活動手冊 - 開南大學

The Revolutionary Epoch of English Teaching with the Advent of
YouTube
Jia-Yeuan Lee, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies
Chung Yuan Christian University
Abstract
YouTube has become a world wide craze in the cyber world. People use this
website to express their unique thinking, creativity, emotion, ideas and almost
everything. Even though most people just use it as a window to communicate with the
unknown viewers, the potential to highly enhance language teaching can never be
overlooked. This paper aims to explore the facilities and information YouTube offers
and their impact on the language learning field and how language teaching practitioners
and researchers can use it as effective assistance in the teaching of another language.
YouTube offers the most needed data in language teaching field, including the realia,
the first hand information from a native speaker, and the real life experience from other
cultures. It also offers the real record of different events, such as the great speeches
from world renowned speakers, dignitaries, and politicians. It also provides the real life
pictures or films of the culture-related activities, which can easily solve the problems
commonly encountered by language teachers. With the information from the website,
teachers can save a lot of time creating teaching aids or materials and can use the data
there to give assignments to learners and can also train students in the best ways.
However, the use of YouTube could also have its own defects. If used ineffectively, the
efforts could be in vain and the results could be limited. Therefore, in this paper, I
intend to offer some thinking about how to design a cyber-curriculum for the teaching
of English in Taiwanese universities in order to turn a boring lecture-oriented class into
a vivid and effective one.
Key word: YouTube, cyber-curriculum design
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