Wow! I am enjoying this course…learning much in short time.
This week I was introduced to the sweet tool Delicious.com. It is just a nice tool that saves my time and my favorite sites too! People just invent tools that are necessary to our 21st century! As the saying goes "Necessity is the mother of invention" people need to have access to their useful links everywhere they go any time… I have to say that Deborah's directions are so useful to create the Delicious account. I like so much the reactions of the participants of this course… we share and express our happiness of the new technological tools in our wiki. I am using the delicious site all the time now.
Well, we have learnt to use other useful tools in this course. The first one includes using technology in teaching. Thanks to the contributions of my coursemates I have various ideas of using technology in my classes… the websites that Deborah offers are really great and we can use all of them in different teaching/learning settings. It is just amazing how we choose the sites according to our students' needs and plan our teaching accordingly. I believe that with practice we can be smarter in choosing the suitable sites.
Another task of this week is about examining Aural/oral skill-building websites. Now we have different sites that can serve us at class! The advanced use of CALL can really change teachers' role at class. The learner becomes more and more involved and becomes in the centre of the learning process. The offered websites can help improve student's aural and oral skills. I believe that speaking demands much more effort to acquire from the ELF learners than listening: since the students have to produce new things and not only perceive things… I believe that high quality web tools can help learners improve their aural and oral skills. Today, I have to think of different ways of how I can use these wonderful web resources at my classes.
Thank you all for your contributions in this week.
Best,
Khuloud.
Hi Khuloud,
ReplyDeleteI think speaking in L2 is easier for some students than others. If you're a perfectionist, it is difficult to speak spontaneously because you know that you'll likely make a mistake. Fluency suffers for the sake of accuracy. On the other hand, some learners are very fluent and don't worry about accuracy, leading to some fossilized mistakes in speech. When I'm choosing material from the web and lesson planning, I try to get a balance between fluency and accuracy in speaking practice.
What is your experience? Have you had the same kind of reaction from students when they speak English?
Janet
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteDear Janet,
ReplyDeleteYou are talking about a very important point now! Yes fluency suffers for the sake of accuracy. It is right too that some for some learners it is easier to speak for others…
My students usually come from a very difficult socioeconomic background. We live in a very conservative society too. I encourage my students to talk but the problem is that they are too shy to talk. My students and especially the girls are not used to express themselves even in Arabic (their mother tongue)! This is why I work so much on the social aspect of learning and especially with the girls. I try to have an encouraging warming environment that support learning with mistakes! I always tell my students if you don't make mistakes you don't need to come to school… you are here to make mistakes and learn from your mistakes! And I believe this works! At my school we have a program called Access(We are part of the Access Microscholarship Program) sponsored by the American Embassy and the social cultural activities that we have in this program help me a lot in achieving my goals with the students. Here is a link to one Access activity where the students sing a long with the folk singer! You will see that each one sings alone :) it is just a "disaster" but it is so so beautiful to see them singing loudly happily… I am very proud of them. Here is the link (the last 3 minutes are just funny!):
http://c3.ort.org.il/Apps/WW/page.aspx?ws=124e7449-904f-46e3-a016-ea1a70990619&fol=cd9e0424-2343-4f11-9b52-c2d1bcb58ee4&page=0bd9b02a-e3c0-4e81-b371-b25e9bde87ae&box=d8fc4797-81c2-45fe-ac55-a6948b5adc25&_pstate=item&_item=318dd08d-65f7-4359-953e-1fbea0167f97
Yours,
Khuloud.