Electronic Surveys Inquiring With Authentic Language By: Hanan Al-Tamimy

Electronic Surveys in the Foreign Language Classroom  The use of electronic surveys in the foreign language learning process provides a real-world opportunity for students to use their new language skills.  Surveys are created to help gain information about a group of people.  It offers teachers an opportunity to inquire into students ’ opinions about content as well as the learning process.  Teacher can use surveys to inquire into the likes and dislikes, preferences, frequency of activities, and opinions of the students.

Activity 7: Feedback on the class  One of the best ways to reflect on and improve your teaching is to get feedback from students on your lessons and the way they are being asked to learn. This activity gives teachers an opportunity to find out about students ’ feelings about the class.  Based on your beliefs and current practices, construct a survey asking for students ’ reaction to the activities and curriculum of the class. Make sure that you ask for positive contribution, such as questions beginning with “ what are the things you most like about … ? ”

Activity 7: Feedback on the class  Post the survey and allow students to respond anonymously.  You can either report the result of the survey to students or use what you learn to make changes in your teaching practices.  If students ’ responses show a lack of understanding of useful teaching and learning strategies, it may be worthwhile to spend some class time discussing the rationale for such strategies.

How to Use Online Surveys In this activity, we are going to use the online survey site SurveyMonkey.  Open the site from this link:  Click Sign up Free at the side of the site or at the bottom to create a new account.

How to Use Online Surveys  Creating an account: Choose a username, a password and fill in your e- mail address.

How to Use Online Surveys  Start a new survey: After you create an account, create a new survey by clicking on Create Survey at the top of the page. Then choose Create a new survey from scratch.

How to Use Online Surveys  Choose your design whether an academic research, marketing.. etc. We will choose Academic > Student Survey. Then write the the title of the survey. You can choose whether to hide the title from the students taking the survey or not.

How to Use Online Surveys  You can change the theme of the survey (choosing different colors for the survey)

How to Use Online Surveys  Creating survey questions: Click Add Question Here and choose the type of question you want to ask such as multiple choice, rating scale.. Etc. We are going to choose Multiple Choice (Only One Answer).

How to Use Online Surveys  You can choose exactly how the choices of the question appear and it ’ s arrangement.  Write the choices the student have to choose from. Each choice should be in a separate line.  When you finish, click Save Changes.

How to Use Online Surveys  To start using it, click on collect responses.

How to Use Online Surveys  You can create a link to send the survey to students by .

How to Use Online Surveys  After you create the link, you can copy it and send it to the students by or put it in your website.

How to Use Online Surveys  You can also change the options of the survey like allowing multiple responses, allow responses to be edited, display a "Thank You" page, or save the IP address in result as show here:

How to Use Online Surveys  Viewing Survey ’ s results: To view the results, click on Analyze Results.

Advantages  This type of surveys help teachers to: - Collect sensitive information that cannot be gained without keeping the participants anonymous. - Help improve the class in many ways: teaching technique, studying materials, teaching aids, students ’ needs, … etc. - Allows teacher to gain a lot of precise information within a short time.

Done By: Hanan Al-Tamimy