TEFL QUIZ – CALL UNIT 5

Group Members:

Aulia Hakim - Jessy Therinda - Rahmani Husna

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         From what had been learnt from this unit (5), our knowledge grows especially about teaching listening skill. We are impressed with the way CALL ‘s site provide us comprehensible explanation about teaching methods and how it could be applied in computer systematically.

For example in 5.2.1, the natural approach becomes easy to adopt because it is simple yet well- elaborated. Moreover the site led us to some related sites which have totally implemented the approach such as:  John's ESL Community-(http://www.johnsesl.com/templates/quizzes/LQ.php), California Distance Learning Project (http://www.cdlponline.org/) and so on. These sites enlarge our understanding on how the natural approaches works and how it is applied on the computer. Therefore, it is suggested to use the site to support teachers developing their language teaching.

Back in time, when one of our group members (Jessy) was in high school I actually did this kind of learning experience. The website contains an explanation about the topics and the exercise pages along with the audio. It was about listening comprehension exercise, fill in the blank, and yes or no questions. The provided exercise is very comprehensible, flexible and accessible, even when her teacher wanted to add other input, she could easily insert it inside the site.

         Things to know, that listening skill as comprehension abilities is emphasized to proceeds production abilities (either writing or oral). It help the learners not only to focus to the comprehension abilities but also to make them familiar with the language (L2) itself.

         And for some reasons we do agree to delay oral production in language learning. When we are forced to speak in that language, we need to know about grammatical structure of the language. It helps us so much in arranging the sentences. Somehow, students with limited grasp of vocabulary couldn’t easily produce a good sentence. Their focus doesn’t tend to the essence of comprehension, but to sentence arrangement.

         In addition, we think the fundamental things to build for low-level learner is vocabulary before anything else. By conducting many comprehension skill activities (either reading a text or listening an English video) student’s vocabulary is automatically increased and they become even familiar with the language.

         According to our experience when learning Mandarin, this approach is well-adopted, where we as the learner weren’t forced to produce a sentence in first year earlier. There, students tend to be equipped with the grammar and enough vocabulary. So they were let to be grew/ familiar with the L2. We think that is very effective way to develop student’s comprehension first.

Using CALL intensively as a self-study in developing English language in this semester help me a little understanding more about the topic. The provided information is clear enough, easy to understand, and neatly arranged in the website. For example, in unit 5 the topic is about Total Physical Responses and it gives complete explanation along with the example of implication. They also give some references blog or website related to the topic. Such as, an example of TPR game in the web <http://www.tpr-world.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=tpr-world&Category_Code=2000>. 

However, there were something missed, when TPR is applied on the computer. The main sense of TPR itself like, face to face are not effectively used. There were no intensive meeting between teacher and student during the site is undergone. Therefore, teachers couldn’t measure how far was the movement the student had made, whether they really understand or not, or whether they really imitate the teacher’s instruction or not. Besides, there was crucial thing left, without holding face to face, the teacher/ guider couldn’t give private feedback to evaluate learner’s development.

         According to Rahmani, based on her experience. Learning L2 more fun if  use bottom-up activities, she use it when she learn privetely with her daugther, she can learn many word without limited by subject that we learned.With this methode student will have many vocabulary than using top-down activities. We can know meaning of word and how to use it without restricted. This methode also make phonology, gramaticcal and lexical methode knowledge develope faster than anoteher methode.

         As we know there are two functions of language, sometimes we use it automaticly without realize it. To distinguish it, sometimes we find complication, but if we want to more carefully we can distinguish it easily.Learning function of language really helps when building parallel applications. It also helps us to develop communicative skill.

         In our opinion call program helps us in transactional purpose, CALL program provides us transactional language to develop information collecting skill to academic purpose. For social conversation, we think that CALL program have many weakness especially  for communicative conversation with partners.