Week 3: Aural/oral skills - Delicious - Sample Project Report

 

I really love and enjoy this Webskills course but I wish I had more TIME...

I’d enjoy spending much more time on exploring new sites, reading my classmates’ posts and commenting on them; I'd love to take a more active part in the discussions but I constantly suffer from lack of time. :-(

Aural/Oral Skills

I have never lived in an English-speaking country so I know from my own experience how difficult it is to understand the many different English accents. Another big problem Hungarian learners have to face is the different stress and intonation patterns not to mention some sounds.  As a consequence I have been really interested in all materials that can help learners to improve listening and speaking skills.

I read the articles and visited all the links provided for us on the Webskills Course Website but in many cases I will need more time to take a deeper look. 

 Randall's Cyber Listening Lab  has impressed me. It is easy to use, it has a clear layout. It offers a wide choice of activities most of which include not only listening tasks but pre- and post-listening activities as well. Transcripts are also provided which is great help if you practice on your own without teacher’s help. The day after getting to know this site I already used it in my class. I wanted to see how it works with students and I am quite satisfied with the result. My teenager students enjoyed the task, they found this type of practice useful and they said they would use it at home as well.

What I have been looking for recently on the Internet is sites where my students can practice English individually. Indubitably, I am happy to get lesson plans as well and other materials for teachers but since I have many students who miss a lot of lessons because of their sports career, I would like to provide them with well-chosen materials for individual work. Both The Best Sites To Practice Speaking English and The Best Websites For Learning English Pronunciation provide a lot of materials that meet this requirement. I don’t think it is a good idea to give the links to these two sites; I’d rather lead my learners to more specific pages. If the choice is too wide, it is easy to get lost or choose the less useful activities. So that is why I have written that a deeper insight will be need.

 

Saving bookmarks on Delicious

Delicious is a website every user should know about. How many good links I saved in different devices have been lost or could be found only when using a particular computer?! Not anymore. After creating my Delicious account the next step was to add the ’+ Add to Delicious’ button to my browser’s toolbar which lets you quickly add links from any web page. This is again something that I will share with my fellow colleagues and students.

Another advantage that you can explore sites saved by other people you follow. At the same time Delicious offers the option to save links as “private” which makes the site even more attractive for me. Gradually I will add my bookmarks saved earlier; it is just a question of time. Yes, TIME! :-)

  

Sample Project Report

 

I feel honoured that I had the chance to read Zlatka Dyankova’s report on her project An Olympics Webquest for Grade 11 Students. It gives a comprehensive insight into her determination to increase her students’ motivation and through this their knowledge of English. As the project is based on a Webquest http://www.zunal.com/webquest.php?w=52104 which is followed by PowerPoint presentations I am looking forward to learn about these tools.