Teach English in Lechang Zhen - Linfen Shi

There is no substitute for human interaction! While this is a solid belief of mine, I also believe that in our technological era we should work smarter and more efficiently, not harder, in order to achieve greater results. Imagine a classroom full of 30 or more students and a teacher, teaching an ESL lesson. If I where that teacher I would want to work as productively, proactively and efficiently as possible, to achieve the maximum amount of teaching and learning from my lesson. What tools would I use to aid me on this journey? Well, that's where Computer-Aided Language Learning or CALL would step in as part of my lesson. Computer-Aided Language Learning has a plethora of applications that can assist teachers in their lessons. Teachers who take advantage of this would soon come to realize how important CALL is to them and their students. I don’t believe that using CALL would entail a teacher walking into his or her class, merely turning on his laptop and SMART Board, then sitting back in his or her chair for the remainder of the lesson. It's more a matter of, wait, how do I achieve the engagement of my students in the lesson. Sure, I could spend hours the night before, while completing my lesson plan rummaging manually through magazines and cutting relevant pictures out to use as captivating visual aids for my lesson, but I consider myself to be an open-minded individual who likes to soak up the entire big picture. So instead I would turn on my PC or laptop and use the most popular search engine to do the work for me, now that’s being smart and learning to use CALL as a sort of a teacher's personal assistant is smarter. This integration of technology into the teaching process not only helps increase student engagement and focus but many more objectives of the teaching process. CALL helps with teacher challenges, like increasing student focus, maintaining student interest and attention. Teachers can use a great multitude of CALL applications such as stories, games and interactive videos to make the learning process more efficient and entertaining. These applications assist with skills like reading, writing, listening and speaking. CALL can even be used to help teachers in their absence and as a practice tool for students. It allows teachers to customize teaching, for example, when a group of students is working and learning a bit slower than the remainder of the class, a teacher may then adapt CALL applications to the needs of the specific level of learning for the group. For me, one of the greatest advantages of CALL is that it can provide learners in remote areas with access to native English speakers. For students, CALL allows them to self-test or be tested without the fear of embarrassment when getting things wrong. Some CALL programs are so smart in design that they help teachers and students establish how well a student is doing in areas such as vocabulary and grammar, by testing these subsets of language competencies. I don’t think that any teacher wouldn’t want his or her students to think of them as boring or mundane. Students these days are techno-savvy and a teacher who isn’t, well is just ‘not cool’. For a lot of students, and as technology becomes more affordable and accessible, a personal laptop or tablet is becoming a substitute for the traditional hard textbook and writing pad. This advancement in technology and transition in the way students learn has created a portal allowing teachers to use CALL to assist them in teaching. If every student has a piece of technology in front of them that allows them to run online CALL applications, this would allow teachers to provide individualized learning. Students would be able to choose their learning style, skill, and pace of learning, customizing their learning needs to their own personal preferences. CALL applications provide an interactive learning platform. We see this more and more as the advancements in technology spiral, leading to an ever-increasing advancement in the development of new and better CALL applications. Some CALL applications now use lip-syncing technology that can teach and mimic the articulation of language. Advancements like TTS, Text to Speach, along with advanced video graphic editing technology produce almost life-like avatars, which enable students to match and search phonetic similarities, allowing them to gain exposure and understanding of the English language in ways which were not accessible before, and in doing so achieving a higher quality English learning environment. The development of CALL is ever-growing and with advancements in technology and the continual growth of internet access to even the most remote locations on earth, CALL is fast becoming an essential part of language learning. As stated by Hubbard (1996), the question for many language teachers now seems to be not whether, but how computers can aid in the language learning process. Teachers have been finding ways to stimulate their student's minds since the beginning of time. This need has led to the confluence of teachers using the latest technology and language theories to develop learning aids like CALL since the early ‘50s. This desire to create platforms that assist and improve language learning will continue to evolve and work in symbiosis with teachers and students far ahead into the future. References: Hubbard, P. (1996). Elements of CALL methodology: Development, evaluation, and implementation. In M. Pennington (Ed.), The power of CALL. Houston, TX: Athelstan. Internet resources: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (last edited on 14 June 2019). Computer-assisted language learning. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_language_learning