tHe EnD of DeLiCiOuS WeEk 3!

I am so happy to be with such motivating and helpful classmate! This was indeed another busy week. Like Poncho, I find that I am learning more than I expected to being in this course. We had 3 things to do this week. The first was to look at speaking skills. As I have mentioned in my post in nicenet.org, in my country, speaking skill is not given enough emphasis due to many reason and the main being the fact that teachers are exam-oriented therefore, we would focus more on reading and writing, 2 skills tested in our major exams. Reading Miller's (n.d.), I was reminded of the importance of speaking and that we spend most of our time speaking. But why than speaking is being neglected in our classroom? 

Reading Gong's (2002) article on using CALL in language teaching and learning also gave me a better understanding about reasons why it is difficult, at times, to have well-develop software or program for teaching speaking. I must agree that it would need a great amount of funding in order to develop a realistic and interactive software which all of us can use in our classroom. Besides being realistic and authentic, there's also the question of suitability. I am talking about the accent used. As Malaysia is a Commonwealth country, the Queen's English is used but than our society at large is expose to American English through movies, songs and etc. I guess that is a small matter but a matter which many would use as a political interest in my country. Just imagine, even the teaching of maths and science has become an issue here just because many city parents insist to continue the program but rural folks do not want to simply because of competency and the importance of English language for the rural folks.

I am still trying to include the use of CALL or web skills in my classroom but than I am faced with a major problem of availability of computers and internet access. But than I am sure we are able to use activities which we can download in our classroom to help enhance and expose students to the abundance of resources on the net. Besides that, I would also like to use emails with my students. I think this will help them with spelling and grammar. This will be a small and first step in implementing the use of web skills in my classroom. 

Finally, I can answer some of my own questions about Delicious.com. It is so useful and I can now arrange all my links into stacks and I can easily access them on the net wherever I am. I hope to share more links with others and hopefully some of them would be useful to all my classmates and teachers. 

Lastly, I got to look at some past projects. I am so impressed with how teachers all over the world are so motivated and how they are so detailed in their observation. Looking at their project, 2 in particular, I am reminded of how it was my dream too be be a great teacher. Now I have so many ideas what to do with my class when CALL is concerned. I really hope that I will be able to plan and make things happen, not this year, next year! I truly appreciate all my classmates encouragement and words of wisdom too! This is the very reason why I am still teaching and still a teacher trying to touch lives despite all the negative things happening around me. Thanks to all and good luck too to all my friends and teachers!!!