Week 3

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.