Week 6 - Graded Assignment 1

Assalamualaikum.

Summary on Teacher’s Support in Using Computers for Developing Students’ Listening and Speaking Skills in Pre-sessional English Courses

This article explores the role of teacher to help students use CALL programs to improve their listening and speaking skills in English pre-sessional courses in the higher education context. The discussion views the perspectives from both students and teacher, while the findings later will suggest several potential ways that will be helpful for teacher to help students use computers effectively for their language practice.  In the introduction, the writer explains in brief about CALL, how it functions, and how it will benefits students and teacher in learning process. He also stated that researchers have suggested that computer-assisted learning can be influenced by teacher instruction (Little, 2002; Wiebe & Kabata, 2010), and that learning by this method still needed teacher support to provide explanation, evaluation and feedback. Thus, we see the roles of teacher are paramount as they cannot depend on CALL alone to help the students. Moreover, this study aims to investigate in what ways teachers provide support using CALL programs to develop learners’ listening and speaking skills, hence the study follows two research questions as guides, which are:

1) In what ways do students interact with the teacher when they work on computer-based tasks to practice their listening and speaking skills in pre-sessional English courses?

2) How does the teacher direct students in using computer programs to develop listening and speaking skills during these sessions?

Methodology

Participant: 200 students from two different universities in UK. To be specific, these students are the international students that hail from different countries such as:

1) Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Philippines)

2) Europe (Italy, Cyprus, Germany, and Greece)

Age: Ranged from 20-28 years old

There are three ways used in this study to collect data. Data collection consists of;

1) Questionnaires

• The questionnaires aimed to investigate students experience, perceptions and opinions of teacher’s support during their use of CALL technology.
• Tutor distributed questionnaires to two language centers (121 were returned with data)
• The data collected analyzed using the statistical analysis computer package SPSS.

2) Interviews

The main aimed of the interview were to explore:

• What sort of help teachers offer to students when doing CALL listening and speaking tasks
• The attitudes of the teachers and students toward such support
• Using open-ended questions for semi-structured interviews

3) Observations

• Four lessons were observed and recorded with a digital audio-recorder and field notes.

• Focused on how teachers interacted with students during their computer work and on the types of activities and worksheets teachers used to help the students complete their computer-based tasks.

Findings

The findings in this study show that teachers offered support in a variety of ways during the pre-sessional CALL lessons. This support can be grouped into two categories: student-teacher interaction and teacher’s direction.

Table 2: The Frequency of Teacher Feedback on CALL Tasks

	Often	Sometimes	No, not at all
Listening (%)	59	31	7
Speaking (%)	69	20	7

Note: N = 121; Missing: 3% for listening, 4% for speaking

Student-Teacher Interaction

As shown in Table 2, 59% of students questioned said they often received feedback from their teachers for computer listening tasks, with 69% for speaking tasks. Generally speaking, the results suggest that the majority of teachers often gave feedbacks to students working on computer-based tasks.

Table 3: How do you prefer to obtain feedback on computer-based tasks?

	Listening		Speaking
	N	%	N	%
From the computer	33	27	16	13
From the tutor	81	67	72	60
From your partner	7	6	33	27

  Note: N = 121

As can be seen in the questionnaire data (Table 3), more than 60% of students reported valuing feedback from teachers in class for both listening and speaking tasks. These findings indicate that though students could receive feedback from CALL programs, they also obtained teacher feedback. Students perceived preference for teacher feedback. One possible reason for this could be that the teacher can provide more details of feedback for students’ work on the CALL programs than that computer does, therefore students still like to receive teacher feedback.  

Teacher’s direction

Most of the students appreciate teacher’s direction because for them from teacher’s direction, more benefits can be got from the task which their teacher had assigned. They also felt appreciated and motivated by this structure. Besides that, the task which assigned by the teacher boosted students’ individual and collaborative work and at the same time encouraged themselves to work on CALL task. The students also felt frustrated when they had to do the work by their own without any direction from the teacher and they also more motivated if the sessions be directed by a teacher rather than by themselves. The students too more needed their teacher’s direction to enhance their computer learning. The teacher in this study also found that the students also needed their direction and feedback even for their self-study on CALL programs. So, this shows that from students’ point of view, teacher’s support can enhance them in their learning especially in their speaking and listening skills than individual study on CALL tasks. Without teacher assistance, the learning efficiency in using CALL programs could be impaired.

Discussion

·         Teacher-student interaction is valued by both parties.

•       Students need teachers’ feedbacks and support in order to use CALL programs.
•       Teachers need to remain interactive with students when they are using computers.

·         Students need teachers’ guide to keep them on CALL tasks.

•       Teachers’ guide can motivate them to work on CALL programs
•       Teachers should also provide extra activities for students.

Conclusion

·         Teachers’ support is necessary; it will increase students’ motivation.

·         In order to enhance students’ motivation in working on CALL programs, teachers need to;

1.       Be familiar with CALL
2.       Be ready to give effective feedbacks on students’ questions
3.            Prepare task sheets to facilitate students’ comprehension on CALL tasks OR ask them to present
4.      Organize group activities to discuss their CALL tasks to help their understanding

Additional points

·         The article has helped teachers on how to direct and motivate students in all kinds of CALL environments

·         The suggestions can be applied in other types of language courses which use CALL programs

·         The article has suggested that;

1.       The institutions should provide training for the teachers in order for them to fully understand CALL programs OR at least suggested several ways of delivering feedbacks
2.      The CALL designer to provide notes for the teachers to increase their level of comprehension on CALL

ENGLISH LESSON PLAN

Topic of lesson     : Students and Marriage

Language skill       : Speaking

Level of students   : Matriculation, Level 5

Time                     : 1 hour 30 minutes

General Objective : To encourage and improve students’ speaking skills

Specific objectives: 1. To increase students’ vocabulary input throughout the lesson

                              2. To enhance students’ grammatical skills

                              3. To enable students to improve their pronunciation while speaking

Teaching Aids       : Power Point presentation, Podcast

Procedure             : Step 1 – Induction

                               Step 2 – Activity 1 (Describing pictures)

                               Step 3 – Activity 2 (Group debate)

                               Step 4 – Closure

Evaluation            : The activities which have been carried out have improved the level of students' speaking skills; grammatical, vocabulary and pronunciation skills

Teacher reflection  :

STEPS	CONTENT	TEACHING LEARNING ACTIVITIES	TEACHER’S COLUMN	RATIONALE/REMARKS
STEP 1 5 minutes	Induction	·         To recap the previous lesson and give a brief introduction on today’s lesson	·         The teacher will recap the previous lesson and will give an overview of the lesson	·         To make sure the students are prepared for the next lesson
STEP 2 20 minutes	Activity 1 – Describing pictures Example questions: 1.      Give you opinion about the social problem shown in the picture? 2.      Do you think there is solution for this problem? If yes, why?	·         5 minutes – students’ preparation ·         15 minutes –  Activity 1 ·         Distribute different pictures which are related to social problems to each group. ·         Each group will present their opinions about the social problems	·         The teacher will distribute pictures to each group and assess the students’ performance	·         To generate students’ vocabulary ·         To encourage them to speak. ·         To enable the students to share their opinions.
STEP 3 10 minutes	Activity 2 – Pronunciation test	·         Students will be given 10 minutes to answer the questions	·         The teacher will give the website’s link to the students and assist them in conducting the test	·         To test the students’ knowledge about pronunciation
STEP 4 45 minutes	Activity 3 – Group Debate	·         15 minutes – students’ preparation ·         30 minutes – Activity 3 ·         Students will be divided into two groups ·         A topic will be given to be discussed by the students Example: 1.      “Getting married while studying.” Agree or disagree	·         The teacher will give a topic on the related issue to the students ·         The teacher will evaluate students’ skills throughout the activity	·         To generate students’ critical thinking ·         To encourage students to voice out their opinions on the issue ·
STEP 5 10 minutes	Closure	·         The teacher will sum up the whole activities for the lesson	·         The teacher will give positive/ negative comments on students’ participation throughout the lesson	·         To sum up the class activities ·         To give positive or negative comments on students’ participation