Let’s not “power down”!

This week has been exhausting, but also terribly challenging. First there were all those readings about Computer Assisted Language Teaching and the reviewing of some websites on listening and pronunciation. I think these issues raise several questions, though, and I’ve hinted at some in one or two of my posts. As much as we can agree that CALL is useful and reliable, we also know that there are many speakers of English as a foreign language who are fluent and have reached a high degree of perfection without ever using these methods. For some, the learning of a language seems to be almost innate, no effort needed. I have that experience with my three children: they are all quite good, but one of the twins seems to take everything easily and he hates studying grammar rules. He relies more on intuition and he is usually right. He never had special classes or training and still, he is more fluent and he pronounces most things more correctly   than the others.

And then there is the question of which English or which accent we should teach. I agree with David Crystal and think this is another challenge for us, teachers. I’m sharing a short video where he talks about this issue, but there are many others you can watch on YouTube.

While testing some of the activities on pronunciation in all those websites Robert suggested, I suddenly remembered a video I had shown my students not long ago. It is quite nice and they even tried to learn some bits. It also made them aware of how difficult English can be and how important it is to learn it right. Here it is in case you’re curious.

Another task that I enjoyed doing was reading and commenting on one of the projects from last year. It’s always difficult to judge on someone’s work when we don’t exactly know what is behind it, who are the people involved, etc. I hope I have not been unfair because I realize that creating and developing a project is always difficult and there are many variables that we cannot control. However there are always lessons to be learned, even when things don’t go as well as planned. Or especially then.

To conclude this week’s overview I just would like to point out that in every job, in every area of our life, people need to be challenged, they have to remain awake. I remember something I read by Prensky: in his book “Don’t bother me, mum – I’m learning” he says that some students don’t like school because they feel they have to power down when they get there (as many of the things they do and learn outside school are much more challenging than what they do there). I think this course won’t let us power down. Nor will our students, as I sense, in all of us, the will and the power to make learning a real challenge!