martes, 23 de noviembre de 2010
domingo, 14 de noviembre de 2010
Multimedia and ESL Education
Everything in the world changes every day. Some of these changes are big and some others are not, but what is important is that those changes affect people in a certain way. We can see how things that were pretty useful have been replaced by new technological devices and all those actions that seemed to be impossible are now easy to do thanks to internet and some other tools. It is not possible to think that those changes cannot affect or transform teaching, specially language teaching. All these technological advances have improved the teaching of English as a second language.
Before starting to describe the influence of multimedia in ESL education, there is a term that need to be defined:
Multimedia is a term used to express that different forms of media 
work together as a single one. In the list of these multiple kinds of media, there are some that are really important to highlight: text, audio, animation, video and graphs. Text could be considered as one of the most important elements in multimedia because although there are some things that can be described using images even audio, text is always able to introduce the information in a concise way. So, It is not necessary to replace text by images or video; the use of text is excellent.
work together as a single one. In the list of these multiple kinds of media, there are some that are really important to highlight: text, audio, animation, video and graphs. Text could be considered as one of the most important elements in multimedia because although there are some things that can be described using images even audio, text is always able to introduce the information in a concise way. So, It is not necessary to replace text by images or video; the use of text is excellent.For years, ESL teaching have included the use of media to succeed. Text and audio were used in isolation and later on there were integrated getting excellent results. Nowadays, Multimedia have taken the best of each media creating a more complete tool that may be used in different ways, most of them help people; this , of course, can be used in benefit of English and students of English as a second Language. So, the process of learning is not limited because students are able to make the process of language adquisition as natural as they want it to be because, as it was mentioned before, multimedia includes text, images, video and some other relevant elements working at the same time to get the same. This is also an excellent point for teachers because they can take advange of this situation to create a context to promote the learning. On the other hand, teachers are not that necessary in this process of learning because the learners of English as a second language are exposed to the language and Multimedia is just another strategy to make them the best; in this case, a teacher should be there acting as a monitor not as a director of the process.
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