Reflection

Thank you Maggie, Jean and an anonymous for commenting on my website.

The pages "Popular Sports in Australia Website Activities" and "the Popular Sports in Australia Webquest", have been designed to create a collaborative, cooperative and autonomous learning environment for the non-English-major freshmen in the college in China. These students are approximately 19 years old and have an intermediate level of language competency in English. More specifically, most of them have been sat in the ILETs, gaining results of around 4.5 or 5. Maggie points out that I have underestimated my students’ ability in English and the exercises are too easy. I do agree with her, therefore, I have already made some adjustments to increase the difficult index of this website, for example, add a drag and drop Mix activity and mini presentation exercises, and change the content of the cloze exercise. Thanks again for your suggestion.

However, concerning the matching exercise, I did not make any changes. This is mainly because the aim of this exercise is to activate students' schema and make a preparation for the further questions. In addition, Hughes (2003) in his Testing for Language Teachers maintains that the exercises in one exam should be arranged gradually from easy to difficult level so that a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere can be created. Students’ anxiety and pressure in the language testing are reduced at first and then they are more willing to do a further thinking.

In addition, I still have some doubts on the feasibility of this on-line teaching method in Chinese context. The reasons are as follows. First of all, the big size of the Chinese language class makes the adoption of on-line teaching much more difficulty than in western language class. It is a normal phenomenon that there are more than fifty students in one class while a teacher is lecturing in the front of the whole classroom. To adopt the on-line teaching, a large number of computers are needed and the complicated technology problem should be solved first. Also, the teachers need to take a great risk to teach the foreign language on-line because it is more difficult to control the behavior of all the students. We cannot make sure that all the students are highly motivated and interested in the topic the teacher chooses. If the students are bored, there are so many distractions on the net. Moreover, this on-line teaching is not good to students’ oral English. Since encountering new vocabulary is inevitable in language class, how could you expect that all the students pronounce the new word correctly? Therefore, I completely support Brown’s (1994) idea that several times repeating the new words several times is necessary and valuable for vocabulary teaching, especially in teaching such large classes in China.

Comment on Molly's website

Hello Molly,

Sorry, my comment is a little late. Hope you have a great time in China!

Overall, you designed a very cute website. The content is carefully and well designed and suitable for your students. All the links are work and attractive. The background picture and those animations are very attractive, but I think too much these shinning animation are a little distractive for your students. Also, I find the cross word may be too simple compare with other exercises, and I know it is because you have not register that software. Actually, the process of register is not very complicated and I can show you some time if you still need use this software in China.

In summary, I love this website because I’m a visual person Hope your students enjoy your website.

Cheers,
Yuki

Comment on Jean's website

Hello Jean,

First of all, wow, the animated tiger impresses me a lot! And also your project looks great to me: soft background color and well-designed activities. The main topic of this website is wild life in China, which is very attractive for me. Moreover, those animal activities are very interesting and insightful. However, I find that the crossword puzzle is quite difficult. After I read the article, I still cannot finish the exercise. As Maggie suggested, probably you need to highlight some keywords in the article. Overall, you did a great job! I have learnt a lot from you in this year! Thank you!

Cheers,
Yuki