Week 7

WEEK 7

This was another excellent week for me, because I learned new knowledge related to Learner autonomy and the use of computer in the classroom.

According to Henri Holec, Autonomy is the ability to take charge of one's own learning. Learner’s autonomy has been a buzz word in foreign language education in the past decades. It has transformed many of the old practices in the classroom and has giving origin to self access language-learning centers around the world. As result of these practices, language teaching is now seen as language learning placing the students as the centre of our attention in language learning education.
As it was mentioned in the article by Thanasoulas, autonomy is a process and not “by no means teacherless learning. I consider that technology is one of the important elements of autonomy but is not essential.

There some activities that we can perform with or without technology to encourage greater autonomy in our students:
1. Pair work
2. Student’s self reflection on the progress in learning.
3. Recognizing and praising by the teacher the success of a learner
4. Use persuasive communication to change learners’ attitude.
5. Use a variety of reading genres like newspaper and magazine articles as communication study.
6. Get students’ participation in online forums and discussions.
7. Provide students a web site to explore, do listening and reading activities and take quizzes.

Although I don’t have computer in my class, they play an important role concerning students’ learning because they can help a lot in a classroom, no matter if we have 20 or just 1. Some ideas to use a computer in a class are:
1. I think we can use the computer as a Learning Center, where students can go at least once a week to do many learning activities and improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.
2. We also can use the computer to teach summary work using the AutoSummarize tool. By this tool students can improve vocabulary skills because they will be encouraged to use their own words to substitute words that they have identified previously. It’s important that this kind of activities can be seen for all students, so we should put it on the computer screen.
3. We can use the Track Change Tool and the Insert tool to get class discussions more effective. One group of students present and read their summary aloud to the whole class and others groups can comment on it.

As I mentioned I don’t have a computer in my classroom however, I think is important to have at least one and I created a sample of one-computer classroom lesson entitled “Better to be Unlucky”. I think that having one-computer option to teach English is that both students and teachers can use it to improve the English teaching skills; the computer can be use it for assessment, presentation, accessing information, communication, production and publishing.

Regards,

Carlos