Hello Janine and other participants,
Week 03 has moved so rapidly that I struggled to
match with other speed.
The tasks and topics for this week were absolutely
new to me and hence became challenging too.
But the new challenge taught me new things.
The focus on “Listening” among all the four skills
was a new and interesting aspect for me to learn.
Till this day I never realized the significance of
this skill. I always put stress on speaking skill.
But the article by Lindsay Miller was an eye-opener
for me.
The use of real and authentic text like radio,
CD-ROM, Internet clippings for developing skill was never thought about.
Now I have decided to carry the first two, i.e.
radio and CD-ROM (along with a battery driven CD-Player) in my class in the
absence of Electricity on regular basis.
Moreover, I also came to know about Delicious.com
which was again new thing for me.
Though I learnt too little till date about it, I
hope that with regular efforts I will get on with it.
Overall it was a great learning week for me.
Hoping to learn more
Bye
Shirish More
Hello Shirish,
ReplyDeleteI am glad to hear that someone feels like I do after reading Miller´s and Gong´s articles on how to use, find, implement and organize authentic English material. It is interesting to read that you are for the use of “hardware” like a battery-powered radio and CD-ROMs and I understand by reading the context of your teaching. I thought a radio was out of stage when I read the article but at the same time I thought about its pros and cons. One advantage is that you can take it to any corner of the world and still be able to get a signal, like I would do if I were to teach deep in a mountain village in the Venezuelan Andes. One of the disadvantages I see, for instance, is that although it allows you to get authentic English speech, how would you repeat or make repetitions of the broadcast? What sort of radio programs are out there in the interest realm of our students? I was a big fan of short-wave radio, my real passion; I was a SWL Card collector and post stamp collector too! And I saw it fading away when “Miss Internet” came upon stage. I recommend you this web site: http://swling.com/ - Your beginner's guide to shortwave radio listening and shortwave radio reviews, as they announce it. You may find radio programs in advance to plan and share with your students. Yes, CD-ROMs have their space too, and you can actually make your own. Try to download MP3 versions from, for example, http://a4esl.org/podcasts/b , and then you take them up to your students under a lesson plan. As I see, you are not very much into web tools for the reasons you have mentioned. Delicious can also be a great source of material, did you know you can also search into what other users have found? Type anything in Delicious search pane and you will be amazed. Please, follow me on Delicious and I will do the same. Thank you for helping me reflect on how to use my old-loving passion for radio.
Dear Shirish
ReplyDeleteI beleive that you are right listening is as much important as speaking skills. I know that some teachers in my school and other school, they ignore this listening skills. I think students need to listen fisrt then they can speak fluency and accuracy. Stephen Krashen (1987) wrote a reseach paper about the language acquisition, and as he claimed that any language learner need to listen first and then he can produce that language. He claimed that if we understand the message of the language then we can speak that language and he called this comprehensible input.
Thanks
Naif
Shirish.
ReplyDeleteI was also impresioned by the new tool, delicious. I have not idea that this kind of tools exist. By the way on this course I have been learning many aspects about the use of internet, I though that I had an idea about internet, but now I realize that I´m still a learning on the use of internet. At my institution we are so close to finish the semester, and as we are applying a project I think that I need more time to use and get experience with all this new knowldege, so I think that I have to practice little more, to explore them little more and by the next semester those new tools are becoming part of my teaching.
Andrea.