Transcript

MAGGIE CHARLES

When I first started using this software, I did find that … one student memorably said to me ‘Why are we doing this? It’s just a technique,’ and I explained why, obviously, and that I thought, well, yes, it was a technique, but it was a very well-worthwhile technique for students to learn, to help in their language learning.

I can remember just one specific student who voiced this objection. She said she thought it was a useful technique, but that wasn’t what she wanted to be doing in a language class. And when I asked her what she did want to be doing in a language class, then the answer was she wanted to be doing a lot more discussion.

So she didn’t want to be sitting and working on her own computer. She said ‘I can do that at home.’ And she wanted to be talking. And that’s also quite interesting, because I remember in the early classes I found it very, very difficult to actually stop the students from just working on their own computers and to get them to discuss what they had found.