The Role of WeQuests in Learning a Foreign/Second Language

Nowadays, young and adult people familiar with technology and they have the technical skills to deal with it in a proper way. There is no more digital immigrants, so the use of technology in the education setting become necessary to involve to engage the learners. Web quest is one tool that can be used to promote the use of technology in the educational setting. According to Bernie Dodge (1995) a web quest is an inquiry oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing."As it is clarified from the definition, students play an active role in the learning process and the teacher is a facilitator has to  provide the students with the all information they need, as well as she should modify the web quest to suit all students' needs. However, Web quests are designed to focus on using information rather than looking for it, and to support learners' thinking at the levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation; simply, it promote critical thinking. Generally, web quests are cooperative activities where students assume different roles relative to an authentic problem; for that students enjoy web quests because they are given the opportunity to use the Internet to find and apply information. On the other hand, they have to work on a project as a result of what they have been learned from processing the information of a particular web quest. In addition, web quest provides a motivated learning environment for the learners to develop their academic skills and social skills by collaborate and contact with each other in the classroom.

According to the current situation of technology in Saudi Arabia, I will use web quest as a tool to enhance learning in the classroom because it gives the learner the complete chance to learn through things they prefer, not through the textbooks which they are hated more than anything else.

Evaluating Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab Website

            Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab http://www.esl-lab.com/ is an online, multimedia listening website that is designed to assist Second Language students around the world to practice and enhance their English listening and comprehension skills. This website has been created by Randall Davis who graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, with an undergraduate degree in Spanish education and a master's degree in TESL. However, Every Site Has a Reason for Being There and Randall Davis site there to enhance listening comprehension, as well as improving the teachers and students communication skills with authentic and interesting audio.

            On the other hand, the design of the website presents the information on easy way to find and use, it has been organized according to the different levels with supplementary links such as, vocabulary exercise. Also, there is a developed quizzes to test the audience knowledge based on their levels .Moreover, The page on the websites load in a reasonable amount of time and it is consistently available and load without problems, but the main problem with the site is its background colors as well as the smallest size of the font that may cause problem to people who has vision problems.

           The content on the website is easy to read and understand by the audience. Also, it has enough information to make visiting the site useful and informative. Moreover, the title of the site appropriate to its purpose, as well as, the voice in audio records very clear and each lesson have activates promote the listening skills; each audio has pre-listening, while listening, vocabulary and post- listening exercise. In addition, each lesson clarifies the learners’ level, topic, and type of audio record, speakers, and length. And users can easily download the audio record while it found in website as written form also. There are a lot of links in a website as Randall’s other site where it is clear and easy for learner to move from one website to another.

              In conclude, the site grade level is appropriate as an extra activity for the audience and they are able to choose the listening records according to their levels, needs and interests. Although the site is not that much interactive and engaging for them, because its design does not attract them; it looks very formal; whereas, the content look attractive for them and cover all their needs for the different real life situations.  

Virtual Classrooms in the EFL Classrooms

I will write today about the virtual classroom that I had last week, it was about "How Does Arabic Influence the Pronunciation of English?" by Miss. Peggy Tharpe. It was for one hour and for limited number of people, only 15 students and 2 teachers were involved. She explain why Arab people do not reach the accent of native speakers, the difference between the sound system in both languages and what is the solution for wrong Arab pronunciation. She believed that active listening skills necessary to differentiation between the almost similar sounds.

Virtual classrooms help learners to maximize their knowledge about a particular issue because they look to the issue from different angles; Arab teacher for sure will not have the same point of view as Europe teacher, as a result the learners will build their own beliefs about the issue and improve their critical thinking.

 However, virtual classrooms may have advantages and disadvantages as any other techniques of teaching which mainly determined by the context where learning will take place. The advantages definitely will relate to the improvement of learners' proficiency of the target language. For example, if there is no native speaker of the target language in the community, virtual classroom will help the learners to acquire the native accent of that language by connecting them with native speaker. Also, virtual classrooms help the administration of college or school to control the lack of teachers in a particular major, by making agreement with teachers form over the word to serve that majors' lectures. On the other hand, disadvantages will relate to the lack of motivation, of accessibility and the misunderstanding as a result of poor devices and communication.

In addition, virtual classroom can be used to facilitate the teaching and learning of English language if we make sure that the successful factors are available such as, perfect internet connection, good sound system ,or appropriate size of screen for the show .I completely believe on virtual classroom, but unfortunately it is not supported in the educational setting in Saudi Arabia.

Do teachers need to create web-based language activities for EFL students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Why and why not?

Most teachers in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia use the classical methods of teaching the language, without any tendency to improve their teaching method according to the available invention of technology in their context. They have to involve the technology in their syllabus design and create their own web-based activities. There are two reasons can be considered under the necessity of web-based activities for EFL learners in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from my point of view.

          First reason, is to cover the gap that usually happens because the lack of actual practice of language. When a teacher provides an alternative environment of actual social practice in a web, she\he definitely helps the learners to gain the same advantage of actual social use.

The second reason is doing what she\he can not do in the classroom because the limitation of time,45-50 minutes are not enough for the teacher to help her\his learners to acquire the target language perfectly. She/he can create a variety of material and activities through the internet that affecting the learners' proficiency of language.

Web-based activities should be considered as essential part of the learning process in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I can simply describe web-based activities as teachers' homework.  

Wordle in EDU 401

Normalisation of Bax in the Saudi Kingdom

Stephen Bax tried hard in this article to answers these questions, where has Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) been, where is it now and where is it going? In the beginning, he showed that there is no real analysis of the past of CALL in educational situation, and most of the reports written by many researchers were based on their wishes or what the situation should be. For example, they use the wrong terms to describe the phases of CALL in the past .Bax called this period of call as" Restricted CALL". Then he stared writing about "Open CALL" which refers to the current situation of CALL and the future. To achieve the actual meaning of "Open CALL", we have to reach to the normalization as Bas suggested.  Normalisation is relevant to any kind of technological innovation and refers to the stage when the technology becomes invisible, embedded in everyday practice. He supported his suggested stage of actual "Open CALL "with the steps to reach it, which are:

1-   identify the criterial factors which normalisation requires.

2-   audit the practice of each teaching context in the light of these criteria.

3-   adjust our current practice in each aspect so as to encourage normalization.

In regarded to the situation of normalization in the Saudi Kingdom, normalization of CALL is what the ministry of education working hard on it to achieve in the coming few years. There is a big development in the use of technology inside the educational setting, but this kind of development needs to develop the teachers technology skills and the learners attitude about learning, not only developing the educational setting.

“Challenges of creating web-based activites in Sally Morrison” Interactive lanaguge Learning on the Web”

Nowadays, teaching or learning English language is not limited only in classroom practice. The internet provides many and different websites that can enhance language learning, but this does not means it is easy to use web-based language learning activities to improve the learning process. There are many difficulties that face a language teacher in creating web-based activities, which are:

1-the teachers do not have the technical skill and knowledge to create web-based language learning activities.

2- the variability of students’ access to computers as well as connecting with the internet.

3- the need to design website appropriate for the needs of students with disabilities.

These are the general difficulties can be faced by teachers anywhere around the world; Saudi teachers face also the same problems. Moreover, they have their own problems such as lack of support from the students' parents to encourage this type of learning. Saudi students' parents always have the idea that learning should be done through traditional ways of learning and other is wasting of time. Also, Saudi students usually have the idea that English language is very difficult and can not learn in any way, for that they always do not do what their teachers asked them to do at home. On my opinion, even the infrastructure in Saudi Arabia does not enhance this type of learning; there is area within most of cities missing the internet connection. I hope the situation will changes in the coming few years.