Abstract
Living in an increasingly globalized world, human beings have to solve more and more problems and face many new challenges together. It has thus become essential for English teachers in the 21st century to develop new and effective ways to integrate burning global issues and events in ELT. This paper reports on the approaches and outcomes of a technology-enhanced news circle project designed to incorporate global education into my University English course for Taiwanese university students not majoring in English. Twenty-five Taiwanese participants of this project were divided into six mixed-ability news discussion groups, or circles, based on the results of a TOEIC-style reading test. Thirty news articles about various current global issues or events collected from free news websites were posted on the news circle blog created for this project, and each group, or circle, had to conduct four online role-based discussions on four different pieces of news posted on the blog. Questionnaire surveys, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, and group discussion records were employed to investigate the outcomes of this project, and the major findings show that this project was beneficial to raise these students’ global awareness, increase their interest in looking for solutions to world problems, improve their critical thinking skills, motivate them to read and discuss in English on the Internet. The design and implementation of this project and the findings of this empirical research will provide valuable insights for those interested in integrating global education and ELT in EFL countries.
Author Information
Wan-Lun Lee, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan
Paper Information
Conference: ACTC2015
Stream: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
This paper is part of the ACTC2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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