Goals for this class

I plan to apply what I learn in this class to one of my projects aimed to study the intercultural communication between Chinese and American students.

Guided by the tutor, the Chinese students in CUMTB are supposed to establish an intercultural communication blogspot. Several sections will by designed to cover a variety of tasks or themes which might attract both Chinese and American students to engage in interaction, such as typical campus conversations, activities, sports, religions, love and marriage, education, happiness, advertisement, ecology, employment and so on. Students from both cultures may upload their opinions, comments or articles to this blog in written or audio-visual form. Teachers may also assign some projects to them. For example, when studying cultural differences in friends-making pattern, I may guide my students to design a survey or interview , conduct it through the blog, collect data and analyze the result with the statistical software SPSS. In this way not only can students improve their intercultural communication competence, but also they can learn how to conduct students-centered autonomous researches, thus improving their problem-solving ability.

Through this kind of year-long activities, teachers may have a chance to study students’ identity construction in EFL teaching in terms of cognition, attitude, behavior and critical thinking. Hence, EFL teaching and research are combined with technology in a perfect way.

Thoughts on using technology in classes

As pointed by some researchers, any benefits from engaging in CMC are not automatically derived from the tools themselves but rather from how CMC is used in service of promoting meaningful interactions and real intercultural reflections. So the instructor must consider both the pedagogical objectives of a course and the implementation of an appropriate CMC tool.

When using technology in EFL teaching, a teacher should be fully aware of the benefits and challenges of CMC. As to the benefits, we may look at four broad categories: 1) language use and development 2) classroom dynamics 3) student attitude 4) teachers’ research potential and resources. While most researchers admit CMC is really effective, there are several challenges we’d better keep in mind: 1) computer literacy 2) access and logistics and 3) privacy and security 4) plagiarism in electronic age.

As a Chinese saying goes, “It’s better to teach a person how to fish than give him or her fish itself”, so is the use of CMC tool in EFL teaching. Technology will never replace teachers. What we are supposed to do is to guide the learning process and help students use technology more effectively, rather than leave them uncontrolled, give them no feedback, and eventually blame the technology as an obstruction to students’ linguistic competence. After all, one thing is clear: teachers who use technologies appropriately will replace those who do not.

culture tour in penn state university

The first impression on this university: clean, beautiful, relaxing, nice, wonderful