Materials Development I

Here are the documents for my first materials development:

Click here to go to the Lesson Plan
Links to technological tools are incorporated into the lesson plan.

Click here to go to the overview of the materials explaining the rationale behind them

Week 6
Teaching with Corpora

Corpus is a principled collection of texts which is accessible via computer. There are several different corpuses available for use and this vast amount of data can help classroom teaching.

First, it is important to understand how corpuses are constructed and why they would be useful for teaching. Reppen (2010) Ch.1. provides information on this by stating the importance of meaningful contexts and activities for language teaching. Using corpus in order to decide what to teach will also enable teachers focus on what the students will encounter the most in the target domain.

The chapter goes on providing some ideas to use a corpus with language learners. Flowerdew (2009) also provides some activities. One of the activities can be developed by using word lists and concordance lines. Word lists will help understand how frequent certain words occur and concordance lines will show the context that the word is used in. Students can identify the parts of speech, suffixes, word forms and spot the words that they do not know. They can check what other words go together with a certain word and they can even learn the different registers and the pragmatic uses of that word, whether it is more common in spoken or written language.

Although there are not many language teaching books based on corpus, corpus linguistics is growing rapidly. It seems to provide many benefits for language teaching; yet, there is definitely need for more studies and activities to be developed. This way, there will be more sources available for teachers that are used and proven to be useful in classroom.

Week 5
Designing CALL Activities

This week, we talked about designing activities and two of the online tools we used were Grockit Answers and Socrative. These tools are good to create various activities. I have tried them both and found them to be useful tools.

With Grockit Answers, it is possible to make listening activities with comprehension or discussion questions. As students are watching a video, they answer the questions based on the video and can see other students' answers. These videos can be authentic and the teacher can choose any topic related to the subject of the lesson. Or teachers/students can make their own video and upload it on Youtube and comment on each others.

Another tool I tried was Socrative. It has a variety of activities to choose from and Space Race is definitely my favorite. IT is a good way to motivate the students, it will encourage them to participate and to try harder to win the race. It is also good for having pair or group work which will require the learners to negotiate meaning and interact with each other.Overall, this week, I have used these two different tools to create activities and found them to be very user-friendly and time-saving. I also liked how they encourage interaction among learners.

I have created an activity using Grockit Answers and the description and the link for this activity can be found on my blog.

Grockit Answers Activity

For this activity, I created a short video with four questions.

Students will watch and listen to the video and answer the questions as they do so.

This activity is good for practicing listening skills since it has comprehension questions. Also, the open-ended question at the end of the video requires an opinion based answer which can be discussed among other students.

I have tried this with one of my friends who is a non-native speaker and she found it interesting and she said she would love to see others' responses to the questions which actually makes this activity more fun and interactive.

Click here to go the activity on Grockit

Week 4
SLA and CALL

This week was especially helpful to realize my own teaching philosophy and what role technology plays in it.
Although I believe that technology has great things to offer, I always think whether using it will help my lesson objectives or not. It is important to consider the objectives and plan accordingly. If it is not making learning process more effective or easier, then what is the point of using it? So, as teachers, we should be careful when deciding to use an online tool. They can be time-consuming or time-saving and we want to think about both advantages and disadvantages of it and then determine if it is worth using that tool.

Yet, there are times I use technology just for the sake of motivating my students. I think, if used properly, online tools can be a good source of motivation and we know that motivation is key to language learning. Thus, again depending on the purpose and the needs of the learners, these tools can function differently and might be helpful.

Overall, my teaching philosophy with technology aims to enhance learning either through motivating my students or through creating more effective tasks for the learning process.

Digital Storytelling In-class Group Activity

We were assigned to use capzles.com which is a social digital storytelling website.
We developed a short story with pictures and sound.

Click here to go to our group's story on capzles

Unfortunately, we found this website really difficult to use. We were not able to arrange the pictures or make a slideshow using this online tool. After spending quite a while trying to figure out how capzles exactly works, we were not able to create what we wanted which was a disappointment. There is probably more to discover on capzles (I hope), but with my experience so far with it, I don't see the point of using it to create a 'story'.

Google Drawing

Week 3
Web Resources for Language Teaching

This week, we talked about various tools to be used for language teaching.

I will talk about some of the tools we discussed in my post for this week.

Hot potatoes is a very popular tool that many teachers use and it can be easily applied to language classes.

I heard of it many times but it was actually my first time trying hot potatoes. I think it is quite easy to use and you can create activities in a very short amount of time. You do not have to worry about using a word document and spending time with the format of your activity. Hot potatoes does it for you which is very convenient for teachers. In addition, it includes several basic types of activities which are common in language classes. Thus, many teachers would be able to create effective activities since they are already familiar with these types.

Digital storytelling is another good way to help students' learning process. Especially for listening and speaking skills, storytelling has a lot to offer. Now with the advanced technology, it is possible to create digital stories which are stored online. I think there are many great advantages of online storytelling tools. You can create a story in a short amount of time. Teachers/students can record their voices and listen to others' stories. You can personalize the stories, choose whichever topic you want and share them with anyone you want. While it can be easily incorporated into speaking skills, it can also be used for writing skills or certain grammatical features. I have tried some of these digital storytelling tools such as capzles, storybird and voicethread and they all offer different features. So, depending on the purpose and the structure of the activity, it is possible to choose and use one of these online tools.

Overall, while there are great online tools, it is important to note that they should be 'tools' not the main purpose of the class. So while integrating these activities. teachers should definitely think about their learning objectives.

Digital Storytelling Assignment

I have created a storytelling activity using a series of pictures on VoiceThread.
Students will listen to the instructions, look at the picture and tell the story.

There are two characters in the story, Jenny and John. And in the end, students will respond to the question 'What should Jenny do?'

This activity is designed for adult learners since the topic, domestic violence, would not be appropriate for younger learners.

Everyone records their responses and shares their opinions.

Click here to go to the activity on VoiceThread