Teaching English through New Digital Media
Abstract
This paper focuses on analyzing the importance of using new
digital media in teaching English and finding the best ways how to
take advantages from the technologies covering a variety of positive and negative
impacts of cases from Indonesian perspectives. New digital media technologies
in education with their reorganization of social networks and web 2.0
software tools offer opportunities for people to challenge previous centralized
models of learning by connecting, sharing and discussing ideas outside of the
class room and at great distance from each other. Through digital technologies,
young people get more new information from the technology they use outside of school
than they do from their teacher in the classroom. It is clear that learning in
an online environment helps to improve the target language, encourages learner
independence, and has great potential for the development of intercultural and
communicative skills. Our failure to provide language learning material resources
must partly be due to teachers and parents who either do not appreciate or do
not understand the power of social media. The new digital media are a frontier
that is rich with opportunities and risks, particularly for young people. The
use of new media and social networks (e.g. Second Life, Facebook, Twitter) has
implications for language education, society, culture, distance learning, sociology-psychological effects of the web, and access to information. In this paper,
I try to explore the importance of using new digital media in teaching English
that frequently avoided by teachers of English in Indonesia and that teaching
methods often repress essential aspects of social learning in relation to
media and privileging teacher knowledge over young people’s own experience.
Finally, this paper also suggest a new focus for research that will encompass
these neglected learning areas, teaching material and methods using the
approach of new digital media technologies.
Key words: new digital
media, teaching English, social networks, language learning material, teaching
methods.
Topic/Sub-theme: Teaching
materials and media
Venny Eka Meidasari, M.Hum.
Lecturer in University of Indraprasta PGRI and a postgraduate
student in State University of Jakarta
E-mail: venny_xiaofen@yahoo.com
Handphone: 08151604655
I. Introduction
New digital media technologies in
education with their reorganization of social networks and web 2.0 software
tools offer opportunities for people to challenge previous centralized models
of learning by connecting, sharing and discussing ideas outside of the class
room and at great distance from each other. Through digital technologies, young
people get more new information from the technology they use outside of school
than they do from their teacher in the classroom. It is clear that learning in
an online environment helps to improve the target language, encourages learner
independence, and has great potential for the development of intercultural and
communicative skills.
Using these kinds of new digital media
has always been a challenge. Students and teachers should be able to use in
their learning activity different media through different technologies. New digital
media provide teachers and students with creative and practical ideas. They
enable teachers to meet various needs and interests of their students. They
also provide students with a lot of language practice and tasks which develop
reading, writing, speaking and listening skills activities using let say, Second
Life, Facebook, or Twitter. New digital media also entertains students and
encourage practicing English in general, both inside and outside the classroom,
promoting extensive learning by giving the students the confidence, the
motivation and the ability to continue their reading outside the classroom.
On the other hand, new digital media are
also a frontier that is rich with opportunities and risks, particularly for
young people such as misuse of cyberspace, offending materials, breaking intellectual
property rights and access to information. Thus, in this paper, not only I try
to explore the importance of using new digital media in teaching English that
frequently avoided by teachers of English in Indonesia and that teaching
methods often repress essential aspects of social learning in relation to media
and privileging teacher knowledge over young people’s own experience, but also
I have made some suggestion that we as a nation should do to minimize the
negative impacts of this new generation technologies. Finally, this paper also
suggests a new focus for these neglected learning areas, teaching material and methods using the approach of new digital
media technologies.
II. Theoretical Framework
A. The
Notion of New Digital Media
Ever since digital technologies were
made widely available, scholars, educators, policymakers, and parents have been
debating their implications for young people’s literacy, culture, attention
spans, social tolerance, and propensity for aggression.
The term of new digital media itself,
according to James, et al. (2009:6), “Refer to the actual technologies that
people use to connect with one another—including mobile phones, personal
digital assistants (PDAs), game consoles, and computers connected to the Internet.”
Through these technologies, young people are participating in a range of
activities, including social networking, blogging, gaming, instant messaging,
downloading music and other content, uploading and sharing their creations, and
collaborating with others in various ways.
Similarly, on their book Ito and
colleagues (2008:12) stated that “We use the term “new media” to describe media
ecology where more traditional media, such as books, television, and radio, are
“converging” with digital media, specifically interactive media and media for
social communication.” They use the term “new media” rather than terms such as “digital
media” or “interactive media” because they are examining a constellation of
changes to media technology that cannot be reduced to a single technical
characteristic. Current media ecologists often rely on a convergence of digital
and online media with print, analog, and non-interactive media types Based on
the arguments above, I may conclude that new digital media refers to applications
of the computer that include multimedia, artificial intelligence and
networking.
Multimedia is the combination of the
computational power of the computer with the presentation capabilities of video
and audio. Artificial intelligence uses the computational power of the computer
to support and in some ways mimic human cognition. Networking includes the uses
of computers that are connected via landlines or microwave to each other and
the Internet and World Wide Web.
B. Teaching
Language using New Digital Media Based on Environment Analysis
There are many ideas and techniques that are used at school very
often. For example, playing songs to practice listening comprehension or
interpret it; having a discussion on a controversial topic; having a free
speech; or giving a presentation. All these things are normally done in an
“old-fashioned” way. That is, new media is not or almost not included.
You may want to bring a ghetto blaster
to play a song or pupils may look up some information for their presentation on
the Internet. But overall new digital media is not really involved in these
everyday tasks.
Environment analysis (Tessmer, 1990)
involves looking at the factors that will have a strong effect on decisions
about the goals of learning, what to include in the learning activity, and how
to teach and assess it. These factors can arise from the learners, the teachers,
and the teaching and learning situation. Environment analysis is also called “situation
analysis” (Richards, 2001) or “constraints analysis”. A constraint can be positive
in curriculum design.
From the learners point of view, there
are some reasons why we should consider to use the new digital media, such as
there are relatively few native speakers (the language setting); there are
relatively few opportunities to use the language outside the classroom (patterns
of language use in society); and majority-language speakers doubt the target language
has contemporary.
As from the teachers’ side, especially
in Indonesia where English is not one of the official language, some problems
such whether teachers can provide good models; produce their own spoken or
written material; their ability to correct spoken; or are they having pronunciation
training can be minimized by using the technologies of new media and from
learning situation point of view, in order to understand a constraint fully, it
is usually necessary to examine the nature of the constraint in the environment
you are working in, and to examine previous research on the constraint. For
example, a constraint of class size. If this constraint is considered to be
important for the particular course being designed, it is useful to know
exactly how large the classes are. Do they contain 40 students or 140 students?
Is it possible to change class sizes? Or does new digital media gives us some
advantages to take? There has been considerable research on and examination of teaching
large classes. This research has looked at the relative merits of group work
and teacher-centered activities, the effect of class size on learning, and individualization.
Using new digital media as a tool to teach and learn can be one of the
solutions to overcome the constraint.
To overcome the constraint the
curriculum designer might try to provide self-study options for work to be done
outside of class time or if possible the time available for the course could be
increased. Environment analysis involves looking at the local and wider situation
to make sure that the course will fit and will meet local requirements. There
is considerable research data on many of the important environment factors,
including class size, motivation, learners of mixed proficiency and special
purpose goals.
Good environment analysis draws on both
analysis of the environment and application of previous research and theory.
Based on my experience, it is also possible to let students work on their own
projects using the new digital media outside of school. That means they can
realize their own ideas with student-centered work at home. Although this kind
of work should only be used as a means to add to their work at school, there
are many different projects that could be done at home and which have certain
advantages over work at school.
III.
Methodology: Language Education Through New Media
New media technologies in education offer the opportunity for
such self-direction with their ability to restructure hierarchies, inform and
reconfigure communication, and transform relationships with knowledge and
people. With their reorganization of social networks and web 2.0 software tools
offer opportunities for people to challenge previous centralized models of
learning by connecting, sharing and
discussing ideas outside of the class room and at great distance from each
other.
The concept of online language learning is in the formative phase
and is still being shaped by the emerging sociology-technical landscape of web 2.0
tools. However, it is clear that learning in an online environment helps to
improve the target language, encourages learner independence, and has great
potential for the development of intercultural and communicative skills. On the
table below are the main types of Interned-based social media that are within
the scope of online language education:
There are already many on-line language
learning sites with millions of users but which little feedback about the
achievements of learners and little or no guidance from language teachers. An
online language teacher assumes a new role where the balance of control and
feedback between them and their learners is different than in the traditional
classroom.
As a language teacher who is also
teaching my students virtually, I consider an online language teacher means
that: the teacher is part of a community and provides help and guidance as an
equal; the teacher does not strictly control the material provided rather
facilitates learning from materials that the student may provide; the teacher
familiarizes their students with the different types of discourse available in
social media and helps them to adopt and adapt their use; the teacher provides help
where the student is not being understood or is having difficulty understanding
idioms, expressions, or subtle connotations; the teacher guides rather than
instructs the students in their use of language; the teacher ensures that the
sessions are conducted in such a way that established learning objectives are
being achieved; and the teacher is like the referee in a sports match, watching
out for fairness, balanced participation, and adherence to the established
rules.
Design and Procedure
Here is a check list design what I think
should be done for starting a new social network learning group. See the
procedure below the checklist for what should be considered at each stage.
1. Create compatible groups.
Use
questionnaires, check lists or other descriptors to build a profile of the
participants such as: the language they want to learn; the level of ability;
learning objectives; interests; learning styles; willingness to participate.
2. Select the most appropriate medium and tools.
3. Provide a clear introduction and agree the rules of engagement
·
Give an introduction at the
beginning of the course: in what language communication is to take place; how
the course will be structured – that is by time, by topics or by some other
method; the rules and restrictions of the social network; the role of the
moderator; participants’ rights and responsibilities; how much group and how
much individual work will be expected; how much work will be on-line and
off-line; when and how often does the group meet on-line. The content of each session
·
Ask learners to introduce themselves in a discussion forum. In the
beginning learners could do this in their native language initially, to replace
it at a later stage with a description in the target language. In fact, that
could be their first aim.
4. Set goals.
Participants
should set group and individual group. All participants should share in
creating group goals. The moderator’s job is to ensure that goals are well
defined, realistic and achievable; also that enough time is allocated to
achieve them.
5. Encourage team working
Members
should understand each other‟s goals and styles and be open to
resolving conflicts. Simple tasks or games are a good way of becoming
acquainted. Agree the rules (and possible roles) within the team. Another way
to think of this is establishing rights and responsibilities.
6. Listen actively, participate, and provide momentum if
necessary:
·
Have tasks in mind during
on-line sessions and consider giving homework assignments.
·
Listen carefully without interrupting.
·
Ask questions from time to time.
·
Add some examples from your
personal life – it gives more personal contact.
·
Lead some discussions but
not all of them.
·
Express your own opinions
about the topics
·
Manage silence.
·
Learn to recognize, use and
deal with silences.
·
Allow silences when members
need time to formulate their thoughts and find the right words.
7. Fix problems, recognize and solve conflicts.
Although
moderating seems to be less authoritative than teaching, language course moderators
on a social network should deal with those that are not following the rules.
This may mean reminding members about the rights of participants, warning or
even expelling repeat offenders.
8. Evaluate
·
Check for and give feedback.
·
Ask if your support was enough or appropriate
·
At agreed intervals or at
the end of a round of social network encounters surveys could be sent or made
available online so that participants can evaluate the course, the learning
environment and the moderator.
9. Adapt
·
Suggest other tools to be
used.
·
Make improvements to your
own performance as well as the course and the environment.
Based on the explanation above, it can be concluded that from the
Interned-based new social media above, students can learn a lot to improve
their language abilities. The figure below describes some language aspects that
can be improved through the procedure explained above:
Language Education through Media
Source: Meidasari (2012)
From the chart above, it is clear that
all the language competencies can be taught through the new media. Especially,
I put the main focus on the new social media network called Second Life. Second
Life (http://secondlife.com) is an
online world in which you have a character that can walk around and meet
people. It is a social networking site that has very similar functions to
Facebook. You can send friends invitations, talk to individuals, talk to groups
of people and use learning applications or games. But sometimes the best way to
explain something to someone is to simply show it to them. So later I will show
a clip for you to watch:
There are two parts to the Second Life
virtual environment: the Adult Grid and the Teen Grid. The British Council has
built an island in the Adult Grid to train teachers in approaches to e learning.
And for the teens, The British Council has also built an island for teens to
visit for free (http://teen.secondlife.com). Teenagers between 13 and 17 years old can make friends from all
over the world, visit the UK (virtually!) and go on learning quests to improve
their English and learn more about UK culture. They can talk to the Loch Ness
monster, visit Stonehenge and ride on the London Eye.
Second life provides the new word
similar to ours, but virtually. Here, the member can choose their own avatar
represents their personalities, dress it up, and join to various communities. The
website provides the real experts from various universities all over the world
to teach language and all members can speak, listen, write and read every
material from each scene. Each scene teaches them new vocabularies and they
will be put in a situation as if they are really there.
Although they do not serve functions as
many as Second Life does, however, Facebook and Twitter also can be a tool in
learning language. By chatting and taking notes features, students can learn
how to practice their skills. The members of the site can also follow each
other included their teacher and together they can make a social language
learning.
IV. Analysis: The Impacts of New Digital Media: Indonesian
Perspectives
In this paper, I want to argue that it
can make sense by all means to work with new media in the above mentioned cases
to improve the learning experience of the pupils. Furthermore, I want to explain
why this is the case at all.
I want to start with playing songs in a
class. Normally, that is done via a ghetto blaster and a CD. To my mind it is a
good idea to use a PC and maybe Second Life or another video platform like YouTube
instead. This extra effort is frequently avoided by teachers of English in
Indonesia in relation to privileging teacher knowledge over young people’s own
experience.
Thus, the condition was broken down into
the following underlying highlights: who teachers of English are (experiences, background
and training); how they see themselves in relation to schools and curricula;
what they say (and think) about Media as a discipline; how they define their
own approach to Media; what they actually do when they teach Media; key
concepts with which teachers feel most confident and the sources from which
their understanding of these concepts derive; and favored resources and the
ways in which these are used.
But why would a teacher want to have the
extra effort? I think there are several reasons. First of all, the students can
also watch the video and not only listen to the music. So they are confronted with
authentic language material. But they do not just listen to it, they are also
involved visually. So on the one hand the learning is very demonstrative, that
is, pupils are subjected to authentic language material, they can watch a
video, and see that there is more to a song than just plain text. On the other
hand, a video also enables multichannel learning. Learning is often more
effective if two or more senses are required. So if you play a video, students
are more likely to pay attention and remember the contents later. Another great
advantage is the up-to-dateless of platforms like YouTube. We as a teacher can
always choose a song that is of topical interest.
According to the Boston Consulting
Group, some of the world's most avid social network users live in Indonesia,
where more than half of the country's online population participates on social networking
sites as the figure below:
Drawing on evidence from the data above,
it has shown that Indonesia is a vastly growing Internet penetration country.
Therefore, both professional journalists and citizen journalists struggle to
re-invent media ethics, and debate whether and how to adapt existing norms,
such as accuracy, verification and objectivity, to the new media environment. Digital
media brings the Indonesian market together, creating greater opportunities
both positive and negative impacts in this country. Some of them are:
a. Positive Impacts
·
In 2007, the British Council
conducted market research into how the Internet has affected the preferred
learning styles of young people wanting to learn English around the world including
Indonesia (http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/teaching-learning-throughsocial-networks). The results of this research 69% of learners around the world
said that they learned most effectively when socializing informally. This
result suggests that a lot of students learn best from their friends and
family. Perhaps that is not so surprising. The things we learn from our loved
ones are often more immediately relevant to our lives than what we learn from a
teacher in a classroom. Also, when we are relaxed (such as when we are at home
or in a café), then we are more open to suggestions and new ideas.
·
Since the work they do is self-directed and student centered, they
can choose what they want to work on and the pace at which they work. This
makes it even more motivating and contributes to the other advantages. Furthermore,
they learn more easily.
·
Learning through the use of new media enables the students to
learn via many “channels”. They come into contact with audio, visual and many
more inputs.
· Pupils learn actively, they
have to do something themselves. This trains their social, pragmatic, and
cognitive skills.
·
Writing your own or a group
blog or emails with English speaking people helps the pupils improve their
writing and language skills.
·
Reading interesting
information they have found on the Internet can improve their reading skills.
·
Web 2.0 is part of the
student’s everyday life. Working at home on school projects with blogs and so
on is very natural for them and thus, no artificial forced project.
·
The students can work
whenever they want to. They are not forced to follow a certain schedule.
·
Other people, classmates or
even foreign people, can be involved in the work.
·
People can comment on and
add to things a pupil has written. He can then reflect and change his post if
he sees fit.
·
As a teacher, it is very
easy to start a project since there is so much to find on the Internet. He can
search for useful websites and provide these to the students to get them
started.
·
While using Web 2.0
services, the pupils improve their skills to work with these services, that is
their media and method competence is improved. This could come in very handy
for them later jobs and their life in general.
·
When writing emails pupils
learn more about foreign cultures and socialize with people in other countries.
·
Pupils leave the safe area
of using English at school and have to use it freely in a more natural
environment.
·
They want their English to
be good because other people can read it.
b. Possible disadvantages impacts:
·
Accessibility and inequity –
the internet is not always accessible by all learners and teachers.
·
Internet unfamiliarity –
some teachers and students are not familiar with the Internet.
·
The information given by the
students does not have to be accurate. However, teachers can have a look, read
through the material and correct the worst mistakes.
·
Some learners may have problems with new media. That is no real
argument, some learners have problems with languages, but they have to learn it
nonetheless since it is an important part of our everyday life.
·
You have to be careful not
to publish sensitive data. This can also be used as a exercise to make the
students aware of the problems. Since they have similar problems in the rest of
their lives (Second Life, Facebook and so on), it is actually an advantage if
they can learn about the dangers in a “controlled environment”.
·
There is a certain danger
that pupils use a blog, twitter, and so on for things not related to school. I
think it is okay if pupils do that sometimes; if it gets out of hand, the
teacher can react fast. It is important anyway that the teacher controls the
work of the students.
·
Carelessly web-surfing is
not the ideal solution, especially if used undesirably, such as for Internet
pornography, or without careful monitoring.
·
There is no strict
punishment for offending material such as porn video/film uploaded on the new
social media. Several high schools were raided for mobile phones so the
offending clips could be removed. Some ministers said the incident pointed,
once again, to moral decay and the need for stricter regulations of the
Internet. As the videos were uploaded onto Facebook, YouTube and distributed
via mobile devices, both students and working adults tottered on the verge of
sexual hysteria.
Based on the point of
views above, it is clear that Indonesia is indeed a big market for new social
media and this, coupled with the fact that Indonesia has a very active stance
towards media, makes the spread through social media faster in Indonesia. The
government should put some clear and strict regulation related to the issues of
identity and privacy, credibility, ownership and authorship and participation
aspects; similar to what all the experts on the chapter two focused on.
V. Conclusion
I believe that there will always be a
place for the traditional research paper in the college writing classroom, and
we have certainly not jettisoned this, as a glance at our course wiki and class
syllabus demonstrates. But more and more, we see that new media technologies
undergird every aspect of our lives. By combining the print with the digital,
our digital native students were able to think more broadly about their
work—how it would look and how it would sound—and to translate their ideas into
a complex mixture of words, images, and sound.
Ethical stances are also should be
taught and shaped by moral development and the beliefs, values, and purposes
that bring to their online pursuits. For an individual to act ethically, they
need to understand possible consequences for themselves, for others in their
community, and for society. Such abstract thinking requires certain cognitive
and moral skills, including the ability to take different perspectives, think
critically about possibilities, hypothesize about the future, and make connections
between actions and consequences.
The young generation now defaults to
social media in nearly every aspect of their life. They use it to communicate
with their friends, play games and watch TV. Our failure to provide language learning
resources must partly be due to teachers and parents who either do not
appreciate or do not understand the power of social media. But by ignoring
social media we are missing out on a world of opportunities. Schools like to
think of themselves as modern, innovative and forward-thinking institutions,
and the majority of them are. If you enter a classroom today, you are
confronted with computers, PowerPoint, electronic whiteboards and iPads. But by
refusing to engage with our students in the digital playground that is social
media, we will never truly understand their needs and never fully realise its
potential as a language learning tool.
Below are some of the tips for language
teachers to engage with your pupils on social media:
1) Create a Second Life account. You can register and visit the
island for free by going to
http://secondlife.com. You will need a broadband connection to use Second Life,
however.
Alternatively,
if you wish to register your whole class for the Teen Grid, you can contact
Graham
Stanley at the British Council (Graham.Stanley@britishcouncil.es). Graham is a
learning
technologies expert. You can read one of his blogs on this site:
2) Create a Facebook page that your class can 'like'. Start
posting updates to your timeline, but not in English. Ask your pupils to
translate the text using Facebook's in-line Bing translation tool and ask them
to gauge its accuracy.
3) Create a Twitter account. Start tweeting in a foreign language,
keeping in mind that you have a 140 character limit, and see if your pupils can
strike up a conversation with you. Impose a non-English only reply and retweet
rule.
4) Create a blog or Tumblr. Dedicate it entirely to publishing
content in the language you teach. Show your pupils why you love the language
and inspire them to do the same. Ask them to write something, however small,
and post it for the whole world to admire.
References
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James, C., Davis, K., Flores, A., Francis, John M., Pettingill,
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Jenkins, Henry (P. I.), Purushotma, R., Weigel, M., Clinton, K.,
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Internet
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