While some senior educational policy-makers have pointed out that English teaching in China should be one of the areas where the use of IT is most likely to make a breakthough in changing the traditional teaching mode, the EFL teaching and learning in my university (Shandong University at Weihai) remain traditionally closed and restricted with only slight and slow changes.
- As far as the time, place, curriculum and pace are concerned, students are restricted to being physically present on campus and attend teaching sessions. No flexible choices are given to them in the teaching resources and methods to best suit their particular learning needs. Everything is pre-determined and fixed.
- Most of the electronic teaching resources are devised by the textbook publishers. Instructors simply take and use them with little or no modification.
- Another example of IT-related classroom is the listening and speaking classes. In the language lab, the teacher's role is pretty much like that of a technician controlling the media player.
We used to complain that lack of computers and computer labs prevented us from integrating IT into the syllabus design. However, after more than three language labs have been built in my department with enough PCs accessible for carrying out instruction reforms, we found that such labs are actually frequently left unused. This is due to another fact: lack of training on IT on the part of teachers is another factor that results in the closed and restricted learning and teaching. Having been accustomed to traditional practice, they don't quite know how to change effectively even when they want to. Consequently, it takes time for innovative practice to take place on a large scale. Fortunately, different problems have been gradually identified and effort is being made to solve them. More and more instructors have benefited from the integration of IT into instruction. With time passing by, I think we have every reason to believe that the more flexible and liberated language learning tasks will be integrated into the future teaching. However, it may be hard for completely free language learning tasks to become a reality.
3 comments:
Your description of teachers as technicians in the language labs are very vivid, which are the same in my university. Therefore, in the traditional way of language teaching and learning, the tasks cannot be implemented with great satisfaction. Maybe in the process of language teaching and learning, students' particular needs are to great extent ignored. Therefore, it is time for us to raise the consciousness of integrating IT into our future teaching with the "liberated" or even "free"learning system .
Hi, dear Lillian, I see from your comments one typical problem that might be common to most of us. It's always said that we should "walk with both our legs". The implied information in this metaphor actually help illustrate the present situations we are facing with. Sometimes, what really counts lies not in the equipment of certain facilities, but in the human resoures. As instructional technology is concerned, we need to learn and learn to take real advantage of such modern means of IT. It's no easy task for any one of us, but it's good that we are somewhere on the way.
We face similar problem in our pedagogical practice. The digital facilities have improved much in the past few years, and we are trying out the "liberated" system of teaching and learning. However, most teachers who carry out such teaching tasks are young teachers who are mort digital literate. The teacher training is the first step to integrate IT into our classroom. Courses like GLT410 Digital Literacy are quite helpful to realize this purpose.
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