Goals for this class

I’d like to apply this technology to my phonetic and oral English teaching. By means of you-tube, my students may have access to movie clips and imitate the pronunciation. By means of blogspot I may know my students’ problem timely and give suitable feedback to individuals. By means of facebook, my students may get personal help from native speakers and put what they learn in class to practice. As for me, I may conduct researches in negotiation of meaning in terms of breakdowns, repair moves, clarifications and self-correction.

Reaction towards the use of technology in the USA

Generally speaking, technology is much more widely used in ESL or EFL in the states than in China. We may find a variety of web-based tools, such as blogger, wiki, postcards, talking heads, you-tube here while in a typical Chinese class, the most frequently used tool is ppt to give presentations, which in some universities has been so overused that students even call their universities CPU (crazy presentation university). So maybe it’s necessary to acquaint Chinese EFL teachers with more varied up-to-date CMC tools to adapt to different courses.

But meanwhile we are expected to watch out for the negative impacts of CMC tools, such as the inadequate computer literacy of both students and teachers, the lack of supervision of or feedback to students engaging in CMC, and privacy or security issues. All in all, in this electronic age there is no way to escape the main trend of CMC in EFL teaching. How to minimize its disadvantages and adapt it to different branches of language teaching is what we should focus on.