7th Week

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso

When I teach the 10th form, there's a topic entitled 'Technology' we must deal with. I often give them the statement above, by Pablo Picasso, and after discussing for a while the reasons why Picasso might have said so, I always ask my students to add a "but" to the statement and expando on it! Some interesting (and some not so interesting!) ideas always come up.
If I had to add a 'but' of my own and expand on it, I would write: Computers are useless. They can only give you answers, but then answers may be the only thing we are missing! After all, what is our work all about? Isn't it about getting the answer to the question 'how can I make my students effectively learn?'? :)
Computers may not be the ultimate solution for all our doubts and questions, but they can definitely help. And they can help a lot in a classroom. No matter if we have 28 or just 1. It is up to us to decide how to let them help us and make the most out of it.
I often use my laptop or the desktop we have in the classroom as a presentation tool and I remember a few years ago when I asked my students to write down what they had liked the most/the least about my lessons, one of them wrote "I love the lessons when you bring your laptop".
In our school, we have a projector and a magic board in each classroom, so the computer proves to be useful for technology-enhanced lessons. I use it to show films, short videos, cartoons, commercials, quizzes, and so on. Students often use it to show their projects and works as well. If I need the students to do some research, I always bring the laptops we have available at school or I ask to have my lesson in the computers lab.
Computers play an important role concerning students' autonomy nowadays, as they use them everywhere and therefore there is no way they can escape learning English! However it is not, once again, the total salvation. As Victoria said “You can bring the horse to water, but you cannot make him drink” and “In language teaching teachers can provide all the necessary circumstances and input, but learning can only happen if learners are willing to contribute.” In fact, learning strategies are something like teaching how to fish, instead of giving away the fish (just another allusion to the most worn-out of all Chinese proverbs!). And that explains it all, or perhaps not!
If students are not willing to learn ‘how to fish’, no matter how much you try to teach them or if you offer them the best fishing equipment, they just won’t learn how to do it. As Tumposky, quoted by Dimitros Thanasoulas, claims “individual learners differ in their learning habits, interests, needs, and motivation, and develop varying degrees of independence throughout their lives”, which means it is not always easy to motivate them or foster their autonomy at the time they are our students.
I always try to vary the strategies I use in order to ‘reach’ every single student, but sometimes they are so unwilling to learn, they have given up so long ago, that it becomes quite difficult to do it.
Something that usually seems to be motivating for my students is working with films or songs. Music is part of every teenager’s universe, so I try to make them work with something they like, so that they feel more motivated. Unfortunately, it does not always work out the way I expect. Most of my students often listen to American or British songs and they can understand them perfectly well, but when it comes to use that knowledge in a conversation or written text, they just seem to forget it! It seems to me that most of them don’t realize that English is a tool they will in a near future use in their daily life, so they don’t really understand the need of learning it.
Something I usually try in order to foster their autonomy is creating a Portfolio. Portfolios enable students to go further in what their tasks are concerned. They know there are core and optional texts they must insert in their portfolio, which allows them to write about whatever they feel like. Besides that, they can ask for help to anyone they want and they must evaluate someone else’s portfolio and, of course, ask some classmate to evaluate their own.
Something else I do is always asking students to work in pairs or groups. As Victoria, once again, says “Promoting cooperation in the classroom encourages the learners to rely on each other and not only on the teacher. Group work also creates opportunities for feedback from peers: learners will do things to please the group rather than to please the teacher. As well pair and group work will involve students more actively in completing the task compared to whole class work.” I sometimes give students a text and ask them to read it and then to create an exercise (Cloze, True/ False, Questions, Giving a title to each paragraph…) to go along with it. When they finish they hand it out to me, I take it home, correct it and make different worksheets with their exercises. Then I give the different worksheets back to the students and they must solve the exercises their classmates created.
In Portugal, we are lucky that films aren’t dubbed, they are always subtitled, which is very helpful for English learners.
Another positive aspect is that, though we have to work with a textbook that is not always the one we prefer or that our students really enjoy, we have the freedom to use other materials and I often resort to worksheets I create. My students always say they like them best, as I try to make them interesting and funny (as much as possible). I think they prefer them to the text book, because they meet their needs. As Luiza says “The teacher has to decide how to adapt resources, materials, and methods to the learners' needs.”
Something else my students love is role-play! They always come up with nice things and feel more at ease with using English in the classroom. I just feel sorry that due to time limits we can't do it more often!
Have a nice week!
Yours,
Elsa