Week 3 - Reflection

This week's disscussions has brought me realizing that there are lots of undiscovered internet features that I have not known shared by my classmates. I considered myself very active in finding new 'magical' internet features before, but this time I have to admit that I have had skipped many interesting websites that could actually give more benefits for language learning activities.

Sharing bookmarks on the net can be very exciting if you are sharing with people with similar interest. Delicious as one of the most popular online bookmark sharing tool provides a quick access to get your bookmark saved on the net, where you can easily retrieve them on other internet connected computer. To find interesting websites, I use stumbleupon, and once I find interesting websites, I keep it in my delicious account.  This week I cannot help myself from not taking a shot viewing my other classmates' saved bookmark and soon I become overwhelmed with such amazing collection they have.

Another thing that I learned in the third week is about authentic materials for language learning. Lindsay Miller proposed wide choices of utilizing authentic materials for English listening practice class, which can evoke a more serious approach in teaching English listening. The idea of presenting authentic materials to enable students to perceive the natural English usage is an important objective of teaching the language. Most of textbooks have been adjusted for foreign listeners. The spoken text rate has been reduced and lots of natural features of real spoken text have been edited, which make the listening material to be less natural. I also found interesting discussions brought by Shahnoza and Nada that introducing students with different kind of listening material, designing it to suit with specific activities will give a huge advantage for the students to learn more vocabularies and gain more natural listening skill. Overall, week three has given a clearer picture on the potential activities to design for the students and what are the expected behavior that want the students to show after we integrate the technology in the English learning activities, especially in Listening and Speaking .

Rahmat