5th Confession: does practice really make perfect?

Practice definitely makes you better, however, I think that the right kind of practice is essential, being able to choose the right tools that maximise the practice itself.

My main goal is to have students practicing their oral English as much as possible, inside and outside the classroom providing the right tools.  Bax (2011) states that there are five stages in order to have an effective educational practice to know:

1.     Access to and interact with sources of information.

2.     Participation and interaction with others, which includes a social and even an emotional dimension.

3.     Expert intervention and scaffolding through planning, feedback and advice constantly checking that learning is taking place.

4.     Expert modelling.  

5.     Challenge and contradiction from an expert and other learners. 

As it can be seen the social and cultural aspects inside a classroom play an important role, not just teacher-student interaction but student-student interaction are more significant in the learning process. Now, how this interaction can happen depends a lot on the way that classes are designed and how the technology is implemented inside and outside the classroom.

When I was doing my CELTA course I learnt that providing the learners with a lot of opportunities to practice the language within a particular context helps students to improve their learning process, planning classes with a lot of peer interaction, checking students understanding and implement different ways of giving feedback are also key elements into a lesson.  

However, most of the time I planned activities that were focused on controlled practice and I did not provide enough free practice to my students. I always struggled to reach the final phase where students were supposed to practice freely. Timing was one of my biggest problems while doing the CELTA, and now I am working a lot on it, in order to overcome this issue.

For the purpose of using digital technologies into my classes, I concur with Bax (2011) when he states that “we should look at technology, not as an independent force that shapes and determines how learners carry out a learning task but rather a part of a complex mesh of factors which go to making up any particular learning context”. The learning process should be the most significant, taking into account that the classes must be student-centred, that teachers should decrease the time talking by optimising the students’ interaction and providing different opportunities to practice with the assistance of the teacher and encouraging freer practice with an appropriate follow up that expands the person’s language learning abilities. Digital technologies should serve this purpose.

In my previous post I mentioned that I intended to use some pieces of technology inside my classroom to enhance students speaking performance and encourage them to be independent and autonomous learners, to name:

·        Edmodo that can be regarded as a web 2.0 or as Virtual Learning Environments (VLE).

·        Voice recordings and Videos apps which are Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication (ACMC).

·        IPA phonetic transcription translator which I consider as a Computer Assisted language learning (CALL).

·        Other pronunciation and online exercises that can be considered as CALL as well.  

graph taken from handbook of research in second language teaching-Computer Assisted Language Learning by Dorothy Chun. 2006

To be honest with you all, these three weeks have been of mixed feelings. I felt that I was using technology because I just wanted to innovate in my classes, at the same time I was using it without a context, without a connection with the lesson and it was not taking part of “the complex mesh of factors” that help students improve their language learning process. However I felt that I did something good and it was to select the right tools, students are starting to be more engaged in the production of their voice recordings, additionally they are becoming more aware of the phonetic symbols and now I have been giving them inputs on how to recognize word stress and the importance of it. Furthermore I have been implementing student-student type activities and they have been responding well to it.     

This week, I decided to buy a notebook and have it as a diary in order to have my thoughts registered and reflect upon them because I tend to forget what I felt during the classes, sometimes I come up with some ideas about activities but then I forget them and it is very difficult to remember. I just started with it this week but I already have noticed a few things:

1.     Having students doing the voice recording with the listening exercises is more meaningful because the rest of the students can develop the activities from the book while they are listening to their own classmates.

2.      Students who did the listening tend to listen to themselves more critically and pay attention to their pronunciation mistakes.

3.     The majority of students are paying more attention to the phonetic symbols and are starting to improve in their pronunciation.

4.     My instruction should be playing a more important role in the development of the class since I forgot to tell students that the PPT presentations and the voice recording are part of the activities that they have to develop in class, if I don't tell them that they have to pay attention and develop the exercises based on what their classmates are doing, the students will not pay active attention to their peers.

5.     The importance of vary interaction activities, even though I have tried to implement interactive tasks within a few more classes these tasks can become predictable and boring for the students.

6.     When giving tasks in Edmodo, I should provide screenshots and more visual aids about the tasks since it takes long time to load the website on their phones and it can take a lot time that can be used more productively.

7.     Arrive 5 or 8 minutes earlier to the classroom so I can have all the activities ready and see if there is any technological problem that can occur and take plan B when necessary.

8.     Integrate all the digital technology activities into the context of the lesson so it can become more meaningful. Instead of just having drilling exercises from the target grammar.

So in order to answer the question does practice really make perfect? I think that the right kinds of activities are more important than repeating, being able to choose the right tools that maximise the exercises, implement different types of interaction tasks or vary the practice itself in order to motivate the students to use the language within a context and have a positive learning experience is more significant.

  Reference

Bax, S. (2011) Normalisation Revisited: The Effective Use of Technology in Language Education. International Journal of Computer assisted Language Learning and Teaching.

Chun, D. (2011) Computer-Assisted Language Learning. In Hinkel E. (2001) The Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, Routledge.