Week 3: New Materials, New Ideas

It’s Friday, and I’m finally home. I got back to my classroom this week, and I couldn’t wait to try out some of the ideas I got after doing a part of my assignments for the Week 3.

The focus was on aural/oral skill building. I read two articles posted on the class wiki page from which I learned in what ways computer-based environment can enable learners to be exposed to a real audience. One article was about CALL for listening skills by Lindsey Miller, while the other was about CALL for speaking skills by Julia Gong.

As before, there was a list of websites to check out and possibly use in an EFL classroom. I discovered a couple of quite useful ones. 

First I'd like to mention is  ListeningRealEnglish which provides lessons with real-life videos about certain topics. I decided to use Lesson 47for learning USED TO + verb form with my intermediate class this week. I thought it might be a refreshing lesson, since the students would be able to hear and see a variety of English speakers using the same form in a street survey. 

I used it with a group of 20 intermediate students and they responded really well. It was very easy for them to catch the form, and I also adjusted the lesson plan a bit so that it could suit more this particular group. Unlike in the lesson plan on the page, one of the objectives was for the group (Audience) to write down (Condition) 2-3 original sentences that the people in the video say using the form USED TO (Degree). They thought the video was funny and some of them could have relate to the things said. The sentences were not very long and it was fairly easy to note them down.

Apart from this website I'll most probably use some of the materials from Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab, but also from NPR, which  is a great place for finding a number of different topics discussed in real radio shows recorded for the general audience, and not those specifically created for EFL learners.

I liked two radio shows:

1)      a photo story about a father and son from Northern Ireland http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/06/14/191059207/like-father-like-son-creating-art-in-a-time-of-troubles; and

2)      an interview with two female award-winning photo journalists http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/10/16/234929633/behind-the-lens-with-prize-winning-women-of-vision.

I'm planning to use both in my upper-intermediate class to enhance their listening skills. 

Week 3 Assignments also included introduction to another rather useful website - Delicious.com. It is such a fabulous bookmarks manager that provides a clear and simple way of  storing favorite links in one place. The links that you store can be public or private, and there are options for creating tags and a short description for each link. Moreover, there is a possibility of networking with other users, which I find quite useful as well.

  A NEW CHALLENGE 

Being in a webskills class has made me think more and more about how I could apply computers for language learning in my classroom. A month ago, out of sheer curiosity, while browsing through education apps offered in the App Store, I downloaded an application called Edmodo. I had completely forgotten about it, but today, it just somehow came to my mind.  Edmodo is a social learning platform for teachers, students, and parents. It looks quite similar to Facebook (which most of my students cannot live without), and I decided to try to use it with my upper-intermediate students. The initial idea is to use it for collaborating and submitting discursive essays. The students will have to write such an essay for their mid-term exams, so using Edmodo can turn out to be quite useful. Nobody has done anything similar in my school and I fear I might get some criticism from my colleagues and/or parents. I’ll introduce Edmodo to my students next week. I already created an account for myself, signed up my school in the register and created three groups for students. 

The challenge is on!