In my home university (Sichuan International Studies University), although a lot of lessons are conducted in the multimedia classroom, mostly it’s due to the shortage of classrooms with the expansion of enrolment. Most lessons are no different from the traditional ones in the teaching mode except the location of lectures. Only a few courses are conducted integrating IT-related tasks, but such tasks are still quite restricted and closed: the teacher of Advanced English simply turns to the electronic resources in the form of CD-ROM devised by the textbook publishers; the teacher of translation simply takes advantage of the convenience brought about by the intranet to display students’ version and an authoritative version. Teachers are quite in control, pausing for his or her convenience during the class presentation through the show of the PPT slides to highlight some instantly-presentable information, thus saving time in writing with chalk. In addition, some utilitarian students under heavy pressure from exams and job-seeking at certain stages seek more practice corresponding to the question types in the test to come, denying the access to some time-consuming IT-related tasks. It can be seen that mostly the use of the multi-media classrooms is for its own sake to expose students to the computer screen instead of the traditional blackboard. With the shortage of capital due to the university status of being only municipality-owned, the teachers’ lack of proficiency at computer skills, as well as the consideration of students’ factual needs, the really liberated and free tasks are hard to be incorporated in teaching in my teaching context.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
EFL IT learning tasks in my university
In my home university (Sichuan International Studies University), although a lot of lessons are conducted in the multimedia classroom, mostly it’s due to the shortage of classrooms with the expansion of enrolment. Most lessons are no different from the traditional ones in the teaching mode except the location of lectures. Only a few courses are conducted integrating IT-related tasks, but such tasks are still quite restricted and closed: the teacher of Advanced English simply turns to the electronic resources in the form of CD-ROM devised by the textbook publishers; the teacher of translation simply takes advantage of the convenience brought about by the intranet to display students’ version and an authoritative version. Teachers are quite in control, pausing for his or her convenience during the class presentation through the show of the PPT slides to highlight some instantly-presentable information, thus saving time in writing with chalk. In addition, some utilitarian students under heavy pressure from exams and job-seeking at certain stages seek more practice corresponding to the question types in the test to come, denying the access to some time-consuming IT-related tasks. It can be seen that mostly the use of the multi-media classrooms is for its own sake to expose students to the computer screen instead of the traditional blackboard. With the shortage of capital due to the university status of being only municipality-owned, the teachers’ lack of proficiency at computer skills, as well as the consideration of students’ factual needs, the really liberated and free tasks are hard to be incorporated in teaching in my teaching context.
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3 comments:
I’m quite with your point that there are utilitarian reasons that students and teachers decide to dodge to incorporate free and liberated learning tasks.
As teachers, I guess, we need more than just high-tech-equipped classrooms to make good lessons. A lot more effort has to be made to change the mentalities of some educators towards language teaching and learning in our teaching contexts. These mentalities might be the root of why free and liberated learning tasks are impossible in our classrooms.
What you have described about your university is exactly the same with the case of mine. It seems that IT is used only to save teachers’ effort of writing on the blackboard, and nothing else. The problem can be solved only when both school administrators as well as teachers innovate their notion as for what role IT can play in classroom teaching. I am sure the truly IT-based tasks can be achieved in the near future after they fully perceived the benefits brought about by it.
It seems to be a universal problem that departments of arts and humanities in Chinese higher educational institutions tend to be poorly equipped with IT either because its role is underestimated in the teaching and learning practice of humanities or because these schools usually are poorly funded as a result of their peripheral status in the educational agenda in China. I think that what we as language teachers can do is to design meaningful learning tasks with the limited IT resources to make the best that we can.
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