Hello there!
I am already writing the second week's reflection and I hope that you enjoyed the first week. As I mentioned before I'll be around for a while with this training program...
Before the second session, we were assigned to hand in some work. One of them was to check a website called "IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive". In this website you can discover many different English accents from all around the world. The speakers are totally varied, some of them are 18, some of them are 56; some of them are students, while some of them are musicians or even teachers. All you have to do is to choose a place to visit on the world map and click on the speaker that you want to listen to. I visited Frankfurt, Paris, Napoli, Stockholm and Moscow. I heard 5 different accents from five different nationality and the only common thing was using the English language. We were asked to write a report about our experiences of the website and how we would use this website as a tool. I must admit that I had a lot fun and enjoyed the website to the fullest. The second thing was to reflect upon the given questions about a chapter from Galloway & Rose (2015). The questions were basically about the Global English Language Teaching Approach.
The second session was a bit intense, maybe not a bit... a lot. We started with an activity. Our trainer introduced us the site called "linoit". With this site, you can conduct a collaborative, live sessions. It can be used in many ways. We were shown a photo of a swan in which the lyrics of a song was written in a mixed way in different sizes. With the help of the digitalised sticky notes we were trying to type our thoughts about what that song could be about. We were grouped of 3 and sent to the break-out rooms, and asked to pick up at least 15 words and write a story about those words. It was not that easy since we were not given that much time and time management was playing a huge role with the creativity. I was both generating ideas and writing down the messy sentences to be corrected later on. The end product was such a thing:
The man who is from the motherland facing the warm side of the planet -which is facing actually the earth- wants to discover himself in the cold side of the planet. Lately he had been thinking of what would life be in the white madness of the cold side. He slowly started to feel himself burnt from the cold and his feelings were almost frozen so he was suffocating and could not breath. He was even daydreaming his motherland and realised it was a mistake to come here to find himself, he actually was lost in between two sides. Tonight he decides to change his side but he realises that he is stuck in this side.
Just like our group, every group wrote down their own stories to the sticky notes and we all read our stories aloud. The third activity was still related to this activity and it was revealed by the trainer that the lyrics were from the song called "The A Team" by Ed Sheeran. We were again sent to break-out rooms to design an imaginary videoclip to this song. Our groups' idea was to present a couple at the beginning of the videoclip then depicting their lives without their relationship, what would happen in their lives if they were not together in a relationship. From then on the screen was supposed to split into two halves and simultaneously show the boy's and the girl's life through the song and at the end the audience were supposed to be brought back into reality, to the relationship and ends with our characters' sentence: "We may need to talk about something". After the presentation of each group we watched the original videoclip and tried to interpret.
The next activity was to play a game based upon finding a murderer. We of course were grouped again of 3 and sent to break-out rooms. All of us were given some cards about the suspects and also a map of where the case happened. It was too complicated since doing such an activity online was not that easy, I believe that we could find the murderer if we were doing this activity face to face but anyways things got messed up and my group couldn't find the murderer. There was only one group to find the murderer anyway.
The last part of the second session was fully about Global English Language Teaching Approach. We were grouped of 4 -I now realise that we really had a lot of group works during the second session-, and sent to the break-out rooms to discuss our reflections about the topic. When we came back to the main session, we continued on investing upon some points in depth. All in all we met on the same page that teachers of English should not be discriminated (Native vs Non-native), that all kinds of accents matter and nobody needs to feel insecure about their accent, that teachers need to raise students' awareness about World Englishes, that the real skills which an English teacher need are actually pedagogic, creativity, critical thinking, equal assessment, digital literacy and collaboration skills rather than a native-like accent.
At the end of an approximately 4 hours session, I was satisfied with all the work we did though I was feeling pretty much tired. I hope that I will be beneficial with this post to you! Next week there will be no post due to a busy schedule yet the week after next week I'll be here with our third session's reflection. Till then!
- Please have a look at dialectsarchive.com
- Also check linoit
Bilge Güral xx
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