Final Thoughts On Call Course

Computer assisted language learning course has had an immense effect on me until now. What l have learned and what has changed my thoughts and knowledge about teaching English depends on this course. My hesitation at the beginning of this course, expectations and thoughts changed very much. Firstly, l have found out new teaching ways of English, secondly how to cope with difficulties and eliciting boredoom environment of class and finally lots of applications and sites ( which are free to register and use) that l can use in my teaching section. Classical language teaching in classroom can be monotonous, boring, and even frustrating, and students can loose interest and motivation in learning especially shy and passive students. CALL  can provide student ways to learn English through computer games, animated graphics, and problem-solving techniques which can make drills more interesting and rapidly. Its time saving and easy application system also teachers to teach the course in a better way. Actually in Turkey still lm thinking that nothing will change in education system but it depends on teacher how to give the course. So we as young teachers should give care our job and if we want to teach English or any other course to students we should try new ways of teaching. New language, new pronunciation, new vocabulary whatever comes to your mind consists effort to learn. It is impossible to teach just in front of the blackboard with presentation of grammer and some structures of language. Four basic skills should also be taught to be effective. To do this we have learned a lot of applications and sites in call course. Audioboo for example, is an important site to check the pronunciation of students, by telling a story, suitable to their level, like us a failure story or news they heard currently, you can give a lot of tasks like these. But speaking program should be able to diagnose a learner’s problem with pronunciation, syntax, or usage and then intelligently decide among a range of options.

For writing, you can make your students have a wordpress account and give weekly tasks again like us, and check the punctuation errors, capitalization which is done mostly in English or creativity and productivity of your students.For listening again you can offer your students to listen some expert people on audioboo, ted talks on youtube ect. and for reading there are a lot of applications as l know one of them is e book reader application for mobile phones. Students in Turkey are less desireful to read a book. With this application, it comes more interesting and enjoyable to read. It pushes them to read more. Except that l have learned some disadvantages of call course of course. Like verything call is also not perfect. Students are open to adapt to anything they are given. Computer draws attention and addict students to itself. There became laziness, passive students. It is also necessary for teachers and students to have basic technology knowledge before applying computer technology in second language teaching and learning. They should be accustomed to computer usage. Actually we are in technology era but still there are lots of schools which are not met with computer. Except that It can not also deal with learner’s unexpected learning problem or response to learner’s questions immediately as teachers do.

To conclude, CALL has certain advantages and disadvantages and  teachers should know the strengths and weaknesses in applying CALL in classrooms.  But with not solely depending on usage of call and with general teaching style, we as young teachers should make some change and make the learning more enjoyable.