhaps. Let alone communicating with students in English in class with almost 60 students. That’s why the students in China always are good at reading but poor in listening and speaking because lack of immersing in an authentic leaning environment. That’s why even after six years intensive learning, students still have not got ready for the necessary language proficiency for college study.
Actually, this program in Liou’s study (1994) is the most practical one for EFL students in China I have ever met in CALL course. There are three main advantages I found in this project. First, definiteness. Based on a well-grounded theoretical motivation not only in technological innovations but also in SLA, it has a quite clear objective to meet students’ needs of improving language skills in exploring a movie, like reading comprehension and speaking skills, active use of language, and access to the culture of a language. Second, systematic. The whole program contains four units, which are designed in order based on SLA theory, and every step with sufficient assistance in both language and operation. Third, it is operational. The minimal requirement for this courseware project is a multimedia classroom with this courseware, and teachers are not essential because every possible problem can be solved with the help of this software. Therefore, this EFL IVD project is really suitable for individual students’ learning and students can learn at their own pace without any interfering with others.
However, I also have some doubt on this project. Due to its design for individual learning, how to define communicative objective here? Of course, learners can communicate with the computer with this software, which means the tasks designed cannot be as flexible as what it says. That is why in the last unit, it follows the traditional teaching approach. Then, even though, teachers can find out the timing and process of each learner through the platform, it is very difficult to control the whole procedure of the whole class. So it is necessary to have a learning or a teaching plan for this program. In the process of individual learning, students can look up difficult vocabulary or any background knowledge through the learning “help”, but is it possible to conclude for the information which the user looked for at the end of the process?