Creative and innovative ways to teach English: You make the difference

The Malaysian education scene is under going seismic change as we move from years of tried and tested rote learning strategies and venture towards advocating creative thinking skills. In keeping with the demands of globalization, there is deliberate effort to depart from an examination oriented system, often deemed the malaise of the Asian society, to one of creative learning. In order to encourage students to concentrate and participate in the class, teachers need to be creative and innovative. A wide variety of materials and methods of teaching should be explored as students come in different packages with different learning styles and capabilities. But perennial problems plague both the novice and the experienced teacher. The innovative teacher can extract information from texts, audio and visual sources of information for teaching purposes. This paper seeks to inform, to motivate and to explore the many possibilities of making out-of-the-box teaching a reality. Based on classroom and journalistic research across Malaysian schools and universities, this paper deals with the challenges that teachers face and provides practical classroom ideas on how to wear Edward De Bono’s thinking hats in the very mundane classroom. This paper will focus on the following issues: 1.How to generate interest among students, 2.How to make use of everyday objects to bring fun into the classroom, 3. Task-based teaching/ Activity centred teaching, 4. Problems that teachers and students face (ESL context), 5. Thematic teaching methods - across the 4 skill

Four approaches to teaching programming

Based on a survey of literature, four different approaches to teaching introductory programming are identified and described. Examples of the practice of each approach are identified representing procedural, visual, and object-oriented programming language paradigms. Each approach is then further analysed, identifying advantages and disadvantages for the student and the teacher. The first approach, code analysis, is analogous to reading before writing, that is, recognising the parts and what they mean. It requires learners to analyse and understand existing code prior to producing their own. An alternative is the building blocks approach, analogous to learning vocabulary, nouns and verbs, before constructing sentences. A third approach is identified as simple units in which learners master solutions to small problems before applying the learned logic to more complex problems. The final approach, full systems, is analogous to learning a foreign language by immersion whereby learners design a solution to a non-trivial problem and the programming concepts and language constructs are introduced only when the solution to the problem requires their application. The conclusion asserts that competency in programming cannot be achieved without mastering each of the approaches, at least to some extent. Use of the approaches in combination could provide novice programmers with the opportunities to acquire a full range of knowledge, understanding, and skills. Several orders for presenting the approaches in the classroom are proposed and analysed reflecting the needs of the learners and teachers. Further research is needed to better understand these and other approaches to teaching programming, not in terms of learner outcomes, but in terms of teachers’ actions and techniques employed to facilitate the construction of new knowledge by the learners. Effective classroom teaching practices could be informed by further investigations into the effect on progression of different toolset choices and combinations of teaching approache

Academic practice as explanatory framework: reconceptualising international student academic engagement and university teaching

This paper joins growing interest in the concept of practice, and uses it to reconceptualise international student engagement with the demands of study at an Australian university. Practice foregrounds institutional structures and student agency and brings together psychologically- and socially-oriented perspectives on international student learning approaches. Utilising discourse theory, practice is defined as habitual and individual instances of socially-contextualised configurations of elements such as actions and interactions, roles and relations, identities, objects, values, and language. In the university context, academic practice highlights the institutionally-sanctioned ways of knowing, doing and being that constitute academic tasks. The concept is applied here to six international students’ ‘readings’ of and strategic responses to academic work in a Master of Education course. It is argued that academic practice provides a comprehensive framework for explaining the interface between university academic requirements and international student learning, and the crucial role that teaching has in facilitating the experience