About Web-conference

With the development of technology, communication among people has become more and more convenient. Especially, the technology of internet has changed our life greatly. We can share our photos, our favorite food, even the music with our friend on the web anytime anywhere. Thanks to the invention of web conference software, our meeting with colleagues and partners in distance has become available.

During my web conferencing with my partner Karin through skype, which was a quite pleasant experience, we shared our experience in teaching adult.  First, we talked about the role of “adult educator”, and we all agree that the “role of adult educator” in and after our regular classroom has changed greatly. As an educator, we should be able to build student’s confidence, listen to their feedback patiently, and constantly learn and explore new approaches for effective and positive teaching. For those adult with various background, who have their own views and attitudes, we, educator, should customize our teaching methods. We reached agreements that we must be a lifelong learner for being a qualified teacher.

My good classmate, Karin Carlson, has also shared her experience in teaching writing, which did inspire me a lot. She has used several methods to improve her students’ writing ability, such as one group exercise, asking them to do self-assessment or peer-assessment;  pair-share; one minute paper; or one- sentence summary , requiring them to use concise word for the best expression-- “who does what to whom”, etc.  

She also explained that her students come from different country, some are native, some are from India, and even some of them are Chinese. So, I believe it is more difficult to explain in class for those students with various cultural backgrounds.

She also shared one good and interesting article with me. She has briefly introduced the main idea of the essay—the teacher recorded his course by using video tapes and then, students can learn it according to their own pace. For the quick learners， they could skip some parts of the video; for the rest, they can easily repeat what the teacher say and then learn the course effectively and efficiently.

  

At last, Karin also shared a website for me to learn how to write reference correctly.

Web-conferencing is quite convenient and easy to get access to. Although we have encountered some troubles in connecting with each other, the whole process is quite fluent. In brief, Web-conferencing is a definite trend not only for individual communicate, but also for business to conduct meeting, which could greatly lower the cost. 

What are some trends in your field? How are you preparing to address these trends?

In my field, there are some more trends in ESL teaching, such as early start in ESL learning in China. More and more kids are forced to study English when they are just born. Lots of Early English Teaching Institutes have sprung up everywhere in China and their businesses are quite thriving. Why? The reason for this phenomenon is that considerable Chinese parents pay great emphasis on their kids’ study, hoping their children could compete with others not only in math, handwriting, music etc, but also English speaking ability. Therefore, many public or private kinder gardens, even the nurseries are equipped with foreign teachers. Definitely, this is an obvious trend in early ESL teaching.

For adult ESL teaching trend, the content of English course and the test design have to be changed to adapt to the need of social development.

Looking back to several decades ago, ESL teaching in China was chiefly focusing on grammar study. We pay much attention on teaching tenses, voices, or subordinate clauses, etc. Then, we suddenly found that it was not good enough for just focusing on Grammar teaching because it was so boring for Chinese students just practicing and learning those questions. 

And it was easy to observe that we have changed our key point to reading and writing several years ago. In English test, Reading Comprehension part has accounted for nearly 40% of the whole test. We forced our students to read fiction and non-fiction stories pinning our hopes on increasing their vocabulary and subsequently, their writing ability would be improved as well. 

Until today, we suddenly find that oral English and listening comprehension parts are quite important not only for the daily use but also for the career development. It is an interesting phenomenon that most Chinese student can write and read well with large amount of vocabularies while their communicative ability is quite poor. So, we now encourage our postgraduate students to do oral presentation bravely one by one each course. Thus, our test paper has to be redesigned to evaluate the speaking and listening ability of our students.

Third, for the technology part, I firmly believe that E-learning is a trend. Nearly all the students have some sort of smart phones or tablet computers. Advanced technologies have made it possible for students to learn anywhere and anytime, which is quite convenient and cost-saving. Without any doubt, more and more e-learning methods will be definitely used. In addition, for searching the information, the traditional library will be challenged.

I ‘d like to response the trend in ESL teaching by using different practical approaches. I ‘d like to use game-oriented method to help students study English actively and vividly. Sometimes we can simulate some real occasion to force them to express themselves. Watching movie is another good way to improve the English speaking and listening ability, meanwhile, students can learn lots of native words and expressions.

To answer the e-learning challenge, I have to follow the latest technology closely. The skill of how to search valuable materials and how to communicate with students by using my smart phone and computer is urgent. With the advanced technology, I can share the information I valued with my students through micro blog, website, and then I can get their feedback soon, which could realize the dream of studying anywhere and anytime.

On one hand, I am an ESL teacher for adult; on the other hand, I am a lifelong learner as well.

Reference:

 Deena Boraie's blog    Writing assignments   Retrieved   March 1st, 2014    From http://blog.tesol.org/8-current-trends-in-teaching-and-learning-eflesl/      

What new insights have you gained in terms of the variety of roles that adult educators play?

Nowadays, adult education has become more and more popular. People no longer stay for a job during a whole life, and they may change their career according to the interest or the location, therefore, lifelong education or lifelong learning has become quite prevalent. How to make “adult education” more effective and efficient?  Besides the adult learners themselves, I believe that adult instructors must play a critical role in the entire study process.  

Traditionally, we view adult educator as a presenter or a just a lecturer. However, with the development of adult education, the role of adult instructor is various.

First, as an instructor of adult education, the teacher is more like a “guider”. Adult are different from teenagers. They have their own working and life experience, and they have their own learning habits and learning philosophy.  Therefore, the main role of an instructor is just to guide the direction and resources in the class, then the adults may follow the direction and search the materials accordingly.

Second, the role of adult educator may be game-partner or facilitator. Undoubtedly, adults have something in common with teenagers. For example, both of them would like to obtain new knowledge through some games, pictures, and videos, which may impress them deeply. Hence, we instructor should not only strictly teach the materials but also play games actively in class. Setting a good learning environment for students is the duty of adult instructor. 

Third, adult instructor should be a good listener and friend of his or her friends. Only when your students believe in you can you teach effectively and freely. I used to have an adult student who wrote email to me saying that his life was quite tough at that time, and he had to do many part-time jobs to support his family. After replying his email, I suddenly found that he studied harder and more confident than before. Since then, we communicated with each other through the email frequently to discuss the problems he encountered in his life or in his study. As a result, his score of that semester was much better than before. Most students need a listener other than their parents. So, why don’t we instructors become their good listener and friends to enhance our teaching performance?

Fourth, to be a good instructor, one must be good at learning--not only the breakthrough in our own fields but also those new advanced technologies, which means the instructor himself/herself should be a lifelong learner as well. On one hand, we share the knowledge from library or some academic resources, on the other hand, for a good instructor, we must be able to search the latest information from the internet, apps, blogs, or other means of multimedia. Otherwise, we could not follow the trends our students follow, which makes our courses difficult to precede.

Of course, there are many other roles that adult instructors must undertake to make the teaching experience better and thus enhance the performance of both teachers and students. 

Reference: 

Author: Stephen Downes   Written on: December 6, 2010  
Retrieved Feb 23,2014 
From  http://www.downes.ca/post/54312