English v.s. Technology

In Brandl’s article “From Teacher-to-student-centered Approach” he discusses the relationship between teacher and student on the teaching of online English learning. He also mentioned about the relationship between teaching methods and the online English learning. Brandl divides students into three groups which are teacher determined lessons, teacher facilitated lessons and learner determined lessons. The division of the three groups is depended on the degree of reliability on teachers.

For the group that teacher determined lessons are students who have lower English ability so that they need teacher to help them a lot. Therefore, this group relies on teacher more than other two groups. And here the roles of teacher are important because whether students became better all depends how teachers lead them. The second group which teacher facilitated lessons are better than the previous group mentioned in the reliability on teacher. Teacher became an assistant rather than a helper to this group because although they still need teacher’s help, they still able to do something by themselves. And as concerned as the group that learner determined lessons, they have ability to handle thing on Internet and teacher doesn’t have to take care of them at all. They could do anything without teacher.

Though English ability is a crucial point to online English learning, Brandl reminds us that the technological ability is also important to students when they learning English on Internet. We could not only think about English ability of students but also should take their ability of using computer into consideration.

I agree with Brandl because I think it is important to teach students in accordance with their aptitude. The degrees of reliability on teacher of students in different levels are not the same at all. Therefore, if teacher could pay more concerns to those who are not good at English, one day they could be as good as those who doesn’t need teacher’s help.