Reflection of my action research

The website I used for my action research is http://www.ohiou.edu/linguistics/esl/reading/activities1.html. My students, 20 of them, were first asked to browse the website and do the exercises on thier own in the MMLC. They were given 10 minutes as this is set by the web. The topic is about Halloween. After schecking the answers and some consolidation questions were asked to test their understanding. The use of simple present tense and simple past tense was revised as well. Though they are in an EMI school, they are in the remedial class. After revising, they were told to brainstorm 1 festival they like most and draft a mind map for their composition--My favourite festival.

The website could really arouse their interest and let them learn a set of vocabulary for Halloween. At the same time, these students could follow the organisation of the website to draft and eventually write their composition. Though there were numerous grammatical mistakes in the use of the 2 tenses, they could still show me they could follow the lesson. To use a website to teach is not simple as if the topic is too close, students may attempt to copy a lot from the article. But my weak students, some supplementary readings can really help them understand the topic well, and organise their article sensibly and give us reasonable work.

Practical considerations for multimedia courseware development: an EFL IVD experience

The interactive videodisc courseware sounds very useful to English learners, as visual support is always a good aid to wearker students. From the article, the author mentioned something about "Viewing of the film", it looks very interesting and useful to secondary 4 and 5 students as in their new HKCEE syllabus, they are required to read some books and watch some movies as a kind of assessment which is based on the school judgement--School based Assessment (SBA). To most of the students they may not be able to watch the movie with no understanding problem. The aim of watching movies is also to learn English. I guess this can help students, especially those weaker ones. As their marks will be sent to the Exam Authority which will affect their final results (starting from 2008), so with the help of such software, maybe students can understand better about the choosen material and give better and more insightful ideas during the discussion.

I know that maybe such kind of function is not the most advanced one at the moment. But if we, languange teachers, have to equip ourselves with the most up-to-the-minute knowledge, we will be exhausted. To me, enough is good, we are not going to explore new technologies to change the whole world or to reform our teaching methodologies. I'm sorry that I'm not so enthusiastic in carrying out changes on how to teach in the best way with IT, sometimes we are restricted by our syllabus and policies; and most importantly, I am not a revolutionary.

Something related to Copyright

Under the implementation of the new Copyright Law, we have to follow more practical issues mentioned in the ordinance. I used to understand that we should not make copy of a book for more than 10% once. I think this is not quite clear. Many English textbooks used in the As-Level are bound into several booklets, does it mean 10% of the whole book or just the booklet? If the case is 10% of the one booklet, then it wouldn't be possible for us to copy a whole set of Section E Practical Skills paper, as it contains a question-answer book and a data file with about 10 pages, normally, they are more than 10% of the booklet. What should we do? Design the task by ourselves?

My school is an interesting one, as all teaching staff are not allowed to use the photocopier even for setting exam papers. We can only make copy with the approval of the principal, he scans what you want to copy and then signs his name onto the application form, funny? It always takes us DAYS if we need to make a copy in such way as we have to wait for our janitor to copy for us. He doesn't think putting up a notice next to the machine is effective as he believes we must break the law! He is really a good citizen who follows the Copyright Law very much.