Week 3

REFLECTION ON WEEK 3

 

It is unbelievable that Week 3 is coming to an end. Time flies so fast! 

I enjoyed signing up for Delicious. Delicious.com is a site to store useful links. I’ve never heard about this site before. Using Delicious.com helps us to store links in an organized way. The links can be tagged using keywords. Some of the features are almost similar to Twitter, where we can follow others and vice versa while some are similar to Instagram where details on how many links, followers and subscription as well as how many people we are following are shown. Therefore, we can also share the links when we visit other’s pages. I managed to save some useful links which I use regularly to prepare my lessons. 

The reading materials assigned for this week is worthwhile. The focus for this week is Aural/Oral Skills. I read two articles;  Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsay Miller and The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong. Both the articles talked on the importance of listening and speaking skills in one’s life. As I have mentioned in Nicenet, I never quite focused on listening skills and whenever I did listening activities, I used prepared listening texts. Through Lindsay’s article, I’ve learned how to incorporate listening activities and authentic materials in preparing students for real-world context. Julia’s article discussed on the use of computers in learning and more focus was given on speaking skills. 

 

Among the websites listed, I like Esl-lab. Randall’s lab is very organized and easy to be used.  The advantage of using this online-lab is that Pre-, While and Post-Listening lessons are prepared. Teachers need not to crack their heads to think of pre- and post-listening activities. All we need to do is to click, listen and answer the questions. It’s as easy as ABC!

             Reading some of the sample project report gave me a better picture of the final project. Some of the reports were very good; well-planned and carried out. I hope to produce a good report like the ones that I've read. Overall, this week’s tasks gave good coverage on aural/oral skills. Now, I have additional tools to use in my teaching.