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.

CALL and Language Skills

No one can ignore the important of CALL to improve the learners' skills and the objectives of the learning process cannot be achieved only through the Spoon-feeding method inside the classrooms. Students should be involved by the teacher to Call and encourage them to learn independently. Stanford university has been wrote a useful article about " An Invitation to CALL: Foundations of Computer-Assisted Language Learning”, you can found it here.

This article inspires me to write about a useful websites for improving the listening skill and how to use them effectively with the learners. These websites are:

1-  Listen to English - Learn English! :

this website provides many podcasts about different topics which can help learners to improve their listening skill. Teacher can inform her students with this website and ask them to listen to the topic that is related to the lesson. Later, she can ask them questions related to the audio recorded to check their understanding and their attention improvement.

2-   BBC :

BBC podcasts are very useful source for improving authentic listening skill and authentic skill plays an important role in the effective use of language. Teacher can encourage her students to listen to BBC podcasts in the field they like, sport ,music or news. Later, she asks them about the new news they got from the podcasts. If they are pronounced the words correctly, this means they are listen to the podcasts carefully and got the benefit from. As you know, listening always relates to good pronunciation and we cannot separate one from the other.

3- Voice of America - Learn American English :

this another websites for listening practice, it may help the learners to acquire the American accent of English because all the audios recorded by American people. It provides the audios for two different levels which may help learners to learn in progress and achieve more benefit.

Listening skill plays an important role in the learning process. If you do not listen very will and as much as you can, you will not reach to the native speakers ability in using the language.

Social Media in Educational Situation

Social Media has become a part of our everyday lives. In the educational situation, Students and teachers have different reasons to use social media. I will write about the reasons for using social media from two different aspects, from my point of view as student and from my point of view as future teacher.

            

       In the beginning, I will write about my current situation; my point of view as student. From my experience social media helped me a lot to acquire English language. When I am not using social media for a period of time, I feel that I will lose what I had been learned before;‏ especially informal English. I usually follow educational account who are interested in English language and also native speaker to know how to use and contact properly with English language speakers. On the other hand, as my friends living outside Yanbu city and I'm not always have the time to contact with them; I share my account in different social media sites with them to know each other news and be together all the time. Moreover, I can get access easily to what i interested in by following the people who are interested in the same things instead of searching in many different website.

            In regarded to my point of view as future teacher, social media will help me a lot to encourage my students in the learning process because they are use social media sites daily .Also, due to their addiction in sharing their point of view with other people about everything they know. For example, I can use twitter in the learning process by creating an account for the course and then creating an unique hashtag and providing it to my students to use when they respond to a question at the end of a lesson or when they wanted to share addition information about the lesson with their classmates.

          Social media sites are essential part of our daily live and we can not ignore it in any field.

 

Technological Change and the Future of CALL

In this paper “Technological Change and the Future of CALL”, Mark Warschauer discussed the future of computer-assisted language learning (CALL).First, he pointed the factors using in his paper to talk about the future of CALL and he considered one of them is the most important factor which is technological change. He concerned in clarifying the relationship between technology change and other outcomes, in order to define "Technological determinism". Technological determinism refers to the idea that the introduction of new technology automatically brings certain results. He also makes use of Pauls' classification of hard determinism and soft determinism to support his idea.

"In thinking about the possible pedagogical changes enabled by new technologies, it is important to look broader than the classroom itself", from this point of view he started discussing the ten developments in Information and Communication Technology. He deeply clarify how the technology can exchange the way of receiving and sharing information and what kind of communication can be used to make the use of CALL effective.

Furthermore, he believed that the development of technology will affect English teaching in regard to new contexts, new literacies, new genres, new identities, and new pedagogies.Gnerally, he saw the development in these five areas will make the use of CALL in educational process more necessary. Structural CALL, communicative CALL, and integrative CALL are the three phases used by Mark to show the development of CALL over the years.

According to the state of ICT in my country, I can simply say: there is a great development of ICT in Saudi Arabia .Teachers and students have their right to use technology inside the schools or colleges but with very strict rules.