1. What did you learn from the design of the CALL lesson?                                  

Throughout the course of designing a CALL lesson, mainly I have learned the importance of two things–creativity, meticulousness.

 

First of all, I have realized how important it is to be creative when it comes to designing a lesson for students. Although there are still some individual factors that can potentially affect students’ feelings in a class, objectively speaking, the effect of a creatively-designed lesson is comparatively more direct and straightforward. The logic behind this is pretty simple, which is that an interesting and creative lesson stimulates students’ positive reaction and impression towards learning. Once students’ mindsets have been directed in a positive path, learning becomes much easier. For example, they may no longer find it frustrating that they seem to always lack the so-called motivation in learning language, because if they are on the right track, the motivation to learn appears almost spontaneously. Hence, the importance of creatively designing a lesson should never be neglected.

 

The second thing I have learned is that being meticulous in details elevates the quality of a lesson. More often than not, I find it annoying that my lessons often lack some of the basic elements and the objectives of the lessons become blurred. After addressing to this problem, I realize that more attention should be paid to details, such as the purpose of every element in a lesson plan. Once being aware of the importance of being thoughtful of details, I find it easier to have a lucid mind and keep on with the objective of the lessons.

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2. How did the design of the CALL lesson enrich your professional knowledge?      To its simplest, the design of the CALL lesson enriches my professional knowledge by impelling me to look up a lot of information on different teaching theories in order to teach students. By looking up myriads of information on how to teach English, I have also broadened my horizon of the essence of English Teaching. Before taking this course, I thought that teaching English was merely a simple process of giving students vocabulary, explicitly teaching them grammar rules and then they should probably be able to construct whatever sentences they like, and to comprehend what people are saying or what is written on the textbooks. However, after taking this course and when I actually have to design a class by myself, I have found out that English Teaching is far more complicated that I thought. Generally speaking, there are four skills of a language–listening, speaking, reading and writing. I have long been struggling when considering about how to design a lesson that aimed for improving these skills. As a result, I have to look up for a lot information and also look back on my past learning experience for the answers, and I have found that the amount of input is the key. It totally makes sense that to improve the speaking skills, we have to speak a lot, which in the essence is raising the amount of output; however, what most people may have overlooked is that input is the thing that actually initiates the development of language. It is evidenced in the development of a baby’s language ability. A baby starts to talk only when it has gained the amount of input that is enough for generating the output. As a result, my professional knowledge of language learning is enriched by reading lots of information in order to design the CALL lesson.