International Teacher Education Conference 2014 1

International Teacher Education Conference 2014
One UCLA study has found that neurologically normal volunteers were able to change their brain activity
patterns and increase function after just one week of searching the web [4] Another study has seen more activity
in the problem-solving and decision-making areas of the brain than in the brains of those who do not use the net
[24].
THE NON-DIGITAL RESPONSE
Those language teachers not comfortable with digitized media or skeptical of its real benefits must find new
competitive ways of keeping and stimulating student’s attention for shorter time periods. According to Assisted
Living Today [2] young people are being used to receiving (processing and perhaps retaining) information in
much faster ways than the pace laid out by traditional language learning textbooks. This effect and our sped-up
lifestyles could be a (partial) reason for increasing impatience or boredom with traditional learning methods.
Whether this fact is accepted or not, these competing digital attractions/distractions make it necessary for
teachers to find ways of making lessons more interesting, and to go beyond just following the literal instructions
in a textbook and relying on recordings of people using the correct way of speaking.
With this knowledge in mind, a different approach could be used to supplement the education of students who
didn’t have a similarly oriented secondary school as the faculty they study at and to enrich those who did. It is
based on using target vocabulary, concepts and grammar and applying them in different forms at critical times
rather than only following the instructions of a curriculum textbook.
An example of this approach was applied during a semester on a weekly basis at VŠB-TUO. After attendance
was taken, and administrative matters cleared up, an attention-grabbing exercise, a short guessing game of “Who
Am I” (See Appendix 1a) or some fun with logic puzzle started each class. This was followed by a short review
(See Appendix 1b) of the previous lesson and after about the first few minutes, when the attention span of
students usually starts to drop, students were given a word/phrase on a slip of paper and had to find an equivalent
matching word in English or Czech. These were words, phases and expressions which would be dealt with in the
lesson, and would provide a good base (and a list of vocabulary) before any reading, writing or listening
exercises connected with the textbook began. During this activity, all types of dictionaries can be used or
students can ask a teacher or fellow student for help or advice. After this activity students settled down again
with the list of vocabulary in English (and their own native tongue), and started to concentrate on the exercises
or articles in the textbook.
Similarly, other curriculum-based exercises were interspaced with other activities to repeat the
concepts/vocabulary, like Bingo (See Appendix 2) in which the words/phrases used in the textbook are
described. This can again be followed by the curriculum specified in the textbook, and supplemented by some
topical word search or criss-cross activity. (Some textbooks also provide these types of activities but not usually
on a regular basis). In this way students can repeat target words and phrases in different more varied forms.
There are also many supplementary activities which can be applied between curriculum-based exercises, such as
betting play money on whether the grammar in a sentence is correct, using analogy games (for example,
"customer to supplier is the same as credit to____" or "pretty to beautiful is the same as warm to_____"),
activities focused on the similarities of words in English and those loanwords adapted into a student’s mother
language, (of course some basic knowledge of the students’ mother tongue is required), co-operative information
collection activities and exercises that rearrange target letters, words and phrases to reinforce spelling and word
order.
HOW EFFECTIVE IS THIS TECHNIQUE?
How interesting and effective are these supplementary tools in helping students better master a target language?
To get feedback an anonymous questionnaire (Appendix 3) was distributed towards the end of a semester to 200
students at VŠB-TUO (from the Faculties of Economics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering and Safety Engineering) who were exposed to both
curriculum and non-curriculum type sources. It was also used to find out how students generally view digital
media in language learning. It consisted mostly of a description of language learning activities and was based on
what students see as helping them learn and improve their language skills, that is on a student’s perception of
what he/her believes is helping him/her more. The activities were designated beforehand as
supplementary/enriching (S/E) activities and/or course of study (CoS) activities directed by the contents of most
language study textbooks used at VŠB-TUO. The descriptions were ordered randomly in the questionnaire,
mixing the descriptions of usual S/E and CoS activities and students had about 10 minutes to decide if they were
in some way helpful or not in language learning. There were also 3 neutral points, which could be applied to
either category, about cooperative and competitive activities, and the giving of homework. There is of course
some overlap in assessing if a description could be exclusively S/E or exclusively curriculum-based, and S/E
activities were deemed as additional material not part of the teaching curriculum.
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