"Education is Not the Filling of a Pail, But the Lighting of
a Fire"
William Butlet Yeats
My personal
classroom experience and the researches show that lack of participation in
Speaking, Pronunciation and Listening parts of EFL classrooms is a common
problem for most of the English Language classrooms all around the world. As
Burely-Allen mentions, more than forty percent of our daily communication time
is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, sixteen percent on
reading, and only nine percent on writing (1995). In the classrooms, however,
the general aim is usually on other skills. Students try not to participate in
listening and speaking parts of the lesson. Without enough participation, these
skills stay as the most problematic parts of language classes. It is for this
reason that the teachers need to think twice about the ways of increasing
students’ aural/oral participation in these two skills. Third week’s study in "Building
Teacher Skills through the Interactive Web” helped me a lot in organizing my
ideas about how to cope with unmotivated students in aural/oral skills.
Reading the
articles recommended by our tutors was the first part of our study. Among many
other articles on the issue, I found http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc and www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf as the most
beneficial ones in understanding the importance of using the right materials
for these two important skills and where to find them.
“The Employment
of Call in Teaching Second Foreign Language Speaking Skills” by Julia Gong enlightens
the readers about the use of CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) in
language classes by giving the advantages and the disadvantages. It also gives
ideas on the applications of CALL in teaching spoken language.
“Developing Listening Skills with Authentic
Materials” by Lindsay Miller shows the teachers that there are many “easy to access”
internet tools to be used in language classrooms. She also leads her readers
the importance of Pre-, While-, and Post- activity strategies in teaching. As
teachers of English, the first thing to be done to reduce the anxiety of our
students, I belive, is to use these strategies. With the correct use of
strategies, the students might feel more self confident about the material used
in the classroom.
One other thing
that makes a difference in a language classroom is to find the right material
for your students’ use. At this point, the number and the variety of the
Websites and the Web tools shared by our colleagues were enormous. Learning
about these sites, which were mostly new to me, was a great experience. Among
these sites that are there for English Language teachers to use, I found the
following sites as the most interesting ones;
not to mention http://www.esl-lab.com/
I highly recommend the language teachers who visit my blog to
visit these sites and search for the opportunities to make their language
classes more interesting.
Creating my Delicious page was another challenge
of this week. I have created my own "Delicious" page and started
adding links. The URL of my page is (https://delicious.com/#hulyaku).
This is a free service and it is
designed for the users to save their favorite web pages. The best part of it is
that you can have an access to your favorites even if you are away from your
personal computer. You can also develop a network in which you share your
intrests with other people all around the world or just with friends. It is easy to create, I did it within a few
minutes, so I belive that everybody can do it J
Reading a final Project and commeting
on that report was another task of the week. It was an experience which made me
feel excited as it is the final part of this 10-week marathon. Even the vision
of a finished final project which has my name on it made my day J. The variety of the projects I have read made
me understand that I need some more time to decide on what and how to study in
my Project class.
Just like the second part of Yeats quote,
with the new tools I met by the help of my tutors and my colleagues, I feel
myself lighted up and this gives me the power to make my students feel the
same.
Burely-Allen, M. 1995. Listening: The forgotten
skill. New York: John Wily & Sons, Inc.
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