Week 3- My reflections

Week 3 added more valuable activities to use in the classroom. We were introduced to aural/oral skill building websites, to the samples of the project report and created a “delicious” page.

Week 3 was easier to handle than the previous 2 weeks. I am already familiar with nicenet, I know what I am supposed to do in the discussions.

Creating a delicious page

It was the easiest assignment to do. The webpage helps to save useful links by adding them on the webpage and share them with the others. I have saved lots of useful links that I will definitely use in my teaching. There are a lot of websites which are very good for practicing listening and pronunciation skills I came across during the discussions that I was unaware of, so www.delicious.com was the best solution to save all the links I liked and explore one by one later.

Aural/Oral skill building

Developing listening comprehension is the essential part of learning a language. Building the vocabulary, learning grammar, practice speaking will not contribute to mastering the language if the person is not able to comprehend and respond to the dialogue in a real world context. The article by Lindsay Miller “Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials” proved the importance of authentic materials in developing listening skills.
She suggests to use Pre-, While-, and Post-Listening activities to help learners develop their listening skills.

I read the article by Julia Gong about Computer-Assisted Language Learning and agree that “CALL environment becomes an ideal safe haven to learners to practice interaction. One of the greatest advantages is that it offers a private environment for working on the pronunciation.” It was also interesting to read about the advantages and disadvantages of CALL in the development of speaking skills. “Language is speech. People talk far more that they write and the importance of mastery of the spoken language as primary objective among learners is confirmed by surveys.”

A Sample Report

The assignment was to choose one of the sample project reports from the past Webskills classes, read and comment on that report in nicenet.

I skimmed three reports which gave me a clear idea of what my final project must be like. I was impressed how hard the teachers worked, made a deep analysis of their teaching environment, idetified problems and  found the solutions. Most of them mentioned Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences approach to choose the best teaching style.

I liked the reports by Prem Bahadur Phyak from Nepal and  Nicolici Nadina Carmen  from Romania very much. I summarized what Nicolici Nadina Carmen did in her project, posted my viewpoints in the nicenet, and expressed what I liked about the project.