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The front page of activeenglishspeaking.com, “The World is My Classroom: Education without Boundaries.” Students can learn online in their own home or school. The Web site offers English lessons for students wanting to learn to speak and write English with a native speaker using newspaper articles and current news events. Those interested can attend the cyber classroom paying $99 for a full semester. All lessons can be recorded for replay. / Korea Times |
By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Internet technology has produced cyber classrooms where students from around the world can participate and interact with each other. Especially, when it comes to English education, the online space could be a terrific opportunity as learners can experience various English accents and share different ways of speaking.
An Australian professor has been running online classes since 2004 under the slogan ``Education without Boundaries, the World Is My Classroom.''
``Many students can view and attend the cyber classroom at the same time. Online classrooms are a valuable research tool for those seeking to document the way students apply themselves and learn a language, and also provide a learning tool for students of English who have progressive English lessons for review and replay,'' said Marguerite Carstairs, an English professor at Konyang University in Daejeon.
The professor, who taught at primary and secondary schools as well as universities in Australia for more than 20 years, is currently running trial online English classes on Active English Speaking.com at 9:30 pm and 11 pm on weekdays. During the classes that can accommodate up to 99 students, English learners can discuss news articles on various social issues. Also, some other classes deal with Australian history and travel stories.
``Students from Turkey, India, the Philippines, China, Brazil and so on can watch and learn together from one lesson and follow the lesson as a review or replay, as the lesson is recorded and the recording is available at no charge to those participating,'' Carstairs told The Korea Times in an interview. ``This is bringing the classroom into the home, school and world, and making education an international experience.''
During the one-hour lesson, the teacher explains about the topic of the class for the first 20 minutes and students then discuss it for another 20 minutes. Some students have the opportunity to present their opinions for 10 minutes and 10 minutes of free time follows. Students can view the teacher and interact and chat with other students using a comment board and chat line.
The text of the lesson is presented in Power Point. Students can ask questions or make comments on the board, as well as on the chat line. The teacher also has at her control, her own database of photos, images and documents that can be downloaded during the lesson. Teachers fully utilize the whole Internet and computer tools.
Carstairs, who is scheduled to go back her home country soon, plans to run cyber classes everyday on weekdays from March. She charges $2-$10 depending on the class, and an annual membership for $99.
Newspaper Is Good Textbook
The Australian professor, who has taught English in Asia including China and Korea for four years, stressed the importance of textbooks for her English classes. Hence, she has introduced ``Content Based Learning'' that uses content as a base, and provides the opportunity for students to extend beyond the provided content, or work within and around the content at their own pace
``Any group has individual differences and competencies, and an individual set of past experiences and learning styles. It is impossible to write a textbook that suits everybody in the class at the same time. We need some base to study around, and this is the map and the lesson plan, and we utilize a textbook which is at the base,'' she said.
For example, when teaching about the study of weather, the teacher can base the lesson a book and expand it to pictures, photos and online activities using weather maps and weather news.
``The textbook was the source, but the learning experience moved far beyond the textbook. Now I remember the two page spread from my geography book quite clearly, but I remember far more the cloud lessons I gained from lying on the grass watching the clouds and drawing the different skies I saw, then referring the drawings to my textbook, and when I found a cloud that was not in the two page spread, going further to learn what that cloud was and why it was different,'' she said.
From this point of view, she believes newspapers could be the best textbooks among many sources around. She started to use newspapers as a textbook when she taught in China a few years ago. ``There were no English materials and I was expected to write it all for every class and every lesson. I started using online books and text from the Internet, and based my lessons on them. I had students struggling with Shakespeare and other `free' copyright free texts.''
Then she discovered that China Daily had an English page and started to use it for her classes there. ``The first instances were simple. I used a paragraph from the newspaper, and built my lesson from the selected content. Then I went online and asked friends to send me Australian and any other newspapers in English, and I used those as my base,'' she said.
``I had a table with all kinds of newspapers, and had the students reading whatever they could every day for 20 minutes as a start to the class. I was head of the school and had nobody to tell me I should be using a set text, and how to teach, and I developed an entire `Content Based Course' using newspapers and articles from the newspapers.''
She continued ``Content from regular textbooks often are not of interest to the student, and gets repetitive. The same content is always there and not always of interest, especially in situations where older students and adults learning English are forced to go through some very junior focused reading based on the assumption that new learners are also at pre-school levels of intelligence. Newspapers provide a wide range of reading material from front page, to sport, to international, national and entertainment and comics, as well as letters to the editor and fashion. Each student reads the part of the newspaper that they are interested in, and reports one item they found interesting.''
The professor plans to run classes using newspapers for 15-20 weeks this year and she gave instructions for the classes.
Students take a newspaper and look though it on their own, undirected, for 15 minutes each session. If they cannot read, they look at the pictures. They are permitted to use highlighters to underline anything they wish. Students read one newspaper heading to the class in the first weeks or talk about one picture. After a few weeks, they can either read or talk or both. Some students will start talking when they are ready.
They have a maximum speaking time of one minute. With larger classes, students read a headline to a partner. Every student must speak every lesson. Each student works at his own pace. The task is to read one heading, regardless of the number of words. There is no teacher comment in any of this, except 'good' or similar praise. The student knows whether they are good or whether they cannot do the task. All students must participate. That is the rule. They can say one word, maybe the name of the newspaper, if they wish, or read a paragraph. The task is read one headline.
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