Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 The Asian EFL Journal Teaching Articles 2008 Senior Editors: Paul Robertson and Roger Nunn Asian EFL Journal 1 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 Published by the Asian EFL Journal Press Asian EFL Journal Press A Division of Time Taylor International Ltd Time Taylor College Daen dong Busan, Korea http://www.asian-efl-journal.com ©Asian EFL Journal Press 2008 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of the Asian EFL Journal Press. No unauthorized photocopying All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Asian EFL Journal. [email protected] Publisher: Dr. Paul Robertson Senior Associate Editor: Dr. Roger Nunn ISSN 1738-1460 Asian EFL Journal 2 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 Index. 1. David W. Deeds. Applying Computer Assisted 4-34 Language Learning (CALL) Principles to Business/Technology Teaching in English (BTTIE) for Asian International School Students 2. Maiko Ogasawara. Classroom Analysis of an Oral 35-58 Communication Class at a Japanese High School 3. Tuula Lehtonen Personal Authenticity through 59-78 Authentic Materials, Authentic Tasks, and Negotiation 4. Marcus Otlowski. Preparing University EFL Students 79-101 for Job Interviews in English: A Task-Based Approach 5. Sihong Zhang. The Necessities, Feasibilities and 102-120 Principles for EFL Teachers to Build A Learner-oriented Mini-corpus for Practical Classroom Uses 6. Carlo Magno. Reading Strategy, Amount of Writing, 121-159 Metacognition, Metamemory, and Apprehension as Predictors of English Written Proficiency 7. Hong Wang. Language Policy Implementation: A Look 160-196 at Teachers’ Perceptions 8. A. Majid Hayati & Ehsan Askari. Testing Oral 197-214 Language Proficiency of University EFL Students 9. Victoria Rusina. Catering for the Specific Needs of 215-232 Elementary Level Korean Learners in the Australian ELICOS Sector – A Case Study of a School in Sydney 10. Yuehai Xiao. Building Formal Schemata with ESL 233-274 Student Writers: Linking Schema Theory to Contrastive Rhetoric 11. Malinee Prapinwong & Nunthika Puthikanon. An 275-301 Evaluation of an Internet-Based Learning Model from EFL Perspectives 12. Nicholas K, Farrow. Learning to Use the Articles, A 302-336 and The, in One Lesson 13. Yu-Li Chen. Factors Affecting the Integration of 337-372 Information and Communications Technology in Teaching English in Taiwan 14. Ciarán McDonald. Unplanned Vocabulary Instruction 373-394 in the Adult EFL Classroom 15. Mehrak Rahimi. What do we want teaching-materials 395-420 for in EFL teacher training programs? 16. Selami Aydin. An Investigation on the Language 421-444 Anxiety and Fear of Negative Evaluation among Turkish EFL Learners Asian EFL Journal 3 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 Title Applying Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Principles to Business/Technology Teaching in English (BTTIE) for Asian International School Students Author David W. Deeds Department of Computer Information Processing Shingu College, Seongnam, South Korea Bio Data David W. Deeds left the corporate world six years ago, where he worked as a knowledge management consultant. He's been teaching computers, business and English to Chinese and Korean students in South Korea, since 2005. Abstract International educational institutions teaching all subjects in English, from elementary to graduate schools, are proliferating across Asia. Most if not all such organizations dictate that students pass their respectively required English proficiency tests as an admission requirement, however, the obligation for prerequisite and/or ongoing English instruction is generally understood, as learners will initially and/or eventually need additional language training to succeed and ultimately graduate. Many Asian educational institutions have collectively substantial experience/education re: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), but Business/Technology Teaching In English (BTTIE) represents relative terra incognita. Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has proven to be extremely effective re: teaching English to Asian students, and applying the “lessons learned” or principles from this area to BTTIE should benefit Asian international school students equally well. A regular school that has codified principles for CALL for local/native learners should easily be able to adapt such guidelines for an international institution so that students continue to learn: English as a means to an end as well as an end in itself; how to use computers for language and other studies; adapting computer usage to work and Asian EFL Journal 4 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 life. This paper suggests that CALL principles can and should be applied to a BTTIE environment, from English “per se” to business/technology courses...to all classes. Keywords: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), Business and Technology Teaching in English (BTTIE), Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), International Schools, Asian Students Introduction This educator (henceforth referred to as “I,” because using third person in papers such as this is pretentious) has for the past 2.5 years worked for Woosong University’s International Business Department (IBD) in Daejeon, South Korea. Previously, I taught English at Woosong for 2.5 years, including a one-year stint as the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Specialist, during which I managed Woosong’s first CALL Center. My position entailed choosing all software, creating all syllabi, maintaining all records, etc., in addition to serving as one of the primary instructors and teacher trainers. I am currently teaching business and technology subjects in English to Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean and students of other nationalities. Before our international students, who are assigned to various Woosong departments as well as our own, can be admitted to our classes, they must attain a certain score on the respectively required English proficiency tests, but we IBD teachers have determined that regardless, most if not all of our learners come to our classes inadequately prepared in at least one if not more or all English skills: reading, writing, listening or speaking. Various “Business English” classes have been created as part of the curricula, e.g., as suggested courses for different majors, but strictly Asian EFL Journal 5 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 on a voluntary and, what’s worse, ad hoc basis. In other words, students may take such a class (or not!) at just about any time during their studies, not necessarily at the beginning. What my fellow educators and I would like to establish is not just an obligatory, preliminary training course, but a mandatory “academic preparation” semester that all but the students with spectacularly high entrance exam scores would be required to take, if not every learner who studies in our department. One of the common problems is that, e.g., although a student may pass a reading/writing-centric proficiency test, the learner may nevertheless experience difficulty with listening and/or speaking. Such English-preparation semesters have been used for Woosong students who have gone abroad to study, e.g., at the University of the Philippines (UP). Woosong learners were required to study English, regardless of test scores or any other factor, for their first semester at UP before being allowed to join the general student population for their second, because experience had proven that no matter what, otherwise learners simply weren’t ready to handle business and technology (or indeed any) classes taught exclusively in English. Such a program, still in the experimental stage, is currently being administered for students who are about to enter SolBridge (http://solbridge.wsu.ac.kr), Woosong’s new international school. However, such programs have not to date made use of educational technology and I am convinced that this is a serious mistake. Computers should be not only used in English classes, but as part of every course, especially those teaching business and/or technology. CALL principles, when properly applied via appropriate Asian EFL Journal 6 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 methodologies, ideally by experienced teachers, greatly assist Asian non-native-English-speaking learners in every classroom environment, vital because no matter what such students are studying, English-skill enhancement is an inevitable part of the process, just as computer-skill enhancement is. Scope/Research This paper is not intended to serve as a proposal for such a preparation program, nor is a detailed description of such within this paper’s scope, although certain suggestions re: tools and techniques are inevitably addressed. This paper’s purpose is to discuss how CALL principles, generic to TESOL and specific to the usage of educational technology, learned via experience with hundreds of students, can and should be applied to such English instruction, regardless of whether it’s in the form of an intensive, language- centric preparation semester, a Business English or other similarly- oriented class, or indeed a regular business and/or technology class. In other words, in a school setting such as the IBD, it is imperative to keep in mind at all times that English teaching considerations cannot be separated from other educational factors just because English is a means to an end versus an end in itself. Woosong’s CALL Center made its debut in the summer of 2003, used for that semester break’s “camp,” attended by primarily college-age Korean students wishing to improve their English skills for various reasons. Following the camp were five sessions, carefully analyzed for the purpose of establishing the principles stated in this paper. It should be noted that the CALL Center served Woosong Language Institute Asian EFL Journal 7 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 (WLI), which is a private “hagwon,” to use the Korean term, i.e., it is part of the university but caters to a much-wider range of clientele: children to adults. Nevertheless, the typical majority of its students are roughly of university age. Classes are taught in seven-week increments, usually for a total of six per year. Upon entering WLI, students are given a “level test” to divide them into six categories: 1 = Low Beginner, 2 = High Beginner, 3 = Low Intermediate, 4 = High Intermediate, 5 = Low Advanced and 6 = High Advanced, according to generally accepted TESOL standards. (Worldport ESL, 2001) Levels 1-5 were included in this study. Typically a maximum of 15 students per class is the WLI policy: it certainly was for the CALL Center, which featured only 15 student PCs. The one-year “CALL experiment” involved teaching one morning (10 AM – 12 PM) and one evening (5 – 7 PM) class per level in the CALL Center. Thus, a Level 1 student would spend Monday in the CALL Center and Tuesday through Friday in his/her regular classrooms, a Level 2 student would spend Tuesday in the CALL Center, and so on. Fifteen students per class, five days a week, morning and evening, would normally indicate that approximately 750 students participated in CALL classes from summer 2003 to summer 2004. The actual number of unique learners was much lower because many, more than half, of the students were “repeats,” ranging from college-age learners who moved up a level every two sessions to “ahgeemah,” i.e., middle-aged women who stayed in the same level throughout; and, of course, not every class included the maximum number of 15 students. I chose ten unique students per level per session, roughly five from the morning and five from the Asian EFL Journal 8 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 evening classes, to serve as the subjects of my research, so I surveyed and/or tested approximately 250 students over the course of a year. The first interesting point is that age or other factors had only a minimal effect on classroom learning: students tended to respond according to their level more than any other consideration. Students were given surveys and/or tests before and after each seven-week period: the results will be discussed during the presentation of the generic (to TESOL) and specific (to CALL or educational technology) principles that follow. My CALL research informally started as of 2002, so studies conducted 2002-2004 resulted in the creation of the “Top Ten CALL Principles,” intended to be part of a training program for would-be CALL teachers, that will be applied and combined with the studies I’ve conducted as an IBD teacher from 2005 to 2007 on many more hundreds of other students in English as well as business/technology classes, half of which were all conducted in computer labs. The goal is not to bog down in statistics, but rather to present percentages with the objective of making various points in a “conversational” manner. Percentages will be identified as pertaining to “CALL” (2002-2004) students or “IBD” (2005-2007) learners, as described above. Please note that, in yet another departure from convention, references are deliberately given herein without page numbers: the points borrowed from the various sources are painstakingly condensed versions of material – versus short excerpts or quotations – that cover many, in some cases hundreds of, pages. This was done to meet maximum page number and word count requirements. Asian EFL Journal 9 Asian EFL Journal – Professional Teaching Articles 2008 Generic CALL Principles Generic Principle #1: The best overall strategy for TESOL is (i.e., the most effective theories and techniques are derived from) the Communicative Approach. From among the plethora of language teaching/learning models enjoying popularity over the years, one paradigm in particular has proven to be the most effective overall: the Communicative Approach, the primary goal of which is to facilitate learner ability to communicate in the target language. The Communicative Approach is the latest version of what is usually referred to collectively as the “inductive/usage model,” so called because linguistic structures are deemphasized and the teacher’s principal role is to encourage interaction (Celce-Murcia, 2001). Despite the recent influence of American educational philosophies, Asian school systems have for the most part remained loyal to traditional (meaning Chinese/Confucian in origin) “systematic/analyzing” models for teaching languages. Thus, e.g., Korean university graduates chronically can read and write English with varying degrees of success but can’t participate in a simple conversation. This paradox is primarily responsible for the phenomenon of native-speaker teachers now serving as English instructors for thousands of Korean “hagwons” (private institutes) as well as public colleges/universities, where one form or another of the Communicative Approach is invariably used (Ch’oe, et al., 2000). The “English craze” has been gaining momentum in many other Asian countries, with China’s demand for English instruction having Asian EFL Journal 10