Thursday, January 25th 2018.

WEEK 2

RANK: 5

Based on the article "Effectiveness of the Integration of ICT Tools and Activities to Foster Awareness as the First Stage to Reach Learning Autonomy" by Andrea Ariza y Mario Suarez. 

SELF - LEARNING 

The first step to be successful in the languages’ learning process is to become “autonomous” but why? Autonomous means that students are responsible of their own learning. Some people have the necessity of learning a different language, but they see it as an obligation. This might be a problem when learning because students are no committed to learn. 

The article show that is really important to have metacognition strategies when learning a second language because these strategies can improve the language knowledge students have. Metacognition strategies refer to methods used to help students to understand the way they learn. It is important that teachers show students how these strategies work because in this way students can learn how to improve their languages’ skills by themselves. As students become aware of how they learn they start becoming autonomous. 

 

Something that really called my attention from this article is the project which was developed. The objective of the project was to verify if ICT tools were really effective and if students can learn by themselves without someone pushing them to do it. The students’ answers were really positive.  As an opinion, I believe that there are some things to do first if a teacher wants to employ this method with his/her students. First, get to know the students. I think some students will not be comfortable with the fact that they are learning by themselves. Why?  Because they are not used to take some time at home, sit down and focus on learning. Second, start this method step by step. For example, start doing it at class. Teacher can start the class by let students discover what the topic is about. They will get used to the fact that no one is giving them all the information about the language. I will say that with this method the teacher becomes a facilitator as in the Computer Assisted Learning technique.

After letting students get used to the new method, I think they will become completely autonomous; they will study without someone pushing them to do it. As a future educator is a method that I will use because it improves the language’ learning process.