Míriam Sans Borch

I would like to comment on: “Ten trends and innovations in English language teaching for 2018″ by Chia Suan Chong and “What the year 2050 has in store for humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.

For me both articles are fabulous. In the first article Chia Suan Chong revises what she wrote in 2016 and she states two strategies that are basic for me. She writes about Mobile learning and English as a lingua franca.

It’s true that in terms of motivation nothing is more engaging than working with our mobile phones. Chia writes: “Online resources are more accessible with a mobile app” Students from all ages have a mobile, at least in Europe, where my students and I live nowadays. So if we can teach using mobiles our students will be more interested and therefore they are going to learn more and even quicker. I can imagine myself in the classroom telling my students to use Wordable or Essential English or Tri Pro English Website and Mobile Apps because these tools are excellent ones, they have been created with the support of very well-known universities that have centuries of experience in teaching English.

I have download Wordable and it’s got a 4,6 which is a very good rate. I’ve realised that Catalan language is not available yet for the app which makes me a little bit disappointed but of course we can handle it in Spanish. It’s a catchy one because you can invite friends and it’s like a game in which you can win. Spinning the wheel is so fun!

Chia states “this pronunciation course doesn’t help the learner sound British or American, but instead prepares the learner to use English in the global arena.” and I would like to say that I appreciate what Mark Hancock has done with this pronunciation course because sometimes my students ask me if such word is pronounced the same in British and in American English. Nowadays many of my students watch episodes from Netflix and they try to listen to them in English but somehow they see some differences between my accent and the accent from the TV series.

I’m going to comment on the second article I’ve chosen and for doing this I would like to remark the next statement: “Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.” Yuval is right, I find myself wasting a lot of time doing nothing but checking some stupid information that does not help me at all but I can’t get rid of it. And the worst of all is that I know that I’m not being productive but I feel devoured by social networks and internet information.

I totally agree with Yuval when he remarks: “You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.” I’m sure my students have to struggle a lot to study or to do their tasks instead of just holding their mobile phones and being swallowed by them, which is my case too.