Enriching resources and steps

This week’s readings about internet integration in reading and writing incited me to reflect on creative ways to teach and improve students’ reading and writing skills. The article entitled “Using Internet-Based Children’s Literature to teach EFL” helped me understand the importance of vocabulary mastery in comprehension and readers’ motivation. If 99% of the words in a text or book are already known by the reader, he/she can enjoy the reading and the level is defined as “Independent”. If less than 95% are known, the reader may become reluctant to continue reading as it affects his/her understanding. That is the “frustrational” level. I love the idea of using online children’s and young adult literature said in the article in order to cope with the problem of vocabulary mastery. It’s easy to find and access children’s literature and a lot of practice activities, even for outside the class, can be drawn from it.

The article about using Blogs and Ning in class for writing: “Process writing and the Internet: Blogs and Ning Networks in the classroom” enlightened my mind on how social networks can be an effective tool to activate writing process and encourage students’ cooperative work. The examples given in it were very clear and helpful.

The two methods for reading and writing skill-building also give students the opportunity to work on real-life situations or at least relate their activities to realistic situations.

Apart from the readings, there were also websites to choose and to explore for the use in class and I really liked all of them, but my favorites were: 

-  the American English website for reading: http://americanenglish.state.gov/ebooks

- Lauri's ESL Website: http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/

- ESL Independent Study Lab: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.htm

   They are full of interesting resources for the building of all skills: reading, writing, speaking, listening, grammar, pronunciation… I’ll definitely use them in my classes and I already shared them with my students.

The other tasks during this week: the technology-enhanced lesson planning and the class issue reflection have helped me to concentrate more on my class, my students and my teaching; I got to know about all the single details related to them. These tasks are leading me to the accomplishment of my project and to the improvement of my teaching style through technology.