Mini-presentation: my preferred teaching context

I'm a full-time student. I don't have much experience in teaching English. After graduating from this MA program, I want to be an English teacher in a small college in Wuhan. Wuhan is near my hometown, Huangshi and is the capital city of Hubei province in the central part of China, so I choose to work there.

Learning in college is totally different from that in primary and secondary school. Learning of college students is not only limited to their in-class instruction and after-class exercises. And their learning goal is not only for getting high marks in every examination, but also for acquiring knowledge and skills they really need for their future. So they should find what they really need and completely develop their own initiatives to learn something not only from in-class instruction but also from after-class self-learning. It's no doubt that good learning materials are extremely important to students' self-learning . Nowadays, Internet is a huge provider of learning resources. So college students could definitely use web-based materials for their after-class learning. Besides, for better results, teachers in class could provide impressive multimedia presentations and adopt on-line teaching and learning materials for their courses. Therefore, Internet is of great importance to college learning and teaching.

Next, according to my own learning experiences of English skills and some related major courses in the college in the past, I want to share some opinions about the improvement of current general college English teaching and learning in the mainland.

1: Teachers could consider adopting blogs or wikis among themselves and their students for exchanging ideas, solving problems, and collaborative learning.

2: Teachers should find a good way to combine textbooks with appropriate updated on-line resources in every class, so as to rich their instruction and to encourage their students to explore Internet learning resources for self-learning.

3: Students need learn to take advantage of Internet resources for their own study. What's more important, spend enough time on it indeed.

Here are some web sites I feel could be useful for college English learners.

Practising Skills
http://www.elllo.org/index.htm (English listening lesson library on-line, Behaviouristic CALL)
http://www.englishbaby.com/
(lessons of idiomatic expressions, on-line discussion and chatting. Integrative CALL)

Downloading Materials
http://www.veryabc.cn/movie/new/ (movie mp3) Listening + Speaking!

On-line Reading
http://abcnews.go.com/
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

First Post!

Dear friends, in my first post, I like to share some general understandings and preferences on the following three points. 1: my experieces of technology in the English learning context. 2: web sites I use for learning English. 3: what I hope to learn from this course. Welcome comments!


In my English learning context, I use word and ppt for recording information, doing homework and teaching practices; I often do online searching for information and materials in need, sometimes do English listening and watching for entertaiment, but seldom (shame on myself!) do online reading and any listening or speaking practice for expanding horizons and improving language skills. Maybe movies are more attractive to me or I'm too lazy!!  Anyway, regret is nonsense. Start now! Online learning Web sites I want to use include:


1: http://www.msn.com/st=1                                                                                                                        2: https://www.21st.com/cg/switch.do?  forwardName=cgHomePage&newGeoStateAbbr=ca&newLanguage=en 
3: http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/
4: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/
5:http://abcnews.go.com/
6:http://www.youtube.com/
7:http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/index.html
8:http://www.esl-lab.com/
9:http://www.elllo.org/index.htm
10:http://www.englishbaby.com/    (English chatting forum)


From this course, I expect to get more theories about CALL and understandings of how different people might apply the ideas in different contexts, develop my own collaborative learning style, prepare for the using of technologies in my future English teaching in small university and effectively stimulate my own English online learning.


Again, welcome comments!