Reflection (Week 8)

It is good that the copyright law allows copyrighted materials to be used and partially duplicated for educational purposes. Such flexibility is a way how the society catches up with the new methods of teaching and learning languages nowadays. Both teachers and students are benefited.

For teachers to face the increasingly difficult students with declining English level and little motivation to learn the language, it is very important that the teaching style should be changed from purely lecturing to modern ways of teaching English. They have to make use of various materials that are closely related to students’ life and interesting enough to motivate students to learn. Good choices of materials include pop songs, hit movies and hit TV series etc. Other than these materials taken from the pop culture, many schools have their students performing famous plays in English as a highlight of the school’s big events such as the anniversary of the school, which provide students with variety of chances to learn and use the language. Since the ordinance allows schools to use these materials for educational purposes, teachers can have a wide selection of sources of attractive copyrighted materials for students to learn English without the needs for worrying about what procedures they have to go through or how much budget they have to allocated for getting the approval before the designed lesson is successfully carried out.

Since learning in school involve a 2-way communication between teachers and students, when teachers select interesting copyrighted learning materials for their lessons, it is possible that the students can enjoy their learning process more than before. For example, they could be using clips of copyrighted audio or video files taken from performances of their pop idols in their group projects, or taking part in a play in English in front of the parents of all students in the school’s anniversary ceremony. More room is allowed for students to be creative when they need to produce the language in their assignments assigned by the teachers. I believe that the students will be able to have a stronger memory of what they have learned about the language, and have greater confidence in using the language.