Delicious.com? what is it? Now I know. Hmmm, delicious J I must let my colleagues know about it, and not only the English teachers, it is useful for anyone who uses the net a lot, but I’m sure the English teachers will love it.
Authentic material…listening…pronunciation…speaking…from where? Although the listening exercises of course books have developed a lot, they are not so useful. Many times unnatural, even the weaker students can’t help smiling when they are listening to them and they love making fun of the intonation and reactions they hear in those dialogues. And last year when we had the Italian assistant, some of my students struggled to understand her because of her accent. To tell the truth, listening is really hard in the classroom because some students find the same exercise hard, whereas the others can hardly understand it even after second hearing. The gap is much bigger than in the case of reading, writing or even speaking skills. Why? Because some students watch films only in English, or have travelled widely and heard and spoken ‘real’ English, while the others lack all these experiences.
The websites I’ve got to know are so useful not only because they provide videos, and related exercises but also because there are some really short texts which can easily be applied in 45-minute lessons, and also because eager Ss can practise at home.
Yeah, it's really nice to get texts for the video or audio being listened to.. sometimes students know the word but it sounds different to them when they here it for the first time from a native.. and I think the best way to overcome this problem is to let them see what they hear at least for couple of times so that they get used to the native tone..
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. I completely agree with you, it is good to let them listen to a text, even several times. Sometimes my problem is that those who understand the text for the first time, lose interest in the task if they have to listen to it three times. But it is of course important for the others. It is not so much a problem if the listening is not too long, then nobody minds listening a couple of times. and many of the videos I found this week on the websites are relatively short. :)
ReplyDeleteHi Kpetra,
ReplyDeleteI have already shared the information on delicious with my colleagues too. They were really excited to learn about this website as they had the same problem like me not remembering the exact URLs or websites which we need at work.
Listening materials and other skills that we had the previous week to read and learn from were very helpful to me. What I found very handy to myself is reading the comments that people left in the Nicenet Discussions. Many course participants left their favourite websites that they were using, which I followed and saved for myself for the future consideration. I followed some of them and found out that they were quite good for using in the classroom. I tend to agree with you that sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the most suitable activity for your students, however to my mind once you find it your students will appreciate it greatly.
That is why, I thought to myself that the time I spend searching for the relevant activities and materials to offer my students is worth it.
Cheers,
Yuriy
Dear Petra,
ReplyDeleteYou are so right, Delicious is a great tool not only for teachers, but for anyone. In fact, I talked to my son about it and he`s already using it too.
It takes time at first though it will save long working hours once our sites are categorized and described.
Ana