Session 11—MOST Environments

This approach seems like remedial education (Am I right about the name? Not sure about how you call it :P) since its target is at-risk students; however, as a language teacher, I strongly agree that using images to introduce a new vocabulary and concept to learners is an effective way of teaching! It’s a shame that I used to be a “basic-first” teacher in my early teaching years. I didn’t know how to teach Pinyin (the most commonly used romanization system for Standard Mandarin) or Chinese vocabulary in other ways except directly telling them the meaning in English. And I deeply believed that only when students and I got through the boring basic learning process could they enjoy the following interesting parts of learning (contextual learning). However, late is better than never! (What else can I say…☹) I’m glad that I know that I could use technology to help me make learning interesting/meaningful from the very beginning of the language learning process.

In addition, I like the “retelling” idea of this approach. In language teaching, ask students to retell a story or explain a words meaning is very important because the retelling shows clearly that if a students understand the text. Capturing the silent scenes to record students’ own narrations to the stories not only makes retelling process fun, but also introduces tools (technology) to help students’ learn. For retelling, I think VoiceThread and Viddler are very good and easy Web tool for students to record their voice of retelling the story directly on the website.

Besides introducing a whole new course content, I also think MOST can be used for reviewing or assessing students’ understanding of the target language. Teachers can use analogous clips that similar to the subject discussed earlier in the unit and ask them to retell the story to see how much they understand about the subject. While learning the content knowledge, students also have many opportunities to practice their speaking skills in the target language, which I think is extremely beneficial to language learners.

For me, I think the barrier is the difficulty to create multiple analogous videos. Creating stories is always not easy to me, let alone make it a video. But I think like Dr. Oliver mentioned in the lecture of this week, we could use still images or some other broadly defined clips to make this process a little bit easier.