ELT+Innovative+Techniques+by+Gökhan+Bozkurt


 * ELT TECHNIQUES **


 * TWO INNOVATIVE TECHNIQUES **

Due to tremendous progress in information and communication technology, the scenario of contemporary teaching techniques is entirely changed. And the teacher of 21st should shed traditional concepts and techniques of classroom teaching and should adopt the recent and innovative teaching techniques. Teaching English depends on the potential excellence, skills and update knowledge of English teachers. The role of English teacher in present context has remarkably changed because of various factors such as social, cultural, economic and technology developments across the globe. The subject of teaching English at this level is very wide and the difficulties the teacher faces are at large. Due to globalization the world is changing rapidly, hence a teacher has to improve and update knowledge of innovative techniques to meet the demand of changing era. English language teachers must be innovative, imaginative, and resourceful and have thorough knowledge of the subject and adopt new techniques to change socio, economic statues of the country. The first innovative technique is the Massively Multi- Player Online Game and it is more suitable for the young learners. Game based learning has many faceted benefits: motivation, critical thinking, and engagement in learning. Games can be either designed especially for language learning objectives from existing well-known games like the Sims (Purushotam 20050) within the latter paradigm; one of the most promising approaches involves web 2.0 games, called massively multi player online games. The first gives a platform for an online game for millions, and second is a particularly user created virtual world where user can interact in much the same way in the real world. It is very difficult task to engage the learner in extensive communication in English outside the classroom, but the games provide large scale opportunities for interaction. The second innovative technique is the multimedia language lab and it is more suitable for the adult learners. Multimedia language lab is developed to respond to students different learning styles. The basic purpose of language lab is to focus on sound, text images, videos, animation and interesting context that can be created and accessed from electronic devices such as computer, mp3 players, cell phones, and iPods. By using multimedia in the classroom, the students can better understand the lessons by cultivating self thinking ability with integration of four skills. Even this is use full for the learner to learn and stimulate retention by recorded classes and presentation. This tool can develop all four skills of language. It has been found that both English language learners and native speakers who used videos clip to illustrate vocabulary items showed greater improvements in vocabulary knowledge then those who did not receive the multimedia instructions. Even students can improve their vocabulary by playing games and puzzles on computer. ** 1. Writing: ** on internet, there are many websites where one can get exposure to write article, short stories and poems. Students can write and get responses from peer group on experts for further developments. ** 2. Listening: ** by listening recorded talks of experts and native speakers, lectures of eminent persons and English sound track movies such as 'pride and prejudice' 'water lilies' 'ghost and plays of Shakespeare can enhance listening ability and improve their interest in learning. And listen native speaker records and make self correction by listening to the correct responses and learn proper pronunciation, stress and intonation by self control. ** 3. Speaking: ** speaking skills are improved by getting instructions of soft skills and involving oneself in the talk show chart and many more group activities. Language laboratory has following facilities to enhance learners skills: online tutorials, teaching materials, audio recording, video recording, computer, LCD, soft skills teaching software, external web location, games and quizzes, tests, interactive teaching tips for common errors and pronunciation, functional grammar, building vocabulary power, group discussion. In this milieu it is time to shed away our post colonial indignation and get into the right track of learning effective language skills. ** Problems and Solutions Related to These Innovative Techniques ** In spite of the positive roles of multimedia-assisted English teaching, some errors and misunderstandings may occur in teaching practice, which are mainly manifested in the following aspects: first, assisting the traditional teaching pattern where the teacher takes the dominance in conveying knowledge with modern information technology. The courseware used by teachers, simple in design and lacking in innovation, mainly provides convenience for their demonstration at class while neglecting students’ principal status, hence failing to fully exert the advantages of multimedia technology. Second, excessive use of multimedia effects produces flowers but bears no fruits, neglects exploring into teaching contents and designing class teaching, hence failing to achieve ideal effects. The following methods can be resorted to solve the above problems: First, combine course type with multimedia. Currently, large English classes mainly involve listening, speaking, intensive reading and extensive reading. Different courses require different teaching methods as well as the assistance of multimedia technology. Teachers are supposed to be good at analyzing the characteristics of different courses and deliberately employing multimedia technology. The listening and speaking course should be focused on creating opportunity and atmosphere for students’ communication in English. Teachers can combine communicative topics and sentence patterns with vivid and intuitive images, music and films as well as organize students to have dialogues, role-plays and discussions with multimedia in order to enhance students’ interest and enthusiasm. In this way, much class time can be saved and the teaching goals can be achieved to some degree as well. Second, combine different teaching stages with multimedia. In accordance with different key points and students’ psychological features at different teaching stages, teachers should compose proper courseware by taking full advantage of the current teaching software, multimedia information resources and technological advantages based on their teaching demands in order to demonstrate the teaching content in a clear and attractive way. With the intensive reading course as an example, in the warm-up stage, teachers can select some parts from the teaching disk or collect some materials from the Internet or other media to make artistic and interesting images, music or videos which are accompanied by traditional class activities such as answering questions, discussions, oral reports and so on in order to stimulate students’ desire for participation and interest in learning as well as to guide them to accept new knowledge. As a conclusion without any problem in themselves, innovative techniques’ success depends on whether language teachers are initiative or not, whether they can fully exert the advantages of these techniques to find and solve problems. As long as they deepen their research, sum up experiences and improve teaching methods constantly, these techniques will bring about more positive changes to foreign language teaching and therefore greater achievements will be made in our foreign language teaching.