Readings Feb. 25

Readings for Feb. 25:

RICHARDSON Ch. 8. Podcasting, Video and Screencasting, Live Streaming: Multimedia Publishing for the Masses

McQuillan, J. (2006). iPods in Education: The Potential for Language Acquisition

Stansbury, M. (2009). iPods help ESL Students Achieve Success. eSchool News (May 11).

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I have used a mp3 player for the last couple of years, and one of the reasons I got it was to be able to listen to Chinese lessons (podcasts) that I downloaded. I think it was good listening practice, and often a good way to make use of time spent on the subway. I thought it was most effective for me if I could also print out the text of the unfamiliar vocabulary and sentence patterns. But I have never seen the sort of video/text/slideshow functions that can be attached to audio files.

Re. the McQuillan article:

I think using video podcasts that students actually enjoy watching would be an excellent way to practice listening. And it doesn’t always have to be especially educational in content-- as long as it is reasonably realistic and they enjoy it, then it can be good practice for them. There’s lots of ways to extend that sort of activity-- like having students come up with questions to ask their classmates about the story.

I would like to try the “narrow listening” activity (several interviews on the same topic). If the students do the interviewing themselves, it could be even better.

I also like the ideas of arranging a reciprocal exchange with a class in another country (or with a class of speakers of the 'target language').

Re. the Stansbury article:

Having students put together a podcast to tell about a trip to the zoo, or the museum, etc., sounds like a great idea, too. I would love to try that, because I think students enjoy being creative in that sort of activity.

Technology Quick Share

Click this link to see the presentation.

The activity is called: Language Limbo, Debating Controversial Topics

it's from the book: Teaching ESL/EFL with the Internet: Catching the Wave

Level: Advanced, suggested time: five 50-minute sessions

This main part of this activity is meant to get students to prepare to hold an in-class debate on some controversial topic by seraching for information on the internet.

Looking at the activity as presented in the book Catching the Wave, my first reaction was that it seemed to emphasize "outside of class" work and individual work quite a lot. This might be appropriate for certain advanced classes, or perhaps highly-motivated advanced-level adult or university classes, but it seemed to me that it could be made into a much more useful and communicative activity if most (or even all) of the parts of the activity were done in small groups.

For example, students could get in a lot of useful conversation and discussion practice DURING the information-gathering phase. Again, depending on the level and level of motivation, I think asking students to do that alone outside of class is not only asking too much, but it is also not making the most of an opportunity to get students involved in using language in a practical and communicative setting IN the classroom.

If done right, I think this sort of activity could be a very good way to get students taking about something they are actually interested in talking about.

The instructor would do well to carefully consider the overall proficiency and motivation level of the class, so as to adapt the activity appropriately in terms of length of time, which topics to debate, the size of the groups, and the type of debate format chosen, etc.

Readings #3 (1. Soares, 2. Levy-Stockwell, Chapter 8)

*BLACKBOARD - Soares, D. d.A. (2008). Understanding class blogs as a tool for language development. Language Teaching Research, 12(4), 517–533.

What challenges did Soares face when using blogs with her ESL students, and what lessons did she learn? How does she feel about using blogs with students in the future?

One of the challenges she describes (in various ways) is the challenge of structuring and presenting blogging in such a way as to make the activity appealing (and thus motivating) for her teenage students.

Soares gave her students assignments which involved posting short writings to the class blog, and also responding to their classmates’ postings. However, she initially saw very little willingness on the part of the students to participate.

She then gave her students a series of surveys to find out their views on blogging as an activity, and she specifically wanted to find out why most of them were apparently not motivated enough to post and respond regularly. Among the problems that her students reported were not having enough time, or having computer-related problems such as difficulties logging in.

She eventually decided to try devoting more time during class to allow the students to contribute to the class blog in small groups. Doing it this way, she discovered, resulted in generating a lot more enthusiasm from the students. Evidently, most of them probably felt that contributing to the blog on their own, outside of class, was just too boring or too difficult. Soares found that doing it together in class as a group activity was much more interesting and fun for her students.

Soares added links to other class blogs in the sidebar, and asked her students to leave comments on those outside blogs, but she found that getting her students to actually do it was hard because they didn’t think it was interesting. They were willing, however, to leave comments on their classmates writings.

Among the lessons she learned was that her students were not as comfortable using computers and the internet as she had assumed. She admits that they would have benefitted from more hands-on guidance in the computer lab from the beginning.

Overall, I think she learned some good lessons about how best to structure and present blogging to her students in the future. The main lesson was to make it more of a in-class group activity, and not to expect the students (at that age) to put in a lot of time on it outside of class as an individual, ‘homework’ kind of assignment.

LEVY – Ch. 8. Technology

Levy describes several types of technologies Choose one of them and describe how you might want to use it (or have used it), and discuss some of considerations that need to be taken when using this technology with ESL students

A lot of new technology is discussed in this chapter. While some of it does sound very promising, I feel that it’s hard for me to have much of an opinion on the specific details, because I just don’t have enough experience in the field.

Of all of the types of technology that are taken up in the discussion, I suppose the one that I can see as potentially having a big impact on learning is the various ways of using the internet for video-conferencing.

Allowing language students be able to interact with native speakers in real time, I think, would be a great way of giving them a little more motivation to practice and improve their speaking and listening abilities. For ESL teachers teaching in English-speaking countries, it might also be something to try, but I think it would be especially useful for EFL teachers in non-English speaking countries, where EFL students might not often have to react and respond to someone other than their own teacher. In many such environments, EFL students often have a tendency to think that speaking and listening is not very important, compared with reading and writing. I think conferencing could make language learning seem more “real” and more fun for them, and also more useful in a real-world sort of way. One big challenge that EFL teachers often have is making their students feel that English is useful to them in more ways than simply helping them pass standardized tests or getting a good score on university entrance tests.

Hopefully, this type of conferencing will become faster and easier to use in the future, and more schools will have the hardware necessary to make it easy to use as a whole-class activity.

It also has good potential as a way for students (individually or in small groups) to interact with other ELLs, or with native speakers far away. If done right, I think it would be a great way to do some kind of reciprocal language practice. For example, a class of EFL students in China could do conferencing with a class of students learning Chinese in the U.S.