MEL914: Teaching Oral Communication

This paper looks at the relationship between ESL learners’ oral proficiency and the use of online recording tools and feedback from their instructor over a 14-week period. It also examines how the independent learning and assessment framework can help build learners' autonomy. To some extent, the success of this implementation is dependent on how well learners apply metacognitive strategy because it requires them to build their linguistic competency through their self-assessment and self-evaluation as they identify their own difficulties from their own recordings. Because the audio clips are recorded, they can play them repeatedly to spot their own errors. Social-affective strategy is also used when they share their clips with others for peer reviews. When I was training my secondary four students for oral exams 2 years ago, I instructed them to send me audio clips of their reading (usually of a short prose) and a 10-minute long recount/narration guided by structured questions bas...

What are children's dialogic identities, you wonder? The word, dialogic, comes from the root word, dialogue and the term describes the way children see and position themselves and each other as meaning makers and inquirers of text. Discussion with one or more members in a group is carried out for children to build their dialogic identities. As mentioned in the reading, one significant feature of discussions in classroom contexts is that children can talk freely with one another, build onto one another's responses and ask questions with the teacher taking the role of a facilitator. It sounds very much like a learner-centered and social-affective (or collaborative) strategy that MOE will approve. This approach also encourages children to be active and maybe critical readers with multiple views while teaching them to be more than mere receptors of information passed down by the teacher.   In a bid to address the question that teachers have with regards to using thi...