After completing the English Teaching and Practice course in this semester, I learn a lot from the design of the CALL lessons. During the three sessions, I meet some difficulties and also notice several English-learning problems of junior high school students. Besides, after overcoming and re-thinking those difficulties and problems, I come up with several strategies to deal with them.

 

There are three significant difficulties I met when conducting my CALL lessons. First, technical issues bother me a lot. Instead of using network cable, I merely connect the Wi-Fi from my cellphone, which leads to the poor internet connections. Moreover, my computer needs to do the multitasking, like turning on the screen recording, screen sharing, ppt slides, Jamboard and meeting room at the same time, so it often lags and influences the quality of teaching. In order to solve those technical problems, I try to use cellphone and iPad at the same time and find a place with better internet connections. Secondly, how to effectively observe and assess students’ performance and interaction between each other on the class are quite difficult. If they are asked to do the group discussion or pair work, they will turn off the microphone to avoid the mixing sounds in online meeting room. However, in that way, I cannot observe and listen to their opinions and reaction, which is different from physical class. Thus, in order to overcome this dilemma and preserve students’ opportunities in speaking English, I change my teaching style. I put more emphasis on the interaction between students and teacher and change the production part from pair work to individual presentation. Consequently, as a teacher, I can make sure all the English conversation can be observed and contains certain quality. Lastly, time management also annoys me in the first two sessions. Students have to gather to the computer classroom, turn on the computer, log into their Google account and enter the meeting room, which takes some time before the class. Normally, the duration of the class will be 35-40 minutes, which is unpredictable. Then, I revise my teaching style and lesson plan. In order to make studentsspeak more English, Ispend less time on instruction and give them more opportunities to have the conversation with teacher and their peers.

 

In addition, I also come up with several games as the emergency use for managing the time in each session. In addition to some difficultiesI met when conducting the teaching project, 2 I also notice something which can help me in teaching English in the future. First, reward system effectively works and all the students give positive feedback toward my implementation of rewarding them. I chose top 2 students with the highest score for each session and sent them my hand-writing postcards from CCU. This action indeed boost students’ motivation in learning and interacting with me. One of the students didn’t speak a lot in orientation course, but she became active in the following three session due to my hand-writing postcards. In my opinion their motivation and confidence outweigh the language proficiency. If a student lack motivation and confidence in learning and speaking English, how can we perceive that they can learn and speak English well? Thus, I put a lot of efforts in increasing students’ learning motivation. Second, I notice that pair work can also effectively reduce their anxiety toward speaking English. There’s a student with lower English proficiency than others and he seldom spoke up during the class. Nevertheless, he performed well and felt more comfortable when we did the group presentation. He also mentioned that he won’t feel nervous when speaking English together with his classmates.

 

Overall, I hold the positive attitude toward the design of this teaching project and the incorporation of some technology in online teaching. This experience indeed helps me a lot in integrating the theories and practices in language teaching. With this experience, I gain more knowledge and ideas toward online teaching, and I believe that I will keep improving my teaching quality in the future. Last, I hope that the project can be extended to 13~15 weeks in the future.