Blog/2005-06-04

JALTCALL 2005 presentation 6/4/05 †

JALT CALL SIG - JALTCALL 2005 and others †

http://myasuda2.hp.infoseek.co.jp/public_html/JALT2005.f/

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Teaching narrative writing for large EFL university classes in Japan:

A report on a 5 year field study on using videos, 
a Group Mailing List and Groupware on the Internet

Abstract: †

Teaching EFL writing is very hard, as the class size is often very large and grading requires a lot of time and energy on the part of instructors. Before entering university, students have little experience in writing a paragraph in the target language of English. Almost every student has been trained how to translate Japanese into English. In typical writing classes, active class participation is not encouraged or is not feasible, as an instructor is quite busily grading only some and pre-assigned group work. Learning becomes unfortunately a passive one, resulting in learning grammar or about the target language. In short, the students do not necessarily appreciate the actual process of correction by an instructor, nor important focus on form grammar lectures. The paper reports on a five year field study that resulted in much success, on teaching writing for large EFL university classes in Japan. To overcome many physical and psychological difficulties such as the above mentioned, several technological approaches have been implemented in actual classroom setting. Namely, we made the use of videos, a Group Mailing List and Groupware on the Internet. These gadgets are not necessarily new tricks. First of all, the focus of writing has been targeted to 'narrative’ writing, rather than 'expository’ paragraph writing, nor translation. That is, instead of teaching how to translate Japanese into English by sentences, the class focused on the teaching of how to narrate the story based on the video. A choice of a video can be made from among many commercially available authentic videos, but the class adapted a couple of EFL videos, considering the level of the class and the time allotment. Weekly assignments were given to 5 to 6 pre-selected groups consisting of three to five students. Each class covers about 5 minute segment of video story, after when these 5 to 6 pre-selected groups of students are to write a 60 to 90 min. narrative summary story in 10 to 15 sentences, as their group homework, which shall be submitted to the instructor via a Group Mailing List. The instructor will then reply with some corrections and feedback via the same Mailing List, so that other students in the same class will receive both the submitted and corrected mails. Groups of students whose work has been approved, will in turn proceed to share the corrected version with their members, and will be ready to recite the story as a group in class without reading the scripts. All the E-mail work will be stored in the Groupware on the Internet, where students can browse the submitted and corrected pieces of not only their group but others, as well as other documents and announcements. Finishing successively these cycles of weekly E-mail correction and oral presentation of the narration for each lesson, every student will then write, get graded, re-write and recite the narrative story for the whole video story and record on cassette tapes watching a digested video story of about 8 and half minute long. The paper will report on the syllabus, lesson plans, with examples of students' actual weekly E-mail work, and audio narration of final project work.

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Blog / 2005-06-04

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JALTCALL 2005 presentation 6/4/05 †

JALT CALL SIG - JALTCALL 2005 and others †

Abstract: †

人気の10件

最新の30件