Is It Just Me, Or Others Too?

There is no doubt that using chat in the ESL teaching classrooms is a key to providing opportunity to promote the use of written language to communicate in an authentic way. I am referring to synchronous communication we had during our last class. I don’t have much experience of using chat for my personal communication; nor have I integrated it into my teaching.

My experience during the last class, made me think that there are some advantages and disadvantages of using chat rooms during the ESL teaching/learning .

In the beginning, I was excited to be able to communicate with someone, on the other side, and having the same class with a different instructor. Anyway, it was very interesting to get to meet in the chat room other people. Unfortunately, I became frustrated very soon because I wasn’t able to hold the discussion. By the time I contributed a line, people would be talking about something else.

I knew that I had to contribute to the discussion and typing fast was a challenge for me. Trying to type faster, I made some spelling mistakes which made me even more nervous. On the other hand, there was only one person chatting with my class mates, so we all kept asking her questions and that limited my chances to communicate.

From my point of view, if the central question of discussion was brought to the classroom, where you can actually see the participants of the discussion and listen to their comments, I would have been able to get something out of that discussion and at the same time, share my thoughts and get feedback.

In the ESL classrooms, it is very obvious you will have students with limited experiences of using technology, which may create negative attitudes towards their learning experiences.

Now, if we were able to look at the recording s of our chat, my contribution to the discussion wouldn’t show much interaction on the subject matter.

Why is technology important in the ESL classrooms?

While some teachers embrace modern technology in the ESL classrooms and strive to incorporate it into their teaching, others resist the invasion of modern technology deliberately. Why...? To me, those are who have limited imagination of the effectiveness of the modern technology. Yes, I agree that anything new is always a big challenge, takes time and requires some skills to do so. It took me a while to start this blog, because I have never done it, and thought it would require some specific webmaster skills.
In my ESOL teaching, there are times that I need somebody to substitute me. Most common substitute teachers are who have years of traditional teaching experiences, and they prefer not to use my lessons plans which require using, to me simple, technology. For example, overhead projector, PP slides, or online interaction games etc.
I think they need to understand the difference of the effectiveness of using technology.
For example, rather than just showing a" blank check" and explaining to students how to fill it out, you can ,actually, demonstrate it by using software filling it out step by step, making changes to it, or doing other things.
What surprises me is those teachers do not seem to perform any desire to learn how to use technology.
I think if they'd tried to use computers in their teaching a few times, they would overcome the fear of touching computers.
Of course, there are various reasons that teachers reject using technology, but I thought my substitute colleagues may need some encouragement to use technology.