Week 9

This week has been so full of useful and very involving activities that I almost forgot to post on the blog! Many thanks to Dilip who reminded me about the deadline.

I have learnt a lot this week. My team and I plan to modernise the curriculum of our programme and for this, along with up-to-date literature and interactive approach to teaching, I find it extremely important to include internet, webites and other on-line tools in F2F teaching. This will by all means enhance the quality of teaching as well as our students' (learners) autonomy.

Students at our department do theoretical courses in Linguistics and English Literature as well as practical courses of English such as Grammar,Phonetics, Speaking, Writing, etc.

In order to adapt the tools to our needs, I decided to use the Nicenet and blogger. I chose these tools because the former suits the theoretical aspects of the our programme. The students will gladly contribute to the forum. However, nothing is perfect in this world and despite my enthusiastic approaoh, I still anticipate some problems, namely, shy and lazy students' unwillingness to participate. This can be successfully tackled by encouragement, fair assessment system and more elements of interaction in the theoretical sessions.

I have chosen blogger for our practical courses as this system provides an excellent opportunity for the students to share their views on the on-line material provided by the teachers on the blog.

While making an attempt to implement changes I have to deal with resistant teachers as well. Unfortunately, it is not easy for some teachers to say good bye to their 'peaceful' and well-trodden routines, which do not contain 'lurking' unpleasant surprises and more work. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that they have to change, and the sooner the better as the future is ON-LINE TEACHING.

Manana