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Group 1: Wen Zhu, Yao Wang, Qi Wang, Wenyu Xie, Liu Xindi, Mingxuan Wang

Part 1 , Introduction, Summary

Over the last two to three decades, with the contribution of tremendous innovative progress in information and technology communication, language learning has become one of the most popular and dynamic areas of education with the application of learning technologies.

Teachers at the current society inevitably encounter tremendous change and reform in teaching techniques due to the globalization and innovation of technology, shifting from traditional concepts and techniques in classroom teaching to adopting the recent and innovative teaching techniques. One significant change is that ESL and EFL teaching, as well as learning have deeply involved into computer assisted technology, such as various online learning tools, apps, websites etc.

The role of teachers in L2 teaching has changed significantly due to the fast changes in social, cultural, economics and technology developments globally. Although teaching largely relies on teachers’ potential excellence, skills, knowledge. CALL also has gradually played a truly essential role in English teaching inevitably.

In addition to courses delivered in face-to-face settings, computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has increasingly experienced the emergence of a plethora of distance and online courses. Nowadays, Technologies have played as a core component in ESL teaching and learning widely. Teachers currently are required to master the knowledge of the theory, the practice of learning technologies and digital literacy skills, in order to understand the learning trends and technological skills, activities, applying teaching activities and considering how lessons can be conducted from CALL for wider developments in educational technology and the role of digital media.

Therefore, teachers in L2 learning must implement and fresh up the knowledge of innovative technologies to satisfy the demand of the current changing era. In other words, in TESOL teaching practice, teachers should act to enable the teaching practice to become more innovative, imaginative, and resourceful, gaining a thorough knowledge of CALL to adopt new techniques, bringing changes to the teaching application, to students and the society.

Question that we need to consider is how we can efficiently understand the various approaches of CALL, connecting technology to teaching, in order to practice and apply CALL methodology integrating with contemporary ESL and EFL language teaching and acquisition.

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Group members: Yueting Hou, Huan Zhang, Yuenan Yang, Shifan Du, Shannan Sun, Libby Li
Summary

This part introduces how blogs, social network and wiki promote language learning outside the classroom. Blogs can check students’ writing ability and develop their writing skills, and helps teachers control teaching outside the classroom. Blogs support learner autonomy and encourage them to develop language skills outside the classroom. It can be utilized in 2 primary ways.

1) Encourage learners to write journals and post publicly available blogs.

2) Have learners comment on the teacher’s main blog entries.

Social network such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube can provide opportunities for language learners to foster communication skills and set up outside class discussion environment which can improve students’ communication skills. Some wiki-based projects promote peer to peer collaboration, increase motivation, empower learners to construct knowledge, and enable progress assessment.

Experiences we’ve had with this topic

Blogs

In one of my classes of undergraduate school, our teacher asked us to use Twitter to post what we want to share with the class. Except for a short introduction to the topic, we were also asked to add a certain tag so that the teacher and classmates could find our posts through the tag even though we were not friends on Twitter. Besides, we could also share videos in our posts, and people who see our posts can give a like, repost, comment or share. I think it is convenient and useful for language learning and teaching since students can improve their writing skills through peer review and teachers can give feedback or assign projects easily.

Social networking

Social networking such as Google, Face book, Friendster, Bebo and YouTube are changing from entertaining to learning friendly.

As a learner, we can see lots of English native speakers share their daily life on the Internet. Or some English teachers post the teaching video on it. It breaks the time and space barriers which can provides more opportunities to language learners all over the world.

For me, I usually use Bilibili to watch an American blogger share his version of Chinglish to avoid having the same problem myself.

Wikis

When I was doing my bachelor’s degree, my study group was asked to do an assignment collaboratively but we couldn’t schedule our time. So we decided to complete the assignment asynchronously using Google doc. It was an amazing experience because we were all able to edit our work on the same page and we could see all the drafts and edit history. After that, almost all of our group work was done using wikis.

Question we have about this topic

These approaches can improve students' interest in learning through interesting tasks, but are these methods suitable for all classroom teaching?

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Group members: Jingjing Wang, Chenjia Jiang, Fang Cui, Ying Long, Yuwen Sun

Part 3: IV online games, V mobile assisted

1. A summary of the part you are given (5-6 main points)

The third part of the article mainly introduces the benefits of online games and mobile phones for second language learning, and how to use these two learning tools to conduct social interaction for language learning.It also explain what is digital age language learning and how digital age language teachers to have four important responsibilities, then show the example of the multimedia language lab.

2. Ideas/Experiences you’ve had with this topic.

Playing games can really practice people's language communication skills, and this kind of language communication is autonomous and easier to acquire knowledge.
Mobile phones are also very helpful to our study. Because there are all kinds of learning applications in the mobile phone, in addition, the input method of the mobile phone also has the function of automatic spelling correction. I think these two points are very convenient.
Many students learn English in their own countries which don't provide English-speaking environment. Online learning resources provide a large amount of materials that involve students into the authentic English. Meanwhile, online books help to save costs and space.
I (Fang Cui) think games can play an important role in language learning and even assessment in the future. In online games, we usually play a character that performs a variety of tasks, which often involve talking to different figures in various types of settings. Similarly, maybe one day technicians can develop a game in which students play a character that goes through a series of settings, such as cafeterias and grocery stores. In these settings, students can be challenged with scenarios that require them to respond according to the specific challenge they are facing. I feel this is valuable because it measures students’ language skills based on their response in real-life scenarios rather than to random question prompts that we see in IELTS and TOEFL.

3. Further questions you might have about this topic

Some learners are beginners. That means they can not use the   resources online effectively. How they can manage to make use of the online games and materials should be guided properly.

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Group member: Fengyuan Zhu, Mengyao Xu, Wenhui Zhang, Yanlin Yang, Lei Hua

1.     A summary of the part VI, VII and VIII

Audio-visual training aids are the component parts of the good foundation of educational programme. It can be divided as video, audio and audiovisual aids which are used to motivate students from learning language. Audio-visual aides can provide students direct sensory experience and lead the teaching into effective and intersing. Bulletin board, Flannel board/graphs, Slides film strips, Overhead projector, Tape recorder/gramophone, Radio and T.V. / Video are included in the audio-visual aids.

Padmavathi, in her discussion of the connection between English language teaching and learning in the digital age, argues for a context-based approach which combines English grammar and background. She notes that this approach, because it is based in real-life communication, helps learners to more easily distinguish structure and meaning. As a result, learners more readily recognize the proper structural and grammatical usage within the correct context. Ergo, such an approach, as it is based in overall usage of the language, lends itself to effective incorporation in CLT. Ultimately, the goal of this method is to improve a learner’s overall grammatical awareness, understanding of the communicative functions of grammar, and their ability to distinguish between different grammatical systems. In the end, the advantage lies in the fact that students can more easily understand why certain rules apply to certain structures. Additionally, learners are in a better position to determine appropriate usage of those structures in real life, thereby increasing student confidence in practical communication strategies.

In the Conclusion, Padmavathi mentions that, due to the development of globalization, the English language has become the international lingua franca, and therefore maintains power within the global marketplace. As a result, teaching methodologies should be adapted toward the needs of the current era.

2.     Ideas/Experiences you’ve had with this topic

As to the ideas about audio-visual aids and Context Based Approach, I would like to let my student practice simple present tense in a job interview scenario. We could use some recorded conversations or videos about a job interview in classroom. Then it’s also helpful for learners to work in pairs to practice Q&A about greeting and self-introduction parts in a job interview. During the group work, the teacher could list written sentence structures in bulletin points on board to assist learners be familiar with the grammar knowledge.

In English classes, I remembered some of my teachers would like to play English songs or some videos related to the topic of class, and this is a good way to arouse student’s interest and make the class more active. As for content-based approach, I think the content chosen by teachers should be related to students’ real life or their interest. It focuses on students’ active engagement to make sure the feasibility of the teaching approach.

3.     Further questions you might have about this topic

1) Audio visual aids are effective tools to impart good education, however, teachers should consider the appropriate type of audio-visual aids and how long should it spend within the limit classroom time.

2) For EFL students, the biggest problem is a lack of language environment. They have few chances to use other language in real life communication. Thus, in the classroom, teachers should try to create such environment to promote students with their language learning.