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.