Another abundant week!. I learned about many websites and software that can be used in aurol/oral skill building. Among them, some offer good solutions to my own teaching context.
The first one that I learned about and planning to recommend to my students is software called SLIM (Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software). It applies to my teaching context because currently we do not have much time for in-class instruction. And the students need some more help out of classroom. Such self-study software can provide this help. The software is said to be designed for beginner/false beginner students (Delmonte, 2002: I have added the link to his article that clearly describes the software and presents the benefits of using it). It also applies to my conditions because mine are university-level students and they find “repetitions” funny and childish. In most cases, they do not repeat even after I correct the pronunciation. I think this happens because the presence of others may arouse a kind anxiety in the students. Therefore, studying on their own on their pronunciation will “offer a private environment for working on pronunciation without fear of the number of repetitions needed for full comprehension or accuracy of production” (Gong, 2002). I do not know whether it is “outdated” another version of the software has been developed or not, but I am going to search about it…
For the sources to be used in-class, I have discovered the http://www.esl-galaxy.com. I have examined the website and found many useful sources especially for listening. The page with powerpoint presentations has attracted my attention in particular because I use them frequently just to save time. So it seems that I will often visit this site when the second term begins. http://www.esl-lab.com/ seems to be beneficial to enrich my teaching practice.
And finally this week I have come across with “delicious.com” which I have not used before. I really liked it because I have been using two computers one at home and one in my office. Up to now, I have been using the computers’ own bookmarking tools. Sometimes I find a good link and bookmark it but then I forgot where I put it. It has been confusing for me. So this delicious will ease my work too much. It was also a user friendly website and I did not experience any problems in setting up my own page although it is my first time to use.
Sunday, 23 January 2011
Sunday, 16 January 2011
WEEK 2: Search Engines/ABCD Objectives
First of all, I would like to say that this week was beyond of my initial expectations. At the beginning of the second week, when I read the title “search engines” I thought that this week there would not be so many things to cover. Soon I understood that it was just because of my “ignorance” about the search engines. I have just known “google”. What I have read this week (both the required readings and the participants’ posts on Nicenet) have contributed to my understanding a lot. I realized that I am not good even at google though it is the unique engine I have been using. I learned many useful tips for searching through google. I learned about using + sign to combine the words I search for; using – sign to exclude the words that you do not want to appear in the results. I also learned about tilde for the synonyms. Now I want to add one more thing. When you want to search for specific file types, you can use “filetype:pdf” just after the query. To illustrate, you can write your query like "vocabulary practice for clothing fletype:ppt" This one may have been told in the posts or you may already have known it. I just want to share it just in case. The most important outcome for me about the search engines is the doaj.org and openj-gate.com. I admired both of them and I think that I will frequently make use of them from now on. Through the posts sent by the course participants I got aware of the search engines to be used for powerpoint files (mentioned by Mbarek ) for educational purposes (mentioned by Ali).
With regard to ABCD objectives, I realized the significance of setting objectives beforehand once more. I certainly appreciate that we should have a clear mind about what our students are, what we expect them to do after every lesson. Writing objectives down will definitely contribute to have a clear mind. But the thing is that I have too many different classes here filled with students at various levels. And it is not so easy for me to write down the objectives before every class. It seems that I will use what I have learned from this topic for certain classes but not all of them.
And finally, I want to comment on the final project step 1. I chose one of my classes to work with for the final project. I really want to introduce a change to the students in that class in order to make the instruction more effective. Now, I am not certain about what to do. I am just interested in Course Management Systems which I think can bring about a change in the way I desire. I would be happy to hear your suggestions about what to do with such a class.
With regard to ABCD objectives, I realized the significance of setting objectives beforehand once more. I certainly appreciate that we should have a clear mind about what our students are, what we expect them to do after every lesson. Writing objectives down will definitely contribute to have a clear mind. But the thing is that I have too many different classes here filled with students at various levels. And it is not so easy for me to write down the objectives before every class. It seems that I will use what I have learned from this topic for certain classes but not all of them.
And finally, I want to comment on the final project step 1. I chose one of my classes to work with for the final project. I really want to introduce a change to the students in that class in order to make the instruction more effective. Now, I am not certain about what to do. I am just interested in Course Management Systems which I think can bring about a change in the way I desire. I would be happy to hear your suggestions about what to do with such a class.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
WEEK 1: Using Blogs in Language Teaching
I am not so new to using blogs with students as I used it for different purposes before. While I was working at a prep program, I used blog software as a tool to support in-class writing instruction. I am deliberately using "blog software" because what we did was not blogging in its real sense but just making use of the software to share students' writing assignments. I was teaching writing skill in accordance with the principles of process approach: As you know, process approach emphasizes recursive nature of writing skill, the need to guide the students through the stages such as planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing (Hyland, 2003). It also underlines the concepts of audience, purpose and interaction with peers and the instructor. However, it was not so easy to provide an effective writing instruction since the course hour (face-to-face meeting) was very limited. So, using blogging provided us with a wonderful solution to the time-limit problem.
I used the class blog and learner blogs as described in Campbell, 2003. First of all, I created a class blog which was used to inform students about the things to do (assignment, giving feedback to peers, activities to be done etc...). Then I required the students to create their own blogs (learner blogs) to share their writings with the class. During the in-class instruction, I was teaching the topic of the week, showing them some model paragraphs/essays, doing some structure related exercises with them, and all the other stages of writing process were being carried out on the students' blog pages. They wrote the first draft of their assignments on their pages. Then I waited for the students to comment on each other's works. After they got feedback from their friends, I myself read and gave feedback to their writings. For the surface level feedback/correction, I used some colour codes each indicating different types of mistake; for the content-level feedback I used the comment option of blogging as well. Depending on the peer and teacher feedback, the students wrote their subsequent drafts. We did the same things for each topic covered throughout the term.
The short version of the story is that using blog, first of all, increased the time we spend with students; it increased the teacher-student interaction. And most of my students reported that using blogs also contributed to the social atmosphere of their classroom. An interesting thing we experienced during this study was that the students got "real audience" to their writings in addition to their classmates. I strongly believe that this added to their motivation. Even, several of my students said that they felt themselves as if they were column writers in a newspaper, which I found very amazing. To me it was a very pleasant and beneficial experience...
Campbell, A. P. (2003). Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes. The Internet TESL Journal. 9 (2).
Hyland, K. (2003). Second Language Writing. UK: Cambridge University Press
I used the class blog and learner blogs as described in Campbell, 2003. First of all, I created a class blog which was used to inform students about the things to do (assignment, giving feedback to peers, activities to be done etc...). Then I required the students to create their own blogs (learner blogs) to share their writings with the class. During the in-class instruction, I was teaching the topic of the week, showing them some model paragraphs/essays, doing some structure related exercises with them, and all the other stages of writing process were being carried out on the students' blog pages. They wrote the first draft of their assignments on their pages. Then I waited for the students to comment on each other's works. After they got feedback from their friends, I myself read and gave feedback to their writings. For the surface level feedback/correction, I used some colour codes each indicating different types of mistake; for the content-level feedback I used the comment option of blogging as well. Depending on the peer and teacher feedback, the students wrote their subsequent drafts. We did the same things for each topic covered throughout the term.
The short version of the story is that using blog, first of all, increased the time we spend with students; it increased the teacher-student interaction. And most of my students reported that using blogs also contributed to the social atmosphere of their classroom. An interesting thing we experienced during this study was that the students got "real audience" to their writings in addition to their classmates. I strongly believe that this added to their motivation. Even, several of my students said that they felt themselves as if they were column writers in a newspaper, which I found very amazing. To me it was a very pleasant and beneficial experience...
Campbell, A. P. (2003). Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes. The Internet TESL Journal. 9 (2).
Hyland, K. (2003). Second Language Writing. UK: Cambridge University Press
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