Week 4 Reading, Writing, and Vocabulary Skills

I enjoyed reading materials of this week as I am very interested in how could technology help us improve students’reading and writing skills. I am convinced that online materials can be extremely useful helping students to read extensively, and I also learned about how could I integrate these learning materials into my class. Now I want to say something about another article that I read this week: Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction by Jarek Krajka.

This article explores how could Internet be used as a teaching aid to help students improve their writing skills. The author has analyzed 11 different writing genres as examples to show the readers how could Internet be incorporated into different kinds of writing practice. On the whole Krajka emphasizes on three basic elements: websites, e-mail and web publishing. I am impressed by how creatively Krajka uses the website for students to collect information which they would later apply in their writing. I find the websites he recommends are abundant in resources for both teachers and students. As for e-mail and web publishing, I kind of find it may be a little bit outdated. I think e-mail can only be used as a tool for students to submit their writings. Of course teachers can correct these writings online and send them back to students, however I don’t think this has made a great difference to the traditional way of collecting homework and giving feedback. This article was written more than ten years ago, up to now, we have already got more advanced tools like Wiki to help monitor students writing process, to give feedback, and students can work collaboratively to complete a writing assignment online. As for web publishing, it is a good post-writing activity, but I don’t think teachers needs to spend time creating web pages for every classes of theirs. We can borrow platforms like Nicenet or Blackboard for students to use. It will save a lot of trouble and time. Anyway, these are just my personal thoughts.