LEVEL:Form 3 (Intermediate)TOPIC:Choosing Your Career Path THEME:Social Issue TIME:60 minutes LANGUAGE CONTENT:Simple Future Tense AIMS:By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:
(1) practice their writing skills by using the information from the website
(2) present the information in a short essay form using future tense
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS: • One computer per group of 2-3 students • Internet connection • Web Browser
1. Locate the “Quiz! Find Your Ideal Career Path” from kidsworld website. 2. Browse through the website to make sure it is suitable for the students and match the topic. 3. Prepare worksheet based on the information in the website.
4. Students already created their e-mail account in order to submit the assignment.
PROCEDURE:
Set induction: (5 minutes) 1. Teacher introduces the topic of the day. 2. Teacher recaps the previous lesson on future tense.
Task 1: (15 minutes): 1. Teacher asks the students to form a group of 2 to 3 per computer. 2. Teacher instructs students to surf for the following website:http://www.kidzworld.com/quiz/546
3. Teacher asks the students to complete the quiz and teacher allocates 15 minutes
4. Teacher asks the students to copy the description of suitable career and paste in Microsoft
word to conduct the next activity.
Task 2: (25 minutes): 1. Teacher asks the students to select the profession that they like by referring to the description
from the website.
2. Teacher distributes worksheets to students and asks them to complete the worksheet by
writing an essay describing their future using future tense in complete sentences. In the task
sheet, teacher provides few questions asguidelines for the students to create their essay. 3. Teacher guides the students in their work.
Task 3: (10 minutes) 1. Teacher asks a representative to read the result of the quiz and also the short essay regarding
the profession chosen.
2. Teacher discusses the answers with the students. 3. Teacher asks the students to identify some of the future tense used in the essay read by the
representative.
Conclusion: (5 minutes) 1. Teacher recaps the lesson on ‘What I would like to be’ 2. Teacher derives moral values from the topic.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITY:
Teacher asks the students to repeat task 2 again at home and it must be done individually approximately 350 words in length and must be submitted to the teacher via e-mail.
This article is about the research on blog-based electronic feedback (e-feedback) used by the students in peer-editing in order to facilitate improvement in EFL learner’s writing.
The aims of the research:
This study aims to investigate how L2 learners process comments and what problems that they might encounter in blog-mediated peer response activities. Three major issues in L2 feedback were studied, namely; linguistic characteristics of comments, accuracy of the comments, and revision changes incorporated in writing. Specifically the researchers are interested in understanding the phenomenon of e-feedback from the students’ perspectives. What distribution of linguistic characteristics is found in students’ blog-mediated e-feedback? How accurate are the student comments produced in the weblogs? How do students respond to comments of varying levels of accuracy when making revisions? This study also aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of how students produce and manipulate e-feedback on the weblogs, so as to investigate the pedagogical limitations that weblog-mediated peer editing activities that may encounter.
The methodology:
This study involved two major phases: a ten-week writing session and a four week blog project and the each participant need to create a blog. The first ten weeks were allocated by the researcher to equip the participants with some basic writing concepts about the organizational patterns in English writing since the participants were not majoring in English. Writing exercises also given on a regular basis and in addition, to establish the learners’ commenting skills, the researcher also displayed sample of essay using Microsoft Power Point to guide learners to correct errors at both micro and macro levels as a regular classroom practice. Following the ten-week writing session, the students involved in a four-week blog project. In first week, training session was provided focusing on peer editing and linguistics features, then each participant was given assignment to write one paragraph composition on the topic that already decided by the researcher. The participants need to argue their viewpoints to collect information. In the second week, they need to come to class with their first draft and do self-editing before posted their writing on their blog. Next, each student was required to read and respond to other students’ writing online by making comments. In the fourth week, all students needed to hand in a writing assignment that included the pre-treatment draft, classmates’ comments on the first draft, and the post-treatment draft. To analyze the data, the researcher used a series of quantitative methods, including chi-square analysis and test of homogeneity proportions.
The subject/sample:
This study involved 30 undergraduates at a university in Taiwan, aged from 19 to 21 years old. They were recruited from three departments and they were enrolled in an elective one-semester course entitled Reading and Writing in English, aimed to improve students’ reading skills and to equip them with some basic concepts of how to write an organized and coherent paragraph in English.
The findings of the research:
The researcher discovered that blog-mediated peer editing, accuracy levels and revision rates were independent from one another. In CMC peer editing activity, the subsequent revision changes were not determined by the accuracy levels of their comments. These non significant correlations, according to the researcher, may derived from the participants’ limited English proficiency and writing competence. In this sense, those who commenting cannot give accurate comments, and the comments also tend to be ignored by the writer.
Reflection:
This research manages to capture my interest because I never experience this kind of method and it triggers my curiosity of the effectiveness of the method. Based on my learning experiences, my teachers only introduced me to the traditional method of peer editing whereby I need to write and re-write my essay again and again and not to mention this tedious routine cost me a lot of draft papers. To me, this research is relevant and new to our Malaysian ESL context since most of the teachers still sticks to the conventional method of teaching and assessing without giving chance for the students to decide on what they wanted to and letting the students to make comments and responses to other students’ works. Teachers in Malaysia also have negative stigma towards implementing the technology in classroom. I think that this method should be implemented in Malaysia. Honestly, I could say that this research was well conducted and explained as I managed to understand what the issues that the researcher wanted to convey. The comprehensive explanation of the process of conducting the research makes me realize that this research is flawless and it is not too exaggerate for me to consider it as an ideal paperwork that can bring new changes to our existing Educational system that are more to teacher-centred. .
I strongly believe that it is interesting to implement CMC peer editing activity in class in order to promote positive learning experience to the students. Based on my experience during my practicum session, I found out that my students did not get enough exposure from their teacher how to give comments to an essay and the teacher did not give the opportunity for them to conduct peer-editing in the classroom. It is important to know that, peer-editing will motivates the students to become better readers and writers. The purpose of peer-editing not only focusing only on the accuracy of the sentences, but the most important aspect is to make sure that the message conveyed by the writer is understandable to the reader, as what suggested by Elbow (1992) that one thing that the writers needs the most is an audience. According to Kroll (1991) in order to make sure that the students are able to react instructively to their classmates’ paper, peer-editing must modelled, taught and controlled by the teacher as an introduction for it to be valuable activity. Nowadays, with the help of technology, teachers should be creative in order to capture the interests of their students. By using blog for peer-editing, the student can get various comments from his or her reader about the essay written compared to the traditional method whereby students only get comment from a friend due to time constrain.Teacher needs to make sure that the blog directory contains hyperlinks to each student’s blog so that every student could have easy access to the blog of others. I believe that if the students in Malaysia were given the opportunity to apply this method in their writing classroom, they will become more motivated to learn because CMC peer editing will make the process of editing the draft is easier since they do not need to rewrite the whole essay again whenever there are amendments to make.
Hanami (cherry blossom viewing) has been a Japanese custom since the 7th century when the aristocrats enjoyed looking at beautiful sakura and wrote poems. Sakura is a symbol of Japan, and it's said that there are over four hundred varieties of cherry trees in Japan. The most popular kind of sakura which can be viewed everywhere in Japan is somei-yoshino (Yedoensis). Japanese cherry trees do not yield fruits like other cherry trees.
Hanami andcherry blossom festivalsare held all over Japan in spring. In hanami parties, people have fun, drinking, eating, and singing during the day or night. It is like a picnic under sakura trees. Usually, people bring food, do BBQ, or buy food from vendors for hanami parties. Among various food people eat in hanami,dangois the most common.
Cherry blossoms flower at different times throughout Japan. The cherry blossoms begin blooming in January in Okinawa, and they are at their peak in late March to April in Honshu region. In Hokkaido, cherry blossoms usually become in their peak in May. Refer to the map which shows theaverage date of sakura floweringin Japan. The blooming period of sakura is very short.
1. Why do you think evaluation of CALL courseware, websites, materials etc important?
To me, a good teacher need to aware of the students' abilities and needs. Not every material in stores is suitable for the students. That is why, it is important for the teacher to evaluate the CALL courseware, websites and materials first before presenting these teaching materials for students. The teacher need to analyze the content, the language, the graphic and perhaps the issues that possibly very sensitive to be discussed in class. For example, the courseware from our local product suits the students better than the product from Britain in aspect of content and the language. Authentic content included in the lesson may help the students to comprehend the information better plus, the language used is not too difficult or foreign for the students. The material chose by the teacher somehow need to motivate the students to learn. Next, teacher should haveadequate knowledge of the CALL material that he or she decided to use becasue if the teacher doesn't know the proper way to make a full use of the courseware, then it defeat the purpose of using it!! Teacher also need to make sure that the material is user friendly for both teacher and students.
2. How do you think Hot Potatoes JCloze may help your students learn English?
The first reason that I can come out with is that Hot Potatoes JCloze is totally interesting,fun and interactive. The teacher can add interesting pictures and colours toattract students attention rather than a dull white piece of paper with only black sentences. This is totally a new technique that I believe could help the students to learn English better. I strongly believe that the students nowadays are already bored with the same approach that their teacher use which is pen and paper. The second reason is that by using JCloze, the students can get immediate response regarding the answers that they give and they also can always click for clues in order to figure out the correct answer compared to the traditional method when the students only know their mistake whenever they get their exercise book from their teacher.
p/s: I wish that I could learn this Hot Potatoes program earlier before I went for my practical. Hopefully, for the next pre-prac seminar, my juniors will learn on how to create fun activities using the Hot Potatoes Program.
Hi, since this is my first ever entry in this blogging world, it would be more appropriate for me to firstintroduce myself. My name is Liyana Bt Ahmad Afip and I am from Kota Bharu Kelantan. Today is my second day of attending the classes for my final semester. I'm looking forward to attend the classes and trying my best to give the best that I can in order to fulfill all the courses' requirements. But, attending CALL class with Associate Professor Dr. Izaham really gives me goosebumps since I'm a little bit 'allergic' to advance technology. I am not really interested in learning something that closely related to technology and gadjet stuff since I consider them as complicated and time consuming due to lack of knowledge. Hopefully, by attending this class, I manage to improve myself in using computer for the sake of my personal gain and perhaps for the betterment of my teaching in the future. Insyallah..
Answering the question of rating myself in term of my computer skills, I can say that I'm a novice computer user. I don't do much with the programs provided by the computer, I can say that I only use the programs that I believe important for me. The normal activities I do with my laptop whenever I didn't have assignment to be submitted are checking my mails, attending my friends in facebook and not to mention downloading and viewing movies and sitcoms through youtube and Ares.
Talking about computer software and hardware knowledge that I have, I believe that I only have the basic knowledge on how to run the computer =). I think I know what hardware is; the tools that we can see and touchable and listen to for example the monitor, speaker, CPU, printer, mouse and etc. I also know what to do whenever my laptop break down based on my previous experience. Mmmm...software? I usually use Microsoft words (of course) to type my assignment and Microsoft power point whenever I want to do presentations. I want to learn and make full use of the software inside my laptop, but somehow, I still procrastinate the process of learning it.
My experience learning via the computer started since I was in secondary school, when my teacher asked us to go to cikgu.net now known as guru.net.my website whereby there are lots of exercises and notes that will help to enhance our knowledge. Now, in university level, I have visited ESL websites to collect information and played online English games..During my practicum session, I have tried to incorporate the technology into my lesson and Alhamdulillah, I could say that it was a great success whenever I used the technology. The main reason is that, I managed to get the students attention by using videos,pictures and songs before the main lesson started in order to generate their ideas. I discovered the the senior teachers in my school never used these technology provided by the government to the school when I flipped through the record book that we need to fill up before we borrowed the equipment like LCD or Laptop. I not trying to blame the teacher for not using these wonderful equipment because it was a tough job for the teachers to bring the equipments up to the classroom, set the things up and make sure that everything works as what they had planned. I also faced the same difficulty during my first attempt using the equipments, but then after few attempts I managed to work it out and the best part is, my students volunteered to help me to carry and set things up =p
I strongly agree that the use of technology in classroom will help to enhance the teaching and learning process since we are now living in a situation whereby the application of the technology really matters. Teacher is the one who should take an effort to apply the technology in his or her lesson and also encourage the students to use computer to explore new knowledge and learning experience which later can help them in future.
My expectation of this course?Hmm.. I hope that this course is not too difficult for me to comprehend and I managed to catch up with whatever new lesson given by Dr. Izaham related to web designing and other computer skills. I also hope that this course will help me to become a better educator for the next generation of students who always crave for something modern.
