УДК: 372.8:802.0.
Mozharovskaya Helena
USING COMPUTER TECHNOLOGIES IN TEACHING ENGLISH
Annotation: This work is devoted to the problems of teaching English by means of computer technologies and the necessity of using computer in everyday life.
Key words: computer, teaching, technologies, electronic sources, on-line discussion.
Men use languages in order to communicate with each other. And here, using computer technologies becomes very important and necessary. This article has as its objective to show this necessity in nowadays teaching.
Computer is no doubt the most amazing achievement of mankind. It is a data storage system created by man. Nowadays computers greatly increase man’s thinking capabilities of planning, analyzing, computing and controlling. Really, we can’t imagine our life without modern technologies. Computers help and control us nearly in everything we do today.
Of course, computers and electronic resources have come to play a central role in education. You will rarely receive a paper or other assignment from a student that has not been written with the help of computer. Most of our students will have considerable experience with the Internet and will make use of it for much of their academic work. Many of them will be accustomed to using e-mail as a form of communication. Electronic tools can make classes more efficient; lectures more compelling, varied and informative; discussions more free ranging; reading assignments more extensive. A computer with presentation software can provide a single tool for augmenting lectures with outlines, slides, music, statistical tables and charts, images, and even video clips. Electronic discussion tools such as e-mail, conferencing software, and on-line chat services can seed discussion questions before the class meets, draw out shy students, and follow up on discussions or questions on the reading between classes.
Most teachers have computers, and most have some access to e-mail and the Internet. Many people today are highly skilled in computer technology and know how to teach themselves to almost anything. We have to keep in mind that the technology associated with computers and the Internet changes with breathtaking speed.
Now, let’s speak about the course home page. A course home page can serve several functions. Even before the course begins, it can advertise the course to prospective students. More importantly, it can present a broader range of material than paper handouts would by including multimedia material and on-line sources. As its name implies, a home page can act as a twenty-four-hour communications center for assignments, news and discussions. As with most projects, a good outline and definition of your web site can save many hours of revisions and false starts.
Electronic sources, whether on CD-ROM or on the Web, can significantly open up the range of materials accessible to the students. Many web sites can deliver primary documents, secondary literature, sound, and images from a wide variety of sources. Students who explore web sites related to a course can bring compelling evidence and arguments back to the class. Just because students can cut from online sources, the process of researching and writing is not fundamentally different from that for a project that uses more traditional sources. Encourage students to take the same detailed notes and to follow the same strict procedures they use for conventional printed sources. Most valuable sources will not be digitized any time soon, if ever, so students research should include as many traditional sources as electronic ones. Students wedded to the Internet sometimes tend to assume that they never use a traditional library; some act as if they think information that is not on the Web does not exist.
I think teachers must caution their students to be especially critical readers of on-line sources, explain the Web’s fluid editorial standards and the need to determine the standards, origin, and discipline that went into the creation of each on-line source. A short discussion of the answers in class will counteract many of the sources of confusion and disappointment. Creating a system of on-line publications for your course or for your department, can have a tremendous impact on student engagement with scholarly work. Another thing that makes electronic publishing valuable is that it exposes students to the stylistic constraints and opportunities of the new digital media. A number of periodicals exist primarily or solely on-line. So, students have to perform:1) essays in the form of World Wide Web pages(while even a traditional text essay might be posted for comment, the best web essays will make use of the Web’s unique ability to incorporate multimedia elements); 2) collaborative projects(all of the above projects lend themselves to collaborative work by groups of students); 3) classroom library(a digitally course might accumulate an excellent library of digital student essays, teaching units, exhibits and dialogues). That’s why it’s necessary to make the assignment appropriate to the medium. Most rewarding are assignments that make use of multimedia sources, hyperlinks, and collaboration with resources or people over the Internet. It’s important: 1) to arrange for help from your college’s computer department, 2) devote a particular class to a group tutorial, 3) keep technological hurdles as low as possible, 4) keep abreast of the range of technical skill among students, 5) arrange campus, local or international exposure for students’ work.
A moderate effort at planning how to distribute and publicize your students’ work can ensure that students feel their publications have been taken seriously. Many students appreciate contributing to the knowledge of the class and to the learning experience of their peer. A gallery of past student work is also effective advertising of your course to prospective students. The lack of clear standards for evaluating this work has hampered their adoption. Teachers are comfortable guiding and evaluating students on traditional essays and presentation. Web pages or multimedia presentation require more explicit guidelines to avoid uneven results. Electronic projects should fulfill the assignment, conform to online style conventions, make appropriate use of multimedia material, and respect the diversity and size of their potential audience [2].
Multimedia lecturing is also important. At its best a lecture enlivens academic subjects with the instructor’s energy and curiosity and with the persuasive nuances of human speech [2]. The programs can allow teachers to add sound, video, and even interactive charts and graphs to slides. At a minimum, you will need a laptop computer, a project device compatible with your software and hardware, and a classroom with a convenient electrical outlet, dimmable lights and an appropriate screen. Manipulating multimedia resources requires a powerful computer, a modern graphical operating system. I advise teachers to acquire a presentation programs. Many of the more popular office suites include them. Your campus may have purchased licenses to one or more of these products, it may have a central lab for digitizing materials. Make the file size of the slides as small as possible.
Finally, about electronic discussions. On-line discussion tools fall into two basic categories: synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (e-mail, mailing lists, threaded discussions). Classes that already meet together may prefer asynchronous electronic forms as a more useful supplement to their regular discussions. A class can also get the advantages of both by using an asynchronous discussion forum over the course of the term with periodic chat sessions for special guests or events. Most teachers turn to electronic discussions to get students thinking critically about the reading before they come to class, to answer questions to comprehension and fact as they occur, and to provide some continuity of thought between one week’s topic and the next. I am sure that for productive work during the lesson teachers must make the on-line discussion substantive and unique. Consider the demands of on-line discussions in light of students’ work load and time commitments. Balance any required participation with reduced demands in other areas.
Literature:
1. Jean W. Leloup and Robert Ponterio, Suny Cortland. Second Language Acquisition and Technology: A Review of the Research/Eric DIGEST.-2003.-№211.
2. Lilia Morska.Theory and Practice of English Teaching Methodology.- Ternopil: Aston, 2003.-248p.
3. Warschauer, M., & Healey, D. «Computer and Language Learning: An overview». Language Teaching, 31, 1998.-pp.57-71.