Reflection (Week 9)

Everybody knows that multimedia is a good choice of material for teaching and learning English. From the point of view of students, movies or TV series are attractive enough for them to be motivated to learn and have better memory of what they have got from the movie. In fact, compared with ordinary textbooks, multimedia as teaching materials can also provide fun for the teacher in preparing the class. More creative and effective ideas that lead to effective learning outcome from students could be generated when the teacher is more motivated to prepare the lesson. However, it is not that simple in reality.

For students, they definitely know a lot of exciting movies that they are interested in, but of course, they don’t know how to choose the right movie and how to use it for learning English. Similarly, not all teachers know how to select and use movies to teach English. They may have questions like “What should the students learn from the movie?”, “What is the best way to check students’ understanding?” So, the function of “Viewing of the Film with Instructions” mentioned in the reading would be a great help for teachers. The software also provides everything that is needed for learning the English in the move, by providing the script, asking appropriate questions at certain point of the movie with explanation. Even if a teacher has got all the knowledge to do all these (finding the script, setting questions at suitable points of the movie, etc.), he may not have the technical knowledge to do the switching between the movie and the questions. Therefore, a piece of software like the one mentioned in the reading is necessary if a school really incorporates multimedia into normal English teaching practice.

In the reading, it says developing such software requires intensive labor and group rapport. In my opinion, it is also true for teachers to use multimedia in their teaching. Incorporating multimedia into normal teaching practice should be like a culture of a company. Resources from the school are needed. Especially when the workloads of teachers are so heavy, the whole team of English teachers should work together to put it into practice in order to have things run smoothly.