Listening and Speaking Skills - Week 3

This week has been very important for me because it is about the development of web skills with respect to listening and speaking skills which are my favorite areas in teaching of English. I like these areas more partly due to the fact that listening and speaking is not included in the curriculum of the students I teach and so these skills are not normally developed in them. Another reason is the challenges non-native speakers always face in acquiring an internationally intelligible accent with proper stress and intonation. This challenge is something which makes English an interesting language especially from the pronunciation point of view.

Maria Grazia Busà’s article ‘New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation’ has significantly added to my previous knowledge of teaching pronunciation. I learnt about how pronunciation has never got enough place in the classroom teaching all over the world and the different reasons behind it. Internet has not only made teaching pronunciation easier but more interesting as well. Though I have used software and programs like speech synthesizers, speech recognition tools and speech simulators, but somehow I could never make them useful for my students. Now I have many such tools in my hands like Praat that I can use in my classroom for the development of my students’ listening and speaking skills.

Creating a delicious page was an achievement and I think every Internet user should have something like Delicious to keep a record of his bookmarked sites.

The article on listening skills and the one on CALL were also very informative and I have saved them on my computer for future reference.

The discovery of audio recording tools like vocaroo, audioboo and sites like  Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab , ESL Video  and many others has simply been great.

This course has been very productive so far. I’m very happy with my grades of first two weeks and I hope to maintain this momentum in the weeks to come.

A New Chapter

A new chapter has begun in my career as an ESL teacher. I have always been a great admirer of technology. The world of gadgets and apps fascinates me. I feel like a small child fascinated by the moon and the stars and the birds and animals. This course will surely add a beautiful feather in my cap. Doing a course like 'Web Skills' is something I really wanted to do. I am spending a lot time studying for this course. It's been a long time since I worked this hard and I am enjoying it.

Writing a blog has been my biggest achievement in this course so far, though I still don't know much about how to use this tool with my present students. Maybe I can ask them to create their blogs and write something creative, not as assignments, but for the sake of fun only. I don't know! However, I am looking forward to doing something really useful for my students with the help of blogs.

The idea of having specialized search engines for specific needs did not sound good to me. Personally, I am in favour of one simple search engine, like the 'lamp of Alladin', which could find us everything we want. I am very much satisfied with Google for my all kinds of search needs. I would go to other engines only if Google failed me. I can't even remember the names of others. It looks a bit complicated to me. Not my piece of cake, sorry! 

Before the start of this course I wondered how the course would go and whether I would be able to complete my assignments in time or not. But now I believe I have understood what is expected from us on this course and how to get along with it. I am very impressed with the way Courtney is coordinating the course by involving us in it. I liked the way the Learning Objectives for Week 2 were explained on the main course site through ABCD model, even before the introduction of the model to the class.

I hope to learn a million things in the days to come!

Week 1 - Getting started

I started using internet in 1999 (when I was an architect) and blogging and podcasting are not really new to me. I have been using these tools for some years to enrich my own knowledge and experience, limited to reading blogs and listening to podcasts available on the internet. I never used them for teaching anyone or sharing any of my own experiences as an ESL teacher. This means I never wrote anything really useful through blogging, though I did try, twice. I created two blogs on ‘blogger’ about more than a year ago, but wrote only one welcome post on each of them, not being able to decide what to write next. After that I became disinterested in blogging.

So before joining this course I knew what a blog was and how to create one for myself and even how it could be useful for me and my students. But somehow I could not make it really useful in making my teaching more effective or realizing my ambition of becoming an online English teacher.

And while I write this first post for my ‘Web Skills’ blog I am feeling very excited at the prospect of  renewal of my lost enthusiasm for blogging. The course requires me to update my blog every week and that will give me enough confidence to write, before the end of the course. In fact, I am feeling pretty confident right now even though I haven’t finished writing my first post. And now I am thinking about adding new posts to my existing blogs as well. Wow! That feels great.

Well, this time, while creating the blog, I learnt a lot about the settings and templates. I liked the way we can choose who can comment on our post and how we can change the settings as per our wishes. Also the ‘Stats’ and ‘Earnings’ links are interesting. But the most important things that I have learnt is how blogging is being used by our course coordinators as a very useful tool for creating an interactive learning environment for us on the web, where we will be able to interact with each other as classmates during the course of our studies and share our experiences with each other and with anyone else in the world we like, besides preparing us for the future generation of English learners.

Thanks.