Week 3: Reflection

First of all, I am late for this one. Has been a pretty hectic week. The classes that I teach have begun and it was difficult to keep up with all the work(: But I enjoyed every minute of it. The things that I learnt during this week were not only interesting but also opened new ways of using the web for pedagogic purposes. The week started with a discussion on Nicenet about two of the three articles on using technology with students for listening and speaking skills. I read Miller and Busa's articles and commented on them. I thought that some of the general arguments that Miller and Busa make for using technology (listening for Miller and speech analysis software for Busa) were perceptive but both the articles, I thought, were a bit culturally loaded in favour of a certain cultural variety of English. I also thought that when it comes to the teaching of pronunciation, the ideas of 'acceptability' and 'intelligibility' are so varied in their definitions that teaching of pronunciation needs to take that into account in the Indian context. I also had a very fruitful exchange of ideas with Natalya and Celeste on the use of a certain variety of pronunciation.

The second task that I did was comment on one of the project reports that were posted on the class website. For my comment I chose the project of Prem Bahadur Phyak of Tribhuvan University, Nepal. I thought that the project was well designed and the best thing that I liked about the project was the achievability of the project as well as the systematic implementation of it in a low-resource classroom. This project also gave me enough ideas to formulate my project for this course and, I think, that this activity was quite useful.

The third task that I did was bookmark the links on my Delicious pages. I thought that Delicious is a wonderful tool for keeping an organised catalogue of websites that I use regularly. Though I had used Diigo before (which is quite good as well), I think Delicious is very handy too in terms of organisation.

The week, therefore has been pretty fruitful and exciting and am looking forward to the fourth one now. And as usual, the conversations with colleagues, that have increased manifold are an added bonus(: