I have been a tech-averse person my entire life. Thus, I have very little knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and have little experience in using them. Thus, at this point I don’t feel competent in discussing “technology-enriched learning activities and teaching practices that would maximize learning for the kinds of students entering higher education….” For this Synthesis Exercise, therefore, I would like to talk about my opinion of the pedagogical potential of technological resources in learning the vocabulary of a second language (L2). The primary goal of L2 learners is the development of communicative competence in the target language, which is possible only when they acquire a large enough vocabulary to express themselves, and I believe that the teaching and learning of vocabulary can be greatly enhanced by using computerized corpora such as the British National Corpus, which contains over 100 million words; the Michigan corpus, which is specialized for academic spoken English, and the COBUILD bank of English, which contains over 330 million words.
Today everyone in the world is writing to everyone else, keeping in touch and doing business across every border and time zone, and English is the lingua franca of written communication in cyberspace. Thus, the extent to which ESL students can be active participants in the various networks on the web is to a great extent determined by their communicative skills with written English. The importance of textual literacy is mentioned in a paper by Henry Jenkins et al. I think that ESL courses can enhance students’ textual literacy by increasing their vocabulary, teaching them how to use words appropriately, and educating them about norms and values in an English-speaking environment.
With regard to our teaching assignment, I am thinking about computer-assisted vocabulary learning or a media literacy program for ESL students. Right now I have only some vague ideas concerning both of these issues, and need to do some research before deciding on the subject for my teaching session.
Joann
Joann, sounds like a good effort. It strikes a responsive chord for me because many of the community college students in my History classes are not native English speakers. Because History does not require a developmental course in order to enroll (like English and Math, for example), this puts the non-native speakers at a distinct disadvantage. I originally didn’t make much of a distinction in my classes for the diversity of student aptitude in English. However, I now find myself trying to be more sensitive in lectures and discussion groups to define some words that I use. ESL students don’t generally ask questions when they don’t understand. It does show up clearly on exams, written work, and class presentations. Any effort that would improve the vocabulary for ESL students would be outstanding and to the extent it could be utilized in other core classes (for “graduated” ESL students) would be a breakthrough.