Week 3: More and more!!

This week’s resources have been like a basket full of rich food which helped me feed myself and my students as well.

First, I started reading the 2 articles entitled “Teaching English to Adult English Language Learners” by Kirsten Schaetzel, and “Using Original Video and Sound Effects to Teach English” by Shahla Yassaei. They are very useful. In fact, everything in this course is so useful. Honestly, as I already said in the Nicenet discussion, I’ve never really devoted much time to teach pronunciation in class because I thought it was not the real focus. So I just spent little time dealing with it in reading and vocabulary development activities. Nevertheless, thanks to the reading, I can now be aware of the importance of pronunciation in language comprehension and intelligibility. The article provided me with a lot of great ideas on how to improve and work on students’ pronunciation. I really loved the idea of establishing a pronunciation checklist which my students and I can refer to when correcting pronunciation. I’ll definitely develop such checklist based on the performance of the students in speaking and will make a copy for each student so that both my students and I would be able to evaluate their progress and their needs together at the end of each course session.

The article about the use of video in class also helped me find more ideas to raise students’ attention, activate the class and make activities more interesting. I have already used some of the advice given in it like the “Picture or Speech”, “Subtitled films” and “Picture-less listening” and they have made the students be more productive. However, a lot more are still to be experimented and exploited. I think of using the “Freeze framing” in my class for a tense review: simple past, present continuous, future with “will” or “be going to”; and the “Silent viewing” for storytelling.

During this week, I was also introduced to the bookmarking tool: Delicious. I’ve never used any bookmarking tool before but I just saved the links I needed in my phone or in my notebook, but this course has opened my eyes on a great and practical way to save website links. I’m really thankful for that. You can always access it on your computer wherever you are. For sure, I’ll continue using it to secure all the useful links I’ve got and I will still get all along this course and I will also share Delicious.com with my students so that they’ll also be able to share links with each other.

Finally, the sample project I've read has given me an overall view and a general idea of the final project I have to create. It’s a bit challenging but I’m sure help will be provided all along it as it has always been since the beginning of the course; and I hope I’ll be able to clearly and successfully set up mine and bring a change in my class through it.

Good luck everyone!