It is the 100th issue of ETp, and Webwatcher is one of its longest running columns. It seems appropriate now that I stand back and take a look at the current relationship between technology and ELT, and provide a few thoughts around its future.
Thinking about the teachers
I have seen far too many talks in which the ideas suggested really don’t relate to the contexts in which many teachers actually work. I confess that in the past I have given talks like this, too. Many of the things we suggest simply don’t take into consideration the time the teachers have to learn the technologies, the amount of infrastructure in place, the curriculum the teachers have to work to, the rules set by institutions, etc. We need to start with what teachers actually have at their disposal, rather than always suggesting new things.
Recently, I did a workshop on using Microsoft Word: a simple enough subject and a technology that is readily available to all. The teachers really related to it, as they could go straight into their classes and use the ideas immediately. This really got me thinking about this issue. I am not suggesting that we don’t put forward new ideas, but I believe that much more consideration needs to be given to what teachers can do now.
Looking at lists
I am not a fan of lists any more, especially long ones. I spend my life looking at and using technology, and I see my job as being to help busy teachers to make decisions about it. So a list of the top ten podcasting tools is probably not that useful, whereas a list of two or three might be. If I go into a phone shop to get a new phone, I hope that the shop assistant will help me to narrow the choices down. We need to get out of the habit of making huge lists of technologies and concentrate, instead, on a few ideas.
Linking technology to pedagogy
One of the biggest obstacles to the uptake of technology is the pedagogical training that many teachers have. Teachers will not see the possible affordances of technology unless they first believe that language learning takes place through communication and language use. If teachers are looking to maximise opportunities for communication, for groupwork, for processing and using the language, then they are more likely to see that technology can play a role in facilitating this. Even more revealing is that teachers will often say they subscribe to a certain set of beliefs, but what they do in the class actually contradicts this.
Feeling free to take chances
Innovation takes place when teachers feel free to experiment – and have the backing of their bosses and their institutions to do so. We need to create environments that allow teachers (and students) the chance to take risks and to experiment. This means putting far less pressure on teachers to get through a long list of grammar-based syllabus items and, instead, produce a curriculum that focuses more on using and processing the language.
Thinking about the learners
Blending courses should not simply mean adding more readings, more videos and more articles for the students to look at in their own time. We need to consider our students’ needs and the efficient use of their time, making sure we are not overloading them. In the past, teachers have tended to feel that the more that they add to their course, the better. I really believe we need to re-think this.
Focusing on feedback
Many talks on technology address the question of feedback, and for me this is one of the biggest challenges. Firstly, I think we need to change the culture and expectations of our students. Not all feedback needs to be done by the teacher. It is far more cognitive and thought-provoking to get the students to analyse their own work or each other’s work. This requires them to be trained in feedback, and demands a cultural shift in their attitudes to it. As an example of getting the students more involved in the feedback process, suppose they produce ten podcasts in one year. We might arrange for them to receive peer feedback on all their recordings, together with sporadic comments from their teachers. At the end of the year, we might ask them to choose the best two podcasts and submit these for formal evaluation and feedback.
David Kluge did something like this, and Icy Lee has also used this approach with writing. There are many creative ways that we can get our students involved in the feedback process, and this will help them to develop their ability to evaluate their own progress and become more independent as learners.
Technology allows an enormous amount of student output in the form of videos, blogs, wikis, podcasts, screencasts, etc. Although it is simply not possible for teachers to give feedback on everything the students produce, if the students learn to organise their digital outputs, placing them in a single repository like an e-portfolio, it will be much easier for the teacher to view the work, leave comments and provide feedback.
The future is autonomous
In the future, our students will need to update their knowledge constantly, and they won’t always have a teacher to consult. So it is vital that they become more independent and more able to evaluate their own progress and development. Whether students are able to make the most of opportunities to learn will depend largely on their levels of motivation. I believe that learner autonomy will be at the heart of much of what we do in the future. Our job will be partly to develop and cultivate the students and help them to become more effective learners; this, in turn, will help their futures.
References
Kluge, D ‘Boosting speaker fluency through partner taping’ http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kluge-PartnerTaping.html
Lam, R and Lee, I ‘Balancing the dual functions of portfolio assessment’ ELT Journal 64 (1) 2009
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell: russellstannard@btinternet.com
