Week 3: Delicious Oral/Aural Skills and Project Review

This week I am learning how to store my useful links in Delicious. It is one of the world's leading social bookmarking. It is a way to save web links (Favorites/Bookmarks) and find them from any computer on the Internet. It also allows me share links easily with others. Before using Delicious, I usually bookmark useful links I find related to ESL/EFL websites in my browser either in my laptop or my computer in my office. Of course, it is always confusing me if I want to visit my saved website but it is stored in different computer. I have use the computer where I store the saved website/link. Fortunately, my problem is solved now by delicious.com. I can now save my useful websites and even compile them into categorized stacks. I can also share my saved links to others.

 I'm interested in reading the article entitled "The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills". Like what Roza has commented in the previous post, the article clearly mentions the two aspects of spoken language competence, mainly mechanical and meaningful aspects. Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) websites and software also try to address these aspects for their users.

One of the recommended sites that I want to try to discuss is a website of One Stop English at http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/. This page provides us with tips and tricks to help teachers prepare for English speaking practice in the classroom. It has six different teaching ideas readily to be applied in the classrooms according to their levels.

Take one of its teaching ideas, Get out of the classroom 1. It gives several activities to overcome students' boredom of studying inside the classrooms. The teacher can choose one activity to be used and take his/her students to do deliberate speaking activities. In conclusion, I think this webpage is categorized into meaningful aspect as it tries to provide communicative functions in a given, meaningful speech community.

This week I review an article of the previous projects created by Prem Bahadur Phyak, from Department of English Education, University Campus, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal.

His students were 300 Master degree students coming from different areas and knowledge. They had to write theses as a part of their academic program. However, they didn't have any background knowledge of research and academic writing. Furthermore, his department was under-resourced as there was no internet access, updated library and relevant journals. He was challenged to improve his 20 students under his supervision to make use of the internet.

He motivated his students to expand their knowledge through the Net and improved their computers emails. He also conducted a focus group discussion to know their progress, their feelings towards technology,and other stuffs. He was able to teach them. That's what I like from him was his perseverance