The Role of Discussions and Technology in the English Teachers Training 

     

       Our students should be ready for the intercultural communication and establishing positive relations with people of different cultures. Intercultural discussions should become part and parcel of our life, because they help people to regulate ethnic relations and prevent conflicts. In order to achieve better understanding and agreement participants of the discussions should possess certain communicative competence. That is why learning foreign languages, using technology and communicative approach of teaching are so important nowadays.

       Communicative approach includes an appreciation of language as a means of communication. We think in terms of what we want to express, e.g. ask and give information, make contrasts, express emotions, offer advice, hypothesize and predict. Much attention is paid to cultural issues – the culture of literature, arts, science and business as well as cultural conventions in daily situations.  The communicative approach demands of the teacher as well as the learner reflection on what is taking place in the classroom. (S. Villiers “Sharing Our Understandings of the “Communicative Method” //Inostranniy Yazyki v Shkole №3, Moscow 2000.)

      Teachers usually teach their students the methods they have been taught themselves. That is why much attention should be paid to the teachers’ professional development and the methods of teaching teachers if we want to bring real changes to our education.

      A group of 26 Rostov-on-Don teachers was asked about the communicative approach used by instructors in the teacher training courses. According to the questionnaire only 55% of the teachers in the target group studied the communicative approach in the higher education establishments, 81% studied it in the professional development courses. 89%  of the group studied it by means of listening to lectures, 44% observed classes, 14% read articles offered by the instructors, 7% visited the web-sites of universities and colleges, 67% prepared the communicative tasks for their classes, 36% participated in the professional discussions and 40% reflected on the process of their learning and teaching. As we can see the traditional methods of teaching teachers prevail. That is why most of the teachers know how to teach communication but prefer to use traditional methods because they are not sure that the new methods will work.

       The author of this article was lucky to participate in the online training course “Building Teacher Skills through the Interactive Web” for English Language Teachers which was offered by the American English Institute at University of Oregon. Participants in this course were building skills in English language teaching with technology. The participants created an ongoing record of their work in the course and how the new information could be used in their own classrooms using a blog. The weekly posts included an update on progress with a technology enhanced project (https://sites.google.com/site/webskillsuo/home/projects) for each teacher's local school. 

         22 teachers from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe and Asia were reading, analyzing, reflecting on, and discussing articles and resources related to language teaching and learning pedagogy during 10 weeks. For the asynchronous (not in "real time") discussions the participants together with the instructor and two guests have written 1727 posts. Besides it the instructor Robert Elliott communicated with the teachers through e-mails. Every participant received and answered about 50 e-mails and updated his/her ongoing reflective blog each week, adding ideas and reflections about how the new information could be used in his/her local school or setting. All the participants visited the blogs of their classmates and left their comments weekly. Thus during the course about 601 comments on the reflective blogs were made.

      The course was really interesting, but the most important thing was that we, teachers of different continents, countries and cultures communicated and collaborated together. I was amazed while communicating with my colleagues – many of them were very talented and could be called writers because they used so many similes, metaphors and very strong allusions. At the end of the course, giving feedback on the course some teachers wrote: “I think that a good way of teaching –I mean a new not traditional one – is to spend an hour on an English teaching forum a day. Just like what we did together in the discussion board. So that teachers can read something new, share the experience that they have tried, and reflect on other's idea.” “… this course sampled together talented and selfless people who shared knowledge freely and this made life easy for all. I am pleased to have 'met' wonderful people from all over the world with diverse cultural backgrounds. This is indeed something valuable I will always cherish.”

Teaching and learning foreign languages through discussions with the help of modern technology possess great potential for effective multicultural education. 

   Some New Steps

Now I have decided to share my experiences and the results of my research with the colleagues. For the Russian reading audience I can advise to read my article about reflective blogs - Румянцева И.В. Восточно-европейская секция журнала "Образовательные технологии и общество"/ Рефлексивный блог в профессиональном развитии учителей английского языка. Том 14 Номер 2 Апрель, 2014. с. 531- 538. ifets.ieee.org/russian/periodical/V_present.html April, 2011. 

      The reflective blog fulfils several functions: didactic, social, communicative and informative. I have analyzed 30 blogs and 602 comments to them to develop the criteria of a good teacher's blog. They are:

- teacher's experience, current situation and plans for the future are described.

- teacher's knowledge, experience and ideas are summarized;

- pieces of advice are given;

- students' attitudes towards innovations are described;

- answers to the colleagues' comments are given;

- author's attitude to the innovations is represented;

- creativity and the inventiveness are revealed;

- metaphors, similes, images are used;

- links to the useful resources are given;

- colours of the blog are pleasant;

- nice and thoughtful pictures help to understand the content better. 

I hope this page will help my colleagues to make their blogs better.

     

GRADUATION!

Graduation is a pleasant moment in our life. Though it is a bit sad, still I am eager to implement new things which I have learnt about into practice. Besides, I am going to write some articles on the materials of the course and share my experiences with the colleagues at the conferences in the coming new year.

While doing the course I really enjoyed everything, because I learnt a lot of new issues. Of course, Webquests, Blogs, Delicious, ANVILL, interactive PPP, PBL, ABCD objectives writing, rubrics are very useful and should be implemented by all teachers.

Teachers’ discussions, partnership observations were very useful for the learning process. My classmates are very communicative and sympathetic; I wish all of them to cultivate these qualities in their students. I got useful advice and support both from our instructors and the participants of the course.

I’d like to advise the future participants of the course to pay their special attention to the time management. I have been struggling with the lack of time, because of the 11 hour difference between Oregon and Moscow time. For example, when I was waiting for the comments on my blog in the afternoon, it was night in other countries, and nobody wrote anything. In the morning I went to school and didn’t have an opportunity to visit my blog and read the comments, so I missed them and didn’t answer in time.

All in all, I managed to read the articles, visit the sites, fulfill the tasks and bring the whole world into my classroom.

I believe that my students have already got a lot of my doing the course, because now we use technology every day. We did our final project and received positive feedback. So we are making plans for the coming new year, which is sure to be one more step forward.

I was happy at the beginning of the course, when I received this wonderful opportunity to study and I am happy at the end of the course because I have learnt a lot of new issues.

Reading, Writing and Sharing Experiences

I have enjoyed reading articles about different learning styles of our students. Unfortunately teachers do not pay much attention to this issue in my country. That is why I am going to write an article about it with my own experiences and the examples, presented by the colleagues of this course in the nearest future.

This week was also important for me because the Pedagogical Council of our school was held. 100 teachers of different subjects participated in it. It was devoted to the new technologies in education and I shared my experiences of doing the Oregon University course there. I prepared a PPP   with my project and spoke about the experiences of my classmates from different countries.

My students and I also continued to work on our project – we were writing comments to the news which we have published in the Internet. All the kids were highly motivated to do it.

Most welcome to read our school news and leave your comments http://rels65news.blogspot.com/

WE DID IT!

This week was very exciting for my kids and me because we have prepared our news for publication in the Internet but there was no access to it during the whole week. 

At the end of the school week the Internet appeared and we managed to publish our texts without pictures, because the Internet was very slow. So I had to copy pictures and download them at home.

Still I am happy because my objectives were about teaching writing not about launching images. Besides, in class I could observe my students trying to launch them and I can say that they do it even better than me. Here is the URL:

http://rels65news.blogspot.com/

Of course there will be some improvements. Also we are going to learn how to write comments. Still the main job has been done.

It should be noted that this week brought me lots of useful readings and experiences in using different tools. 

I think it should be mentioned about the Regional ITE Conference which I participated in this week and shared my experiences of doing the Oregon University online course. My presentation was about 21^st century teachers of English and it was awarded with a diploma.


Irina

  

Autonomous Learners

As usually this week was full of readings and expectations of the new project.

Together with my students we have visited a lot of sites with daily and weekly news, studied the structure of the posts and photos which can “talk” with the viewer. I have offered my students to choose themselves whether they wish to work in collaboration or alone. We are going to publish our school news in English in the Internet. The students decide what to write about themselves. At present they are looking for something interesting what has happened in November.  

I believe that this project will help me to bring up autonomous learners.

Learner autonomy brings to our classroom more learner-centered kind of learning and radical change in teacher and learner roles. First of all the roles of the teachers change - they become counselors and managers of learning resources.

Motivation is one of the key factors that influence the rate and success of foreign language learning. As we work with the students of the 21 century we should take into consideration that all of them belong to the world of computers and can't imagine their life without them. I observe my students with amazement because they are eager to fulfill any task which I give them using a computer.

Our students are not born autonomous learners. We, teachers, should help them to learn how to learn by means of adapting resources, materials and methods to their needs.

Thanks to the Internet all teachers have equal opportunities for the professional development and access to various resources. It is difficult for me to imagine how we could teach students without computers 10 years ago. Because by means of the computer and the projector my students do presentations of their projects, demonstrate writing skills in story writing, critically evaluate written materials and graph survey information. With the help of technology I can easily access to a selected Internet site to enhance discussion, illustrate the point and retrieve authentic data.

Irina

Getting Closer and Closer to the Final Project

I teach English at Rostov Municipal English Language School #65 (in the south of Russia). My students are 13 years old and they are in 7th form now. Their English language ability is pre-intermediate because they have been studying English for 6 years. There are 11 students in my class. We study English 6 hours per week. 

I took the group 2 years ago, before it they studied English with another teacher in the primary school. I must say, that the students were taught to pay much attention to grammar rules, they have a good memory, can easily learn poems and long texts by heart, but they are not interested in writing and can't communicate.

This week I have offered my students samples of communicative creative students’ writings in the Internet. We have studied samples of writing e-mails, biographies, news, articles, stories etc. They expressed the idea of writing school news. I have offered them an opportunity to write individually or in pairs. Most of them wish to write in pairs. We have brainstormed the ideas about the interesting events in November and the students have chosen the topics. I am really surprised to see the enthusiasm of my students to write in English and still can’t believe my eyes and ears!

All of my students have computers at home; most of them have the Internet in their mobile phones and at home. Our classroom is equipped with 12 computers, the Smart Board and the Projector. We have got the Internet in our classroom this year.

There are some difficulties with the use of the Internet in our school – you can't be sure that you enter the Internet any minute you wish because they switch it off from time to time (for some unknown reasons). Besides, it is very slow.  That is why we can’t use Skype in class. But still, now my kids and I have got an opportunity to use the Internet in the classroom! 

Here are my A B C D objectives related to the communicative writing teaching of my special needs students: 
the students of 7th grade – pre-intermediate level will be able to write their own stories (120 – 130 words each) on the topic which is interesting for them and publish them on the on-line school site or teachers’ blogs site. They will be able to illustrate their works with photos, maps, pictures, etc. They will be able to write 2 or 3 comments on their classmates' writings on-line. The learning will occur both in class and at home.

 A common setting - 80% of time. 

I believe that technology helps to motivate my students to develop communicative writing skills, write creative compositions (not only reproductions), exchange opinions, make comments, etc.