READING
READING
In the Reading section the ‘don’t do guessing from context’ is the most interesting point for me. I believe once upon a time I came across some research which claimed that it was not the most effective technique, so this idea has not come as a surprise for me. However, I think it might work at least partly, which can be enough when reading for gist.
What I do not quite understand though is why asking which part of speech the word is doesn’t add to the comprehension. From my point of view, if a student doesn’t / can’t pinpoint the part of speech, they are not able to use even a bilingual dictionary correctly as the meaning quite often depends on the part of speech. Moreover, when it is time for them to use the word, they won’t be able to use it correctly in a sentence of their own.
WRITING
I really like the idea of brief writing tasks to do in class. Most of my students seem to find writing one of the most challenging types of activities (even more challenging than speaking), so I am planning to use this kind of tasks to show them that they can write and it doesn’t have to take a long time. Last week I did a Twitter-based activity (the aim was to teach informal language and to contrast it with more neutral ways of writing) with a great success and my students reported feeling “less scared” by writing in general.
P.S. I would like to thank Penny, the iTDi team and everybody on the course for all the brilliant ideas and thought-provoking discussions. It’s been a real pleasure to learn from and with you.
In the Reading section the ‘don’t do guessing from context’ is the most interesting point for me. I believe once upon a time I came across some research which claimed that it was not the most effective technique, so this idea has not come as a surprise for me. However, I think it might work at least partly, which can be enough when reading for gist.
What I do not quite understand though is why asking which part of speech the word is doesn’t add to the comprehension. From my point of view, if a student doesn’t / can’t pinpoint the part of speech, they are not able to use even a bilingual dictionary correctly as the meaning quite often depends on the part of speech. Moreover, when it is time for them to use the word, they won’t be able to use it correctly in a sentence of their own.
WRITING
I really like the idea of brief writing tasks to do in class. Most of my students seem to find writing one of the most challenging types of activities (even more challenging than speaking), so I am planning to use this kind of tasks to show them that they can write and it doesn’t have to take a long time. Last week I did a Twitter-based activity (the aim was to teach informal language and to contrast it with more neutral ways of writing) with a great success and my students reported feeling “less scared” by writing in general.
P.S. I would like to thank Penny, the iTDi team and everybody on the course for all the brilliant ideas and thought-provoking discussions. It’s been a real pleasure to learn from and with you.
I like your twitter based activity, though, I do not use twitter, nor do I want to. I will have to find a different way to practice this. very useful, though, to understand how the difference of platform affects grammar/punctuation.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the idea.
Scott van Leenen You are welcome. I believe you can do something like this with chats and instant messages. Actually, you do not need to use the real Twitter in class. I just printed the example tweets out and made templates for the student's tweets.
ReplyDeleteI just started using Twitter again recently, Scott van Leenen and the amount of ELT chat on there is incredibly rich! It often feels like I'm right next to all the big names in the industry. When used correctly, it can be a wonderful tool. and the word limit has increased!
ReplyDelete