Download Link : COMPUTER IS THE BEST TECHNOLOGY TO INCREASE STUDENTS’ VOCABULARY
I. IntroductionIn the past, vocabulary teaching and learning were often given little priority in second language programs, but recently there has been a renewed interest in the nature of vocabulary and its role in learning and teaching. Traditionally, vocabulary learning was often left to look after itself and received only incidental attention in many textbooks and language programs. Thus, although the course curriculum was often quite specific about aspects of teaching such as grammar, reading, or speaking, little specification was given to the role of vocabulary. The status of vocabulary now seems to be changing. For one thing, the notion of a word has been “broadened” to include lexical phrases and routines, and it has been suggested that in the initial stages of learning these play a primary role in communication and acquisition. There are many aids for language teaching to grow students’ motivation and encourage them. In this paper, the writer chooses a computer as a new technology to develop or increase students’ vocabulary because it is the best technology to increase their vocabulary. Teaching vocabulary by using a computer makes the students remember some information as key points in their mind. They can be easily remember and know what they have studied from computer. They don’t need to do much to get the information from computer.
Bryan Oliver (2003) states that,
The C in ICT can help us to remember a number of key points to bear in mind when using computers in English classrooms. Computers are often a catalyst for pupil activity. Unlike television, computers invite learners to be active. They can’t just sit staring at a computer screen. They have to do something. Related to this point is the idea of challenge. Working with computers offers an almost continual series of minor (and sometimes major) problems that have to be solved – in many cases, before the user can continue.We focus in on one aspect of vocabulary learning, as follows. First, we focus on learning words during assisted oral reading. Second, we concentrate on initial encounters with words. Third, we subdivide vocabulary learning from initial encounters in text into two stages: encountering new words in text, and learning from those encounters. We demonstrate improvements over baseline computer-assisted oral reading by: (a) making sure that all students – not just better students – see new text; (b) adding information to text so that children can learn more from encounters with words than they would from the original text alone.
In this case, not only the students get the easiest way but also the teachers find the best way in teaching vocabulary. They don’t need much time to prepare the lesson for the students. Both of them will take some advantages by using computers. Computer as technology in educational world provides a lot of materials for teachers and students needed in language teaching in the classroom.
Vicente Lopez stated that,
The main aim of my presentation is on the improvement brought about by ICT. In this sense I consider that ICT provide for the language teacher. There is little doubt that we, language teachers, need to focus on the use of language, and ICT make it easy for us to do so. Still what I may foresee for the future is an extension of relationships among the different curricular areas, in which language teachers contribute to the linguistic development of both teachers of other subjects and students. The uses of ICT will enable to facilitate the intercommunication of teachers and students, and I think there will be an extension of communities of users hooked to wider thematic areas. This is what I have in mind.
Every subject has its technical vocabulary. The technical vocabulary comprises those terms that the students are expected to be able to use to describe their ICT activities. Teachers should be known and use this vocabulary when teaching. The vocabulary can be displayed in large print, in the computer suit, or by computers in classrooms. Teaching and learning should use this vocabulary in preference to more general terms.
According to Vicente Lopez that language teacher (English) that, I am no expert, but I am convinced that tools are helpful if we are able to provide a reason for use and a safe atmosphere to use them. Computers came to me as one of these gadgets for which I was not fully prepared (still do not know a terrible lot), but was intrigued enough to investigate how to use them. In this sense I consider that ICT provide for the language teacher a relatively safe environment (provided the teacher “feels” confident with the media), but also a strongly realistic use of language, thus providing a reason to learn.
2. The Objectives
The aims of the course are to explore the role of vocabulary learning within a language teaching programme, to review research evidence on the nature of vocabulary and the processes involved in vocabulary learning, and to consider how to facilitate the acquisition of vocabulary by second language learners both inside and outside the classroom
1. This paper aims to familiarize the student with the basics of computer assisted language learning (CALL).
2. The students can be easy to remember a number of key points to bear in mind when using computers in English classroom.3. To motivate the students, and developed their collaborative learning skills so that the teachers could plan activities involving the students working together effectively.4. This paper looks at practical examples that encourage students to develop independent learning strategies, principally in the study of vocabulary, but also for presentations and report writing.
3. Meaningful learning It is clear that the concept of meaningfulness has two main sides: meaningfulness in terms of teachers’ curricular demands/aspirations and the obvious second would be students’ interests and expectations. Vocabulary knowledge plays a critical role in reading, by enabling and facilitating comChildren can learn words from written contexts (Nagy et al., 1985, McKeown, 1985, Gipe and Arnold, 1978), but the process is incremental. That is, the amount learned from each exposure may be small, but the net effect is still substantial (Eller, Pappas, and Brown, 1988). Also, readers with better vocabularies learn more from context – because of broader and deeper prior knowledge of words – even though less of the information in the text is new to them than to readers with poorer vocabularies (Shefelbine, 1990).
A new item of vocabulary usually means a new word, however it can also sometimes mean more than one word. It can also be a phrase or an idiom. So in some cases the students want to improve their vocabulary in order to use a new vocabulary item well:
spelling, pronunciation, part of speech, grammar, translation, use, connotation, collocation and word formation. But the important thing that the teachers should think about related to what new vocabulary item that the students want to learn, active vocabulary or passive vocabulary.
There are no universally useful strategies and they contribute to vocabulary learning in different ways. Students use a number of strategies, often simultaneously. The efficiency of vocabulary learning depends on how students combine individual strategies. If students combine and employ individual strategies from different groups they will be more successful in developing the target language lexicon. Thus, the ideal combination would be that of strategies from all four groups.
The teacher should create activities and tasks (to be done both in and outside class) to help students to build their vocabulary and develop strategies to learn the vocabulary on their own. Students experiment and evaluate and then decide which to adopt or reject since strategies are not intended to be prescriptive.
How did the use of ICT influence the teaching and learning process?
Although the development projects were very different, the teachers and pupils in the schools all found that their teaching and learning had been influenced by the use of ICT.
In almost all cases, the teachers developed their own ICT skills, which increased their confidence and made it easier for them to decide when and how to use ICT effectively in their teaching. Some tackled the technical and operational constraints of working with limited resources more positively than they had before their involvement with the project. (See counting in Reception case study)
ICT work motivated the pupils, and developed their collaborative learning skills so that the teachers could plan activities involving the pupils working together effectively. (See story writing in Y2 case study)
Raised expectations of pupils led teachers to use ICT as part of their strategy for teaching more challenging aspects of literacy and numeracy, eg, omissive apostrophes and decimals to two places. (See apostrophes case study and decimals to two places)
Teachers were able to provide more appropriate and interesting practice and consolidation material for pupils at different levels of ability. (See number skills in Y4/5 case study).
Successful outcomes from using ICT were not limited to pupils’ attainment. Teachers also gained insights into their own practice and the subject being taught, eg, the teacher using ICT to teach the omissive apostrophe discovered how complex the teaching of this topic really was and explained her previous difficulties in teaching that subject. The approach she took helped her to appreciate the children’s difficulties, and enabled her to use that knowledge to improve their understanding – perhaps because the use of ICT made her break down the issue into its component logical parts.
Reading offers hope for spurring vocabulary growth, if children can be guided to read material that does in fact contain unknown words. Carver (1994) argues that “students must read books above their independent level in order to consistently run into unknown words, that is, about 1, 2, or 3 unknown words for each 100 words of text”. Easier text simply does not contain enough new words to substantially impact children’s vocabulary learning (Carver, 1994).
There has been some work aimed at teaching children how to learn words from context, but the major effect may be due to practice at learning new words from context and not due to teaching a specific strategy (Kuhn and Stahl, 1998.) Kuhn and Stahl (1998) conclude that “Ultimately, increasing the amount of reading that children do seems to be the most reliable approach to improving their knowledge of word meanings, with or without additional training in learning words from context.” As Schwanenflugel et al. (1997) put it, “… the vast majority of a person’s word growth can be accounted for by exposure to words in written and oral contexts, not through direct instruction of some sort, but individual encounters with a word in a natural context are not likely to yield much useful information about the word.
We can help children learn vocabulary during assisted oral reading by (a) helping them encounter new words, and (b) helping them learn new words they encounter. We aim to help children encounter new words by increasing how many new material students read – not a guaranteed outcome when students have substantial control over their interaction with the software. We aim to help children learn new words they encounter by adding text to facilitate better learning than possible with the adding text – not a guaranteed outcome since reading is already a reasonable way to build vocabulary.
We can split the reading that a student does into two categories: (a) reading with the Reading Tutor, and (b) everything else (outside the scope of this paper). In the case of reading with the Reading Tutor, “how much reading” translates into how many days a student has a session with the computer, and how many minutes each session lasts. How often the Reading Tutor gets used by whom for how long depends on who sets policy for Reading Tutor use, and in any event lies outside the scope of this thesis. Therefore, for the purposes of the present discussion we will take the number of days allocated for Reading Tutor use per year as externally determined, and likewise we consider the number of minutes of Reading Tutor use per day as also externally determined. How frequently we expect students to read with the Reading Tutor, and for how long each session, have varied for different studies and in different contexts of use.
As any teacher knows, any new topic starts with a large or small number of new words, which students are supposed to learn, to be able to understand the theme and to talk or/and write about it themselves. Any teacher also knows that it is next to impossible to make students learn all the necessary words: at best, they will learn them by heart mechanically, parrot them back at us or write some test, and then probably forget the new vocabulary.
If you have tried checking the new words, say, two or three weeks later, you know what I mean. To activate the new vocabulary, to recycle the words and expressions, we need some new techniques which will be suitable and satisfying for the new generation which is living in the era of ICT, or maybe even post-ICT.
Computer classrooms are efficient, by all means. But since most of my students are used to asking me for clearer (or sometimes simpler) explanations, I can’t imagine my classes without so-called “whiteboard activities”. Sometimes it happens, my students fail to apply the skills obtained by working with certain programmes in real life, so I pay particular attention to all types of communication as it doesn’t only give them an opportunity to bring new vocab items and grammar models into practice, but it helps them overcome shyness, which is a great obstacle in learning a language.
Nina M. Koptyug, Ph.D., associate professor of English, Novosibirsk, Russia said that,
Uses of ICT in language teaching
The regular lesson
It is possible to hold a regular lesson in a computer class with internet access. A teacher may download the necessary material beforehand, and have students work through it, helping out when needed. There are many sites that provide learning materials on the internet.Using the net as a research resource
We decide to search the Web for some data. Every student gets an address, or a name, or some words, which they find through a search engine. They take notes while working, so that next day, we can have feedback.Such lessons are extremely motivational, since the students enjoy using the Web, and they have an additional motivation because they know that they have to report to their peers during the next lesson.
Web site projects
