Роль и место Предметной лаборатории Лингвистики и Межкультурной Коммуникации в средней школе
XVI NATE – Russia
Annual Conference, Chelyabinsk 2010
Content Area: Teaching
English at Secondary School
The Role and the Place
of Linguistic Laboratory at Secondary School
Dear Colleagues,
I’m honored to
be here with you, university teachers with more personal and professional
experience in the field of teaching the English language, and I feel happy to
share some of my humble experience in things related to my profession of a
teacher of English at a secondary school with extended hours of foreign language
- English - 6 hours a
week in Grades 10 and 11, and our students are expected to take the RNE English
exam at the final stage of their school curriculum.
At the same time
I am happy to introduce to you my friends and co-presenters at this
international forum. They are school teachers of English and Media Educators
who live and work in other parts of the world. They are not sitting in this
auditorium today and they are not standing next to me on stage now, but they
are attending this conference in Chelyabinsk,
Russia, nevertheless.
Nowadays, you can be a thousand miles or kilometers away from your friends but
you can communicate, exchange experience, share your ideas and even agree
teamwork.
Two of my
co-presenters, from Germany
and the USA, who are at the
moment in their home places, suggested taking part in this conference over
Skype, and you will be able to see and listen to them live. Two more colleagues
who won’t be able to attend the conference in person this time, they sent in
their video, from Poland,
and student’s PowerPoint feedback, from Italy.
I’m going to talk about distant collaboration
and the way my friends and colleagues are going to support me here is one more
evidence that distant collaboration
works, provided the involved parties share the same ideas and see the
importance of cross-cultural awareness.
Dear friends,
please meet Bill Reilly, NY State, the USA;
Grazyna Zaremba, Warsaw, Poland; Reinhard Marx, Sundern,
Germany; Anna DeGiosa, Bari, Italy.
There are many more ePals English teachers I was glad to meet this year on-line
and hope we could help each other to foster further understanding.
We all got to
know each other thanks to the ePals Global Community www.epals.com , which unites students and their
teachers in all countries and continents, providing support and technology,
encouraging and inspiring teachers that have made their choice to show their
school students new ways to knowledge and communicative competences essential
for the new generation. These competences are ICT and the English language that
must help them discover new ways to live in one world, see advantages of
international team work to overcome stereotypes, learn to understand each other
better overcoming cross-cultural barriers.
I’m proud to
introduce Bill Reilly and Reinhard Marx, who have been nominated ePals Teacher Ambassadors 2010, and inform you
that these two gentlemen will use Skype technology to introduce
themselves and their approach to teaching English and distant collaboration
that have brought them to be nominated Teacher Ambassadors.
Reinhard Marx:
10 min (Skype) - Co-Presenter
And now I’m very
happy to say a few words introducing Grazyna Zaremba, who studied Computer
Science at WarsawUniversity, was a university lecturer for 6 years,
lived in the USA and now is
a dedicated English teacher in Zespół
Szkół nr 10 im. Stanisława
Staszica,one of vocational schools in Warsaw.
Grazyna Zaremba:
10 min (video) - Co-Presenter
I’m also happy to
introduce to you Anna De Giosa and her students in Bari, Italy,
the language school ITC e Linguistico Marco Polo. Our students
and we, teachers, exchanged emails, pictures, slideshows and videos during the
academic year introducing to each other our schools, home places, and cultural
heritage of the countries. In their final PowerPoint presentation our Italian friends
wish my students happy summer holidays. This year we used mostly English for
our communication. For the next school year we are excited to extend our
collaboration to the Russian language too, since some of Italian students study
Russian as one of foreign languages at their language school.
I have been
involved into ‘international project work’ since March 2005 when I started
exchanging emails with ePals schools in different countries from New Zealand to
Canada, and contributing to a joint project Webba Webzine in English hosted by
a school in Sweden. I was eager to involve students of all ages, from Grade 5
to Grade 11 and I could see how proud my students were to see the results of
their joint efforts.
At the end of my
talk I would like to emphasis once again the things that have proved to be
important, from our personal experience, to come nearer to the common goal
which is to develop the language and cross-cultural awareness of our school
students.
This is
importance of the English language for school students, who want to become
highly qualified specialists in the field of their choice who can use English
professionally.
On the other
hand, a good command of English is not sufficient if a professional isn’t aware
of cultural values of his business partners. For better understanding, it is substantial for us and our students to
see things related to the relevant topic through the eyes of the person we
write or talk to. We can come to this awareness through collaborative
communication, team work, and distant collaboration with peers in other
cultures.
There are things that may prevent us from
understanding each other quite often. Those are misinterpretation, false
judgment because of still existing stereotypes and prejudices. At the same time
there are things that may help usestablish
understanding. These are personal positive experience and collaborative
teamwork.
In the course of joint efforts to meet the challenge
and accomplish one task, our students learn to take the right choice; they learn
to see the things through the eyes of their teammates in other countries.
To sum up, I see
my personal challenge as a school teacher to design all my approach to
education in line with the requirements of the modern world and to help my
students pass the RNE English exam with flying colors.