Педагогические науки/5.Современные методы преподавания

Alla Sariieva

NTUU KPI

Usefulness and benefits of the innovation for language teachers and from the students' perspective

In the moderator’s opinion, the major benefit of the introduction of the project has been galvanizing students’ intellectual and creative potential, and their greater linguistic / technological involvement in the course. The benefits need to be weighed against the challenges that a project applied on a fairly large sample of students inevitably imply. This section starts with a peer review focusing on the multi-faceted nature of the project. It is followed by a brief catalogue of a qualitative evaluation of Engwiki provided by students. “On the Engwiki homepage a visitor can obtain relevant information about the importance of the project through links to papers in which the project was presented. Some quotes and related links are also elements that give richness to the introductory content. What is missing is a brief introduction to the project and its aim, so visitors could immediately know what to expect to find on the project pages. The idea itself is very good and encouraging. The system enables students to participate more actively in the course, to contribute by leaving their comments and to show (through personal reviews and team work) what they have learned and what experiences they have acquired. Those diverse elements of student participation are a better indicator for measuring the quality and quantity of students’ activity and therefore the overall score for each student can be given more precisely and objectively.”

The most immediate function of Engwiki was to serve as a repository of articles, both whose creation and the result of which ensure exposure to a greater body of technical and other texts. This has been positively assessed by the students themselves: “On a slightly larger scale, having such a “database” project at the Faculty only deserves compliments. Over a couple of years, this database could grow quite large, should the standards of English 1 remain the same”. The project’s contribution to ‘activating learners' (passive) knowledge of ‘the conventions of communication in their community’ (Dudely-Evans, 1998, pp. 209) – one of the objectives of ESP – has been described as follows: “As I attended a school specializing in economics, my knowledge of IT words in English was limited to just a few, very common, IT words and phrases. When we started doing our weekly tasks for Engwiki, I soon realized how small my IT vocabulary was and how insufficient it was for my major study. The whole Engwiki concept gave me a strong impulse to improve my knowledge of English, to make it more refined. And the best way to do it was through practice. It is said that ‘Practice makes perfect’. So, after working with Engwiki I felt a tremendous increase in my English skills and vocabulary. This new knowledge and skills turned out to be very useful in my later studies. I would like to thank you for making me a part of this mini project.”Regardless of the large number of articles within it, Engwiki is work in progress, especially when we consider augmenting it as a meaningful database: “In the second semester, with Business English 2, we tried to unify the topics a little bit more, creating more quality content within the wiki. From my perspective, such an undertaking is quite something.” The extent to which Engwiki has met that requirement is illustrated in the following words: “In the two projects I worked on, I was able to use my creativity, the timeframe was sufficient, and the ability to choose our team members on our own was welcome. I really liked doing Engwiki projects, unlike other classes in which we have to do essays and presentations in which it is required to put forward facts without a personal opinion.”

Additionally, doing e-tivities offers the chance to build rapport with the students, and access to students’ work posted in Engwiki is a means of getting to know their interests and ‘scanning’ their proficiency in English. It also allows for a balance to be struck with the students’ expectations during the definition-article writing stage, where the first round of topics was defined by the teacher, and the second proposed by students. “As each person is an individual, everybody has some hobby or interest that they know more about than other people on average. Why not just ask for topics that are within that area and write about them? Attempts to relate to the students’ mindset is likely to be rewarded: I've noticed some more enthusiasm during the last e-tivity when the students had the option of choosing their assignments. That could be used to improve the articles as well!”t is evident that the relevance of topics is one aspect of Engwiki that worked particularly well with students. To make the ‘transfusion of knowledge and mutual expertise’ the ultimate goal of a successful course (Harding, 2007, p. 8), “students need to understand that just by talking to the teacher more, they can input their ideas for topics, their ideas for e-tivities and with just that make the wiki experience a lot more fun for them. The wiki doesn't have to be just a source of points that go towards the sum at the end of the course, they can make the wiki a pastime that will earn them points in the end.”“Engwiki has not only provided students with a chance to deepen their knowledge of the subject matter by merely writing about familiar subjects in English, but also by exploring areas: Some of the many subjects to be found on Engwiki I found particularly interesting, like the one I had to write, ‘Paradoxes in communication’.

Finally, among the features of Engwiki that made it appealing to work with was the sense of contribution, seeing a ‘concrete product’ of their work, visible in the comment accompanying the activity at . In the case of students who accepted the project, the urge to achieve (beyond being awarded the necessary credits) was further intensified by seeing their work published, although with students uncomfortable with their writing skills this produced the opposite effect and made them perceive e-tivities as merely ‘something else they are forced to do’. Also, although fairly simple to use, the overall experience of working with Engwiki also depended on students’ ICT skills; its editability (on several occasions, revealing the vulnerability of the content) was controlled by giving wiki users passwords for editing. Students for whom producing articles in wiki was a means of self-realization have given suggestions to make wiki’s quality content even more available for public scrutiny by adding technical solutions and adding more transparent headings to articles, some of which, for easier administration, are presently quite abstract.