Dr Shibu Simon

‘ICT Assisted Editing as a Humanising Communicative Task in CLT’ by Professor (Dr) Shibu Simon

Post author:Tarun Patel
Post published:April 27, 2014
Post category:Dr Shibu Simon ELT Articles and Research Papers ELT Newsletter ELT Pronunciaion Tips ELT Research Papers ELTWeekly ELTWeekly Volume 6 ICT in English Language Teaching Volume 6 Issue 12
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[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 11 | April 28, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

This article proposes to analyse the feasibility and the potential of using ICT¹ assisted editing as a humanising² communicative task³ in CLT⁴ classrooms. It discusses an editing software but the focus is on how to use this software to provide learners with authentic and meaningful use of language in a participative leaning environment free from fear and anxiety.

Relevance of ICT

ICT (Information and Communication Technology) presents a powerful learning environment for learners in the classroom. A great deal of success as well as challenge comes from how to prepare students to interact and learn in this digital environment. The revolution that the new media such as multimedia computers and the internet in particular can bring to English teaching, unlike the traditional methods and materials, is that they dramatically enlarge the repertoire of educational tools, their possibilities, and their combinations. They allow teachers and learners to extend their access to educational resources that make everything visible and more comprehensible, to help analyse and organise information, to get in touch with different types of media, texts, styles, and registers. (more…)

‘Approaching a Literary Text Stylistically’ by Dr Shibu Simon

Post author:Tarun Patel
Post published:March 31, 2014
Post category:Dr Shibu Simon ELT Articles and Research Papers ELT Newsletter ELTWeekly ELTWeekly Volume 6 Language Teaching Methods Volume 6 Issue 10
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[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 10 | March 31, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]

The crux of the problem in teaching literature is how to guide the learners to develop an individual response to literature. Such a guidance will have to focus on the values linguistic units acquire in contexts of use and in orienting learners to discover these values on their own. H.G. Widdowson in his epoch-making work Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature underlines this observation:

Since poetic meanings are of their very nature unspecific and ambiguous . . . there is no such thing as a definitive interpretation. What is important, however (particularly from the teaching point of view) is that the individual interpretation should be based on an understanding of how linguistic items take on particular values in discourse1.

This paper can be described as an attempt to evolve a practical methodology for the teaching of literature with this specific objective in mind: how the learners can be led to discover independently the way language items are conditioned in the context to take on meanings other than those they have in the language code and to infer the message the writer is trying to convey as part of it. (more…)