Monday, August 2, 2010
Reactions to chatting
Chatting, with teachers' guide, can be very useful for grammer and vocabulary teaching. It can practise some drills, facilitate students' use of certain vocabulary, and arouse their interest and motivation to communicate with their classmates. However, on the other hand, it may be time-consuming; students might be distracted from concentrating on the instructors' directions and they might be obsessed with their chatting too much. What's worse, some students, esp. those from poor areas of China, might not be acquainted with computer operation, there might be problems for them to type words quickly enough to communicate effectively with other students, which might lead to comuunication breakdown from time to time. So instructors must control the activity to the extent that students both enjoy it and can learn something useful.
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Great points. Do you have any ideas for how instructors can control an activity to make it enjoyable for students who have low computer literacy?
ReplyDeleteOne of the activities we did in the last class is very inspirational, in which one asks YES/NO questions on a given famous figure and the other one can only answer yes or no. An idea for how instructors can control an activity to make it enjoyable for students with different computer literacy is to pair a students who has medium or high computer literacy with another who has low computer literacy.The instructor can first teach the clss how to search for relevant information on a given famous figure from wikki,then when the students are ready to do pair work of chatting, the one with medium or high computer literacy can be assigned to ask his partner questions to guess who the famous person is, while the other with low computer literacy can only type yes or no until his partner can guess successfuly. The point is how to make pairs to match students with different strengh and week points together in order to carry out a task successfuly.
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