Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1644] Re: IFETS-DISCUSSION digest 232
From: Lawrie Hunter (lawrie@topaz.ocn.ne.jp)
Date: Sat 12 May 2001 - 06:31:55 MEST
Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 13:31:55 +0900 Subject: [IFETS-DISCUSSION:1644] Re: IFETS-DISCUSSION digest 232 From: Lawrie Hunter <lawrie@topaz.ocn.ne.jp>
Dear friends,
with regard to Charles Adamson's
'CALL: Can a teacher do it alone?'
1. I would like to thank Charles for the coherent
outline of materials problems and potential solutions.
This is the kind of thing which needs to be said
in the Japanese university scene.
Hoping not to turn this discussion into a Japan insider
forum, I'd like to suggest that any CALL materials design work,
or any task design work, needs to begin with consideration of
learning scenario, i.e. learner/task/resources/choice of expressive mode.
I teach English to technical university students with
weak knowledge/skill in English, compounded by generally
low intrinsic motivation. There is no commercial material
which suits the needs of this instructional scenario.
A colleague and I have authored extensive materials for our
students. For a classroom-taught critical thinking class,
we use only a paper textbook, our own product. This could be
supported by peripheral material on the web, but we have chosen
not to do so since our students have proven to be too busy or
not interested enough to make use of task support web sites
which we have made in the past.
Our CALL writing course began as a free-wheeling HyperCard
authoring course covering descriptionk, classification,
sequence and cause-effect text genres, but over a 4 year period
the free-wheeling has vanished, to be replaced by strong
constraints on information searching (we now provide the search
domain) and on how learners can structure their documents...
which sets them free, in a sense.
The materials we create revolve around what I think of as
'contained tasks,' i.e. tasks which present a language structure oriented,
information based challenge within an environment characterized by limited
(for transparency of language objectives) information and limitations
imposed on text genre use.
There is a need for learning scenario design
wherein the learner is presented with tasks of suitable maturity,
in an environment with access to little more than the necessary information,
language models and motivational demonstration(s) of the task's utility.
Real life tasks of course consist of exploration of large sets of
data, and choosing from a variety of text genres to express results,
but learners benefit from a reduced set of conditions which allow
for focus on essential process.
Designing materials ought to start and end
with the learning scenario in mind:
what does the learner WANT to do, and how does the
material support/distract from doing it?
Hoping to support, not distract from, Charles' discussion.
Lawrie
<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>-<>
Lawrie Hunter
Professor, Engineering English/Critical Thinking
Information Systems, Kochi University of Technology
http://www.info.kochi-tech.ac.jp/lawrie/
Office: lawrie@info.kochi-tech.ac.jp
Personal: lawrie@topaz.ocn.ne.jp
Mailing address:
Information Systems Engineering
Kochi University of Technology
Miyanokuchi 185, Tosayamada-cho
Kochi-Ken, Japan 782-0003
Tel/fax 0887-53-1342 International 81-887-53-1342
Office tel 0887-57-2206 International 81-887-57-2206
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