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.
It's me again!
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you on what you said about learning a foreign language by listening to foreign music and watching foreign films... It's a really easy, relaxed and almost effortless way of learning a language, not to mention the accent one can get by paying a little more attention to what they are hearing...And, also, I will also agree with you that today's coursebooks are closer to authentic speech. The listening part contains different accents, hesitations, pauses and sometimes even background noise. So, I guess this means that a lot of attention is being paid nowadays to pronunciation teaching.
Last but not least, soundcloud is a tool I had heard of but now is the time to look at it more "seriously"
Thank you
Thanks for your comments Georgia and since our students, or at least the classes we have described, are about the same age, I would like to know more about the coursebooks you use. So, expect an e-mail from me or feel free to send me one.
ReplyDeleteMarija
Maria,
ReplyDeletecool description you did! however I would like to know how you apply the things of the course in your students, if some of the activities are good enough to try them in your class, I know for the things I've reading on your post that you're very experienced in this CALL technologies,and I've been beneficiated from your links (thanks by the way, telling your students to watch movies in english is great and I think is a general idea, the students don't like to listen (Jodi also mentioned something like that in Ninecet) So is our labor to make them more participative in that way, as usual a plaesure to read your post, see you around!!
Hi Marija,
ReplyDeleteThese three weeks have been full of new things that will help us improve our teaching with technology.I agree with Poncho when he says that all your post in nicenet are very valuable. I have tried some of the links you have suggesteduse. This week has been interesting with all the new readings and things we have tried.
Thanks for the audio tool.
See you.
Yes, it a delicious tool for people like us, I used to send an email to my own gmail to keep many webpages, nno problem solved
ReplyDeleteHi Poncho, Marlene and Stefani,
ReplyDeleteSorry for being late with my response, I was very busy.
Poncho, my students used most of the activities from the course at home (mostly those suggested for developing listening skill), because we didn’t have internet in the classroom. When I teach I usually use interactive Power Point presentations, pictures, downloaded videos and songs. BUT, as I announced at the very beginning of the course, I was expecting to get internet access in the computer lab and we actually got it!! That opened a whole new field of technology implementation and I don’t know where to start. I will certainly explore many new tools and let you know about the most useful ones.
Marlene, I’m glad you found the links useful! I’m looking forward to trying out many links that you and others have suggested.
And Stefani, you made me laugh because I used to do the same thing with links! :)
Thanks for dropping by and I’m looking forward to reading your blogs
Marija
Hi Marjia
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the idea of developing Listening skills through authentic material, this really makes students more attentive to their surroundings and to the happenings there. Even I have tried doing this through assembly talk and instruction count at times. Also the thoughts about Ms Miller’s article that you have shared are the almost the same that I possess.
Your statement that using foreign films for learning a language is quite true, I have also seen that this helps a lot in catching the language informally which can then be supplemented with formal rules later. I have also tried a couple of lessons on grammar fill-ups and comprehensions using songs and movie clippings.
Cherry
Hi Marjia
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the idea of developing Listening skills through authentic material, this really makes students more attentive to their surroundings and to the happenings there. Even I have tried doing this through assembly talk and instruction count at times. Also the thoughts about Ms Miller’s article that you have shared are the almost the same that I possess.
Your statement that using foreign films for learning a language is quite true, I have also seen that this helps a lot in catching the language informally which can then be supplemented with formal rules later. I have also tried a couple of lessons on grammar fill-ups and comprehensions using songs and movie clippings.
Cherry
Thank you for posting your comment Cherry. I agree with everything you said and I hope you will add useful links related to this topic to your Delicious page, so I could check them out.
ReplyDeleteMarija