Week 6: 'CARE’ING towards enhancing Reading Skills Among ESL Learners At IIUM

WEEK 6: 

ARTICLE: ‘CARE’ING TOWARDS ENHANCING READING SKILLS AMONG ESL LEARNERS AT IIUM

After reading an article entitled, “ ‘Care’ing Towards Enhancing Reading Skills among ESL Learners at IIUM”, I found that this article is very interesting as it studied students’ reaction to web-based reading courseware named CARE Program to enhance reading among IIUM (International Islamic University Malaysia) ESL learners. This paper also aimed to explore the behavioral patterns of the learning strategies employed by the learners in reading via the internet.

 Basically, CARE program was designed as a supplementary to conventional reading class. It included tutorials on reading and interactive exercises for students to practice in order to improve their reading skills. Students have to master the reading techniques and strategies to enable them to become good readers with high skills. A series of practices are needed to allow learners to master the reading techniques and strategies.

 In my personal view, I believe that CARE program is a good program as it applied the computer technology in reading. Using computer technology in learning brings so many benefits for teachers and students. In this aspect, teachers will act as a facilitator to guide the students throughout the learning process and students are free to explore the knowledge by themselves.

 Furthermore, learning through computer technology is actually time consuming as students can easily access any information needed in split seconds. As people say, the world is only at your fingertips. For example, if a student wants to find the meaning of a word, instead of searching for the word page by page in the dictionary, he can just type the word on a computer and in less than a minute, the computer will give him the answer.

 Aside from that, students will become more motivated if they use the computer in language learning or reading. Computer can provide them with interesting moving pictures and various colors. This will make the information easy to comprehend since they can relate the text to the pictures they see. Besides, the teacher can program the exercises to be more interactive and engaging for students.

 The Malaysian government had a series of planning to inculcate computer technology into language learning. However, up until today, the facilities are not sufficient to cover all governmental educational institutions across this country.

 

 

 

BY: NUR ADLINA