Reflection Paper #1

During the six years that I taught in China, most of the time the classrooms I used were very low tech – just desks and the chalkboard. It is from this standpoint that I approach technology and literacy. For me, literacy goes beyond a person's ability to read and write, basic components to literacy, because it also involves a person's competency about a certain topic. For example, when I taught students majoring in Medical English, it was not good enough for them to merely know a vocabulary word and its definition. They also had to be familiar with some background information about that topic. This extra knowledge is what made them literate.

Technology can be a broad topic. When referring to technology, in regards to education, I would generally say it is the electronic equipment or devices that facilitate the learning process. This could be everything from a computer to a SMART board or from an audio book to an accessibility device for a disabled student. Also included would be the wiring, hardware, software, and internet. This is far from a comprehensive list of technology in regards to education, but this does lay the foundation.

Prior to becoming a graduate student, I cannot say that I thought much about technology's impact on literacy. I recently read an article about how some Chinese and Japanese people were forgetting how to write some of their characters due to people's dependence on "computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems" (Evans, 2010). For those of us using the 26 letter alphabet, the worry is probably not how write the letters, but more likely the spelling of words. A word processing program helps to suggest words when it comes to words that it does not recognize, virtually making it unnecessary to remember how to correctly spell a word. Of course, the phonics that were learned will be needed to at least achieve a reasonable spelling of the word. I would say another issue that technology forces English to deal with is the fact that informal writing (e.g., text messaging, instant messaging, and most emails) is used more frequently than formal writing (e.g., research paper). I believe this affects the quality and grammar of formal writing. One final issue I will mention is that I believe the internet will pull students away from the "classics" and more toward things they find online – shorter less thought provoking types of literature.

There were several times that the availability of technology or resources bothered me as a teacher in China. During my fifth and sixth years in China it was common place for students to have computers in their dorm rooms with internet access. This was great for them, but I never once had a computer in a classroom that was internet accessible. Outside of class I found that my students preferred to utilize Chinese websites to learn English rather than the English learning websites I would give them. I am a strong advocate of using English to learn English, so I suggested good sites and programs for them to use to help develop their communication skills and pronunciation. If my classroom would have been internet accessible, I would have been able to show all of them myself how useful those sites were. Unlike the teachers in the study, I think that the sites I could find for students were appropriate for all of them (Karchmer, 2001, p. 454-457). Finally, in the classroom, I denied students the right of using any kind of electronic dictionaries (or traditional dictionaries) because I felt that they were too dependent on them for looking up unfamiliar words rather than relying on their own guessing or comprehension skills to discover the meaning of the words.

While in China I also had the opportunity to teach writing a couple of semesters. At that time, the university's library lacked the English resources (databases, journals, and other publications) needed for students to do the research papers I assigned to them. Again I had to fight students to not use Chinese sources, but rather taught them about using Google to find sources for their papers. Like the teachers researched by Karchmer (2001), I also taught my students how to discern reliable sources from unreliable ones. In addition, like Marcy I gave my students a checklist to evaluate the credibility of websites (Karchmer, 2001, p. 458). Since most of their sources ended up coming from the internet, it made it easy for me to check passages that I thought might have been plagiarized. I do wonder if I would have had results like the elementary-level teachers in that "students' motivation to produce quality written work increased when they knew it would be published on the Internet" (Karchmer, 2001, p. 458).

Though most of the time I was teaching in China my classrooms were low tech, I did have a few classes that were taught in a listening lab (every student or pair of students had a computer with which to view or listen to something played by the teacher) or multimedia classroom (equipped with a computer, speakers, and LCD projector). When I taught in this kind of room I made use to utilize the technology at my disposal. In the listening lab, I could show students movie clips and other types of video clips or play some kind of recording that would challenge their listening abilities or provide a topic for discussion. In the multimedia room I could present a wide variety of information to students, but would also have students use it to present PowerPoint presentations I would have them to make. In either case, my ability to provide richer background information to them, made the students more literate.

Even though technology was not always readily available to me in the classrooms in which I taught, I did have students make use of it for the purposes of improving their English. Though I would not have called it literacy, I was encouraging literacy by having students to utilize English websites outside of their comfort zone. They were gaining more knowledge on various subjects that allowed them to read, write, and speak more confidently. My goal is to one day return to China and teach again. As China continues to develop, I am certain that I will be able to make better use of technology in the classroom in the future. I feel that I am able to embrace technology in a way that will enhance students' learning and literacy. Additionally, I believe that a teacher must adapt to the changing technology around him or her because certainly the students will adapt to it.

References

Evans, J. (2010, Aug 25). Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan. AFP. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jz3FEk2KJw3NEUyDhbMlTQO0IlOw

Karchmer, R. (2001). The journey ahead: thirteen teachers report how the internet influences literacy and literacy instruction in their K-12 classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(4), 442-466.