Most of my classmates called this week’s task a delicious
one. It was not a surprise to me since we have used a bookmarking tool called
Delicious. I’m one of those people whose list of favourites goes down to the
floor and it gets longer every day, so Delicious will be a perfect tool for
cleaning up the mess on my computer. Except allowing us to keep our links
online, Delicious allows us to create stacks of links, tag them, share them or keep them private, to
follow other users and add their links to our stacks, which will certainly be
one of most useful options to me.
We were also given three articles on teaching aural/oral
skills. The one I particularly found interesting was Developing Listening Skills with Authentic
Materials by Lindsay Miller. Ms Miller has mentioned different listening
activities and different approaches to developing listening skill. She has also
mentioned the fact that listening has been a relatively neglected skill and
pointed out the importance of movies in English. Lindsay also mentioned in the
article that “The authentic lecture discourse contained many false starts,
redundancies and repetitions. None of these show up in English language
teaching (ELT) textbooks.” The article was first published in 2003, so I have
to agree with the author regarding the books published several years or decades
ago. However, nowadays, coursebooks tend to have more redundancies, slang and
repetitions in order to prepare the learners for the real life situations.
Lindsay has also suggested that getting used to subtitles
could be one of the reasons for neglecting the listening skill. However,
subtitles were a key point in my English language acquisition, since I have
learned English for several years by listening to the music and watching
movies. My formal language learning started much later, but my listening and speaking
skills were quite well developed for my age. That is why I often suggest
watching films and listening to music to my students and I cannot help but
wonder how difficult it has to be to learn English in countries where movies
are dubbed.
During this week, we have been also asked to examine one of
the previous projects and give our opinion about it. The projects were all
interesting and they gave me enough clues about what I am expected to do and
how the project plan should be presented at the end of the course.
Of course, Nicenet discussions were a great help this week,
too and I have learned more thanks to other participants ‘comments than I would
if I were to study by myself.
And here is one powerful audio tool that could be used for developing the listening skill: SoundCloud. It lets
users upload and share their audio files, not only songs, but more importantly
brings a social element by adding commenting and likes to the audio stream. Press play, please and enjoy one of my favourite songs.