Greetings to everyone from the second week of the finals! Although it feels like it will be an eternal one... Alright, where were we? Oh, yes our research topic: Inequality issue in English as a second and/or foreign language. Of course we started our research with initially reviewing the literature, what are the previous research regarding our topic and honestly we were unable to reach the most relevant articles due to usual restrictions and unfortunately Sci-hub as well was out of service. We have used several research engines such as ERIC,  ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Mendeley's literature search. About a month ago we opened Dropbox accounts and started to make our organizations through Dropbox by uploading our findings, conceptual maps and outlines, and so on. Then, we also thought that Mendeley can be very handy in organizing the articles in a library and adjusting citations and references. For those who d not know, Mendeley is a free reference and citation generator and it quite lightens your burden when you struggling to work on your research papers. You can alternatively use Zotero and check which works best for you. 

After downloading it and creating our group (Chamber of Mercury), we were able to collaboratively read the articles we have found in an organized manner and thus I and my dear colleagues highly recommend this tool if you are planning to do exhaustive research studies in your field. 

There are a few issues I would like to reproach, which is that the number of articles in our research area is quite limited; we faced limitations when we tried to access full versions of the articles which we found most relevant to our research study. It is sad on the one hand that such an important issue has not received enough attention, and on the other hand, it puts more responsibility on us in investigating the causes of inequalities and proposing realistic solutions. 

When the final week is over, I will update here again and I will be sharing the developments we have made with my group members. Until then, take good care of yourself and if you are in the exam period, I wish you good luck!!!

 First of all, greetings from these first days of the new year. I hope this year will be super duper year for all of us in which we will see each other more often in physical environments. 

With the new year, it is again the time to turn back to our responsibilities. In the previous post, I mentioned that we are going to produce an outline/a road map for our research field and then build our website on it. So we did and we were asked to collaboratively work on Dropbox and create our outline through Mindomo (a collaborative tool for mind maps and outlines). Because from the beginning of the training now on we were mainly working on World Englishes and GELT, we wanted to choose an all inclusive issue to work on but we also didn't want to retell what has already been discussed. Therefore, we preferred an umbrella topic: "Inequality in English Language Education" emphasizing its presence not only for language learners but also language teachers such as practices of native speakerism and for the learners of English as a second/foreing language, conforming to so-called ideal speaker model.  Therefore, we will have the opportunity to tap on English as a global language and to ensure awareness on World Englishes and intercultural aspect of language teaching while also digging deeper on the issues of globalization, immigration, having equal access to education and language materials. 

The reason why we, as a group (Chamber of Mercury) chose this inequality issue because it is a very broad term and it needs attention of educational authorities, teachers within the field of ELT, ESL and EFL learners and even the family members. In that sense, our main aim in this journey of making research and creating website is to raise awareness on the main issue dealing with such notions that I mentioned above and try to change them so that we can shape/change the future of ELT. 

As a final, I would like to share a picture from our training days, I really miss those days!

I feel really lucky to work with these amazing people:)

 

Hi everyone! 

Before greeting the new year I wanted to share one more post. I hope you are doing alright after a disastrous year-it was, for a majority of the world-therefore, I strongly hope that this new year comes with all greatness and brings sense of relief in our lives. However, my realistic estimations do not match with what I hope. Anyway, there's no need to be a merchant of doom. Let's continue with where we left!

You know we are working on a project (21st Century Skills) and this project has two main steps: First step is project training which we did the final session last week and that part is over. Now, we are on the second phase which we are expect to do produce. What I mean by produce is choosing a topic which will effect the future of ELT and creating a website taking into consideration all the aspects that are related to that phenomenon, what problems are there or may arise, what are needed to achieve our objectives and intentions. In order for being able to produce a website, we initially need to make an extensive research on that topic and honestly we have not come to a consensus as a group yet. Therefore, we asked our project teacher Melda Yılmaz for an appointment through Zoom so that we will better organize our thoughts and ideas and she kindly accepted our request. 

The Zoom meeting went well and long and it really helped us when creating our road map we are going to pursue for the rest of the project. In the upcoming post, we will be already made our outline for our particular research and initial steps for the website so I will be sharing them with you as well. Take care of yourself until then.

I wish you a happy happy new year!!

Hello everyone once again,

Our project on 21st Century Skills continues non-stop and in the last meeting we have discussed teaching and learning materials, textbooks and the notion of EIL (English as an International Language) which again brings us to the similar topics that we have previously discussed such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca and English being a global language. We have seen that all these terminology is interrelated and they promote adding a variety to our language classrooms, different accents and dialects of English spoken around the world and also not to underestimate the place of 'cultures' in teaching. Having discussed a lot about English as a global language, we, as each group, were eventually asked to create an activity that will promote GELT (Global Englishes for Language Teaching). We have used a famous play by William Shakespeare "Twelfth Night" and built our activity around this play and tried to show our learners that different adaptations are possible, there is no only one style to act out this play and put on stage, rather there might be multiple interpretations due to different cultures and language uses. 

Here you can take a look at our activity: 

Think Local, Write in English: “Turkish Twelfth Night “

Goal

    This activity aims to raise awareness on the issue of cultural relativity that different styles and interpretations are possible for the same play through showing different pictures of the adaptations (see Appendix) of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. 

Appropriate Courses: Literature & Language Teaching, Drama, Identity and Culture.

Class Time: 3 class hours (120 minutes)

Procedure

 

(It is assumed that everyone in the classroom have watched the original version of the play on YouTube (National Theatre) beforehand by the suggestion of the teacher.)

(1)   Warm up and interaction to World Englishes literature (10-15 minutes). Teacher shows pictures of Shakespeare, The Globe Theatre, and Elizabethan costumes, etc. And T asks the following questions: Did you like the play you watched by Shakespeare? What was the thing that you attracted/disliked most? Which century/culture/setting do these costumes belong to? Which cultures are represented in the play? After some answers and discussions teacher sets a groupwork.

 

(2)   Group Work (20-25 minutes).  In order for students to better make sense of the plot, Teacher handouts different set of scenes from Twelfth Night which are not in the right order. Students are expected to put them into right order in groups. 

 

 

(3)   Group Work (25 minutes) Teacher writes the names of different cultures on small papers and make students randomly pick the papers (Hindi, Chinese, Afro American, Japanese Anime & Pantomime version and Russian). Then, Students will decide on the cultural elements based on their world knowledge (Constructivism). Teacher hands out worksheets consisting categories such as language use, setting (dominant colors, gender representation, censorship), costumes, cultural elements, atmosphere. Then, Teacher shows the pictures of different adaptations of Twelfth Night around the world. And each group will put a tick on the features that they have found in their groups. Then, a speaker from each group will share the answers with the class. Teacher writes the answers on the board. Students will comment on one another’s work.

 

Whole Class Discussion (30 minutes) Now that they have identify other cultures, teacher will ask them to consider the Turkish context, asking the following questions: What kind of costumes they would wear? What might be the settings? This will initiate a deconstructive approach on literary works based on multiculturalism and critical thinking. 

 

The pictures will be used in this activity,

Hindi adaptation of Twelfth Night "Piya Behrupiya", even Shakespeare's famous portrait is adapted to Indian culture. 

Again, the same adaptation

This might as well give a gist to your learners on how might this adaptation put on stage.

Japanese Pantomime version

Modern musicalized version in US

Anime version, Japanese

Chinese Adaptation 

Again Chinese adaptation but modernized version and might reflect Chinese culture more (scene, setting, color and decoration are suggestive)

All-men adaptation in Russian style

Our intention as a group is to draw on our language learners' world knowledge. Therefore, we try to make them guess about how Twelfth Night can be played in different cultures, how language use might they include especially after watching the original version of the play. Is it a must to stick to the original version when making adaptation, should we use Shakespearean language and/or purely Received Pronunciation?  Although some of them might be biased about some cultures, we try to make them guess and then realize how different adaptations for different cultures are possible. 

As prospective language teachers, we really would like to here your comments and criticisms about our activity. We also desire language teachers to use this activity in their classrooms and maybe adapting it to their own contexts, if there is a need for it. Looking forward to read your comments!

 

 Dear langualoggers!

I am going through such an intense and challenging project and homework period, and I apologize for this delay of 1 week. Due to this delay, I will tell you what we did in the project training 2 weeks ago. First of all, I must say that this week in the training enabled me to meet more applications that I have never seen and know. I can't wait to share with you the teaching and learning tools I've learned. I think it would be correct to start with the tools that our dear teacher Melda Yılmaz who is the owner of the project, told us:

1) Edpuzzle: We met Edpuzzle 2 years ago thanks to our university instructor Tuncer Can, if you go to the previous posts, you can see that I mentioned about the application. However, it was thanks to this project training that I started using the site completely, because plenty of interactive video assignments were given during this training process. Anyway, Edpuzzle is a website where you can create interactive videos for your lessons that make activities and topics more appealing to students. You can prepare pop-up quizzes, multiple choice and open-ended questions related to video and topic you would like to teach your students. It is really engaging tool and I highly recommend you to use that too.

2) Animoto: is a video creation tool that provide you with multiple templates to create thematic videos for your specific purposes especially super beneficial for language classrooms.

3) Renderforest: brings it to the next level and offers you such features like creating your own websites, graphics, logos, editing mockups using the templates given and videos. 

4)Thinglink: is one of my favorites since it makes is possible to create interactive videos which you can embed certain links on them to provide further and related info about the topic you teach. This not only facilitates learning and teaching but also adds fun element and make classroom subjects much appealing to students.

5)Tiki Toki: Another useful and interactive tool which helps you to create timelines for the specific topics or events you need to teach in the classroom. I think this tool is quite useful especially when adopting CLIL approach or teaching history and literature and/or visualizing particular grammar items. Do not forget to integrate audio, visual, texts and videos to enhance both your teaching and your students' learning!

6)Weebly: is such an interesting one that gives you opportunities to create websites especially if you do project-based learning as we do and therefore we will create websites focusing different areas that require attention for English language teaching and which teachers of EFL/ESL will benefit from. 

After our project intructor Melda ended introducing these beneficials, it was our turn as groups to bring in different interactive tools that enhance the use of technology in especially remote virtual learning environments.

Seesaw: is a teaching and learning platform that provides all stakeholders (even family members) to share creative activities, get instant feedback and thus make actively engagement in learning possible.

Voscreen: is an app that helps English language learners improve their language their language skills(reading&listening) through short video clips (mostly short parts from tv series and movies)

Quizlet: as its name suggesting, it is a platform that assist teachers to create working sets (quizzes, questions, games) to be studied after a topic is learned in the classroom which inevitably make students consolidate what has been learned in lessons.

Venngage: Providing merely information to make your students make sense of classroom topics is never enough. You have to visualize that information in order for them to be much more comprehensible. Venngage is a tool that offers you plenty of templates to create infographic for your language learners. Integrate infographics in your teaching, I promise your students will enjoy them! You can also use Canva but Venngage definitely has more options.

Ispring Talkmaster: Certainly one of the best tools for creating real life-like conversations especially when genre teaching. It provides you with various contexts to create your dialogs, human characters and add your voice. What more could an English teacher ask for? The only drawback we face as a group is unfortunately it only supports Windows, so if you use different operating system, you are unable to use it for now. 

As skillful teachers of 21st century, there's no other chance for us to learn how to use these tools effectively and integrate them in our teaching. However knowing them is not enough, all of these sites offer a few templates for free, some give a few free chances for a few uses, but after a while they ask you to update your membership and payment to continue to benefit from them. Because they are producing a product, they have a right to ask for money for sure. However, it is obvious that teachers, especially ones who live in third world countries cannot afford these tools which are sold at dollar rate. Therefore, I think that a fund that will enable teachers to continue using these tools should be provided by the state to all schools, so that equal opportunities will be provided in the quality of education.

 Hi everyone,

This week in the project training we have discussed the place of technology in education, its importance and mostly the benefits of integration of technology into our teaching. We have additionally learned new tools that we can exploit in our language classrooms some of them including which we were previously introduced such as wordwall, wordart, linoit, wordclouds that can add interaction and fun element in our teaching using templates they offer to create activities, input, materials, and so on. We are also introduced with concepts like digital native and digital immigrant that were coined to identify people who were born to the world of the internet and computers (digital natives) and people who were born before that era of technological improvements (digital immigrants). I personally realized once again how important it it to keep pace with my future students's vast knowledge on using technology and creating classroom / online activities according to their interests is also important in order not to lose their in the subject and even language learning. Integration of technological tools, materials, having blending lessons rather than merely traditional lessons is a natural requirement of the new world that we live in and the role of globalization is huge and therefore we, as teachers of English as a global language, should always update ourselves to keep up with innovations and new teaching&learning methods, and especially the language that keeps on changing and evolving. 

Apart from these, we also met with presentation and acitivity creation tools that can be used in preparing/planning lessons such as glogster, prezi, and canva. You can click on the links and discover more about them. 

 Hello again after two long weeks langualoggers. At the end of very exhausting midterm weeks, we started to continue our education where we left off. The topic of the 3rd week was digital literacy, which is one of the 21st century skills and also includes information literacy. It was an online training week where we, as prospective English teachers, discussed the meaning of digital literacy, the concept of digital native, having a critical attitude when we reach digital information, and the importance of measuring the reliability and accuracy of the data we are looking for through various filters. Actually, our meeting has started with an online match-up activity which we are all introduced with a new educational tool called wordwall through which we matched related concepts with their definitions. Furthermore, we also learned how we can be critical users of the internet by evaluating information, its accuracy, safety, or checking if it is biased or relevant, etc. That is, in a century where information is so abundant and acces to information is very easy, we have to be conscious users, especially as prospective English teachers. We have to be aware of our rights and also try not to violate others' by paying attention copyright issues (Creative Commons, see if you are interested in getting licences for your creative works) 

We also talked about concepts to be careful about that are under the frame of digital literacy such as cyberbullying, sexting, grooming, online radicalization and access to extremist material, professional conduct in digital environments and digital data security. These can be issues that we may encounter frequently as teachers and we need to pay close attention as active internet users or digital natives and most importantly to be aware of our legal rights and limitations. 

I personally learned plethora of useful terminology and concepts that I will benefit from in my way to become a responsible internet user and content consumer. When creating a language learning material, activity, or a task, I should be meticulous in my choice of content from digital sources because a content is free to access, this does not mean it is free to reuse. Therefore, when using an already produced content, I need to be careful to use a copyright licensed one or I have to state who originally owns the content and where it is taken from. In addition, when creating my own content, I should as well be careful about getting licence for my work, that is, I have to know my legal rights very well and use the content and the internet purposefully.

Lastly, keeping up with the digital world brings many elements with it. The easy access to information does not mean that we can consume or use them that much. Therefore, being digitally native or digital citizen do not only require/offer easy access to information through digital means, but also require evaluation and critical attitude, which is a competence that enable us to distinguish the accuracy, reliability and quality of that information after accessing it. Not only that, but also being aware of the fact that there are some legal costs and responsibilities when using information, so it is also the responsibility of the people we call digital citizens. Therefore, we can only say that a user is digitally literate when these are combined. As teacher candidates and content consumers and producers, we must first be digital citizens that will set an example for our students and guide and project them to achieve these gains.