Blog & Teach

It’s been a busy week in the course. We’ve talked about social bookmarking, listening skills and CALL. Thats’s a lot of food for thought!

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Nowadays, knowledge in the Internet is being spread and disseminated via different channels (blogs, professional websites, forums…), but probably the most effective way to share this knowledge is through social bookmarking, which has become a paramount element in this big world of Internet. Users can build their own framework of sources of information out of different types of platform. Pure social bookmarking platforms like delicio.us or diigo let you create lists of favourite sites and store these lists in a referring library. The big issue is called tagging. Bookmark libraries can become massive lists really hard to manage. Tagging resources with relevant terms related help us search for the sites we need according to our needs (Secondary education, listening, ICT, interactives, edugames…). We only need to type the tags and the site will display those links that contain the tags we requested.

Other ways to share knowledge are sites such as Symbaloo (site where favourites are organised in visual libraries -webmixes- containing links of the same field or topic; Scoop.it is a service where users can build a page with brief posts where they mention a website or a resource, with an image, the link and a description. In most cases Scoop.it provides with a possible descriptive text that can  be edited. Tagging is also paramount when we want to find our “scoops” within the page.

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This week we have also analysed the approach given to listening and speaking skills through CALL. The issue has moved between the use of speech analysis software, more focused on prosody, phonetics a more scientific approach of the learners pronunciation, and the use of websites whose main goal is to help students improve their listening skills through the comprehension of real English and “lab” recordings. Many websites offer scores of recordings covering different subjects and levels. Improving our listening skills through songs is also extremely relevant, and our old ways with the cassette or CD player have been replaced by websites where we can read the transcript as we watch/listen to the song and even do fill-in-the-gap exercises (Lyrics training, Batlyrics).

We could conclude that all these different approaches make up for the feeling that ICT in language learning is here to stay!

When teachers start to think on their next school year, there are a couple of things that quickly come to their minds: What to do and how to do it.

There are many ways to find how. Nowadays, we can find resources and ideas in a massive list of sources: Doing searches in search engines (google and many other), following tweets related to ELT, or ELT blogs. We can also follow curated sites ELT-related (Through Scoop.it, for example, or delicio.us referitories.

Workshops give us ideas on methodology and innovative approaches… experienced teacher trainers and colleagues provide with lots of fresh ideas on how to achieve our goals and how to do it in a motivating way…

But all these ideas, suggestions, tools and experiences would probably be worthless if we did not know why, where, and when to use them. That cannot be achieved if we don’t know what we want to achieve, what we want our students to learn.

Those so called didactic goals have dramatically evolved along the years. Time ago we had many professionals whose main goal was to ensure that students can take in as much grammar as possible… I suffered that in my childhood French lessons. later on, we moved into reading… we wanted our students to be able to read English texts… big deal! When it came to speaking, many of those students were not able to ask how to get to the nearest tube station in London.

Fortunately, things evolved and teachers began to realise that the only way to say that students succeed in learning a language is when they are able to use it in a communicative way. Most (I repeat… “most”, not “all”) teachers try to elicit our students speaking and listening abilities… and that has become a key element in the goals of today’s ELT.

In order to establish clear outlines about the previously mentioned “WHAT”, once we assume this communicative approach is paramount, we must be able to establish those goals, those objectives that will allow us to set the pace for a proficient achievement in our students’ learning process.

The ABCD model has turned out to be a good example of how to set those objectives as we prepare our schedule for our groups. The guidelines and information we find in Penn State Learning Design Community Hub page give us a clear overview of this approach on the Audience, Behaviour, Condition and Degree elements that make up for the ABCD Objective definition methodology.

We must also consider the adoption of the “Competential” approach used by many other colleagues. It is really valid when it comes to establishing communicative goals, as it sets the objectives that define the skills and abilities a student must achieve when he/she becomes competent in the use of a foreign language. The competential approach could be very well related to the establishment of degrees of linguistic skills by language users as seen in CEFR in Europe or ILR in the U.S.

What, how… interrogative elements for a single answer… our students’ success.

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I’ve just started my course at the University of Oregon’s American English Institute. I’m thrilled by the idea of sharing experiences, ideas and feelings with colleagues across the world… be welcome!

I’m sure we’ll all gain a lot out of this professional event!!