Bloom’s Taxonomy & Krashen’s Theories in SLA
Finally!!! I’ve just stumbled on this great website that is absolutely fantastic for both teaching in a purposeful context and catapulting students’ autonomy to sky-rocketing levels. It takes pieces of articles of newspapers and magazines and puts it in an attractive interface for students to listen, read, reconstruct, and take quizzes from these articles. Well that is a very parsimonious description of this website. That’s why I’ll talk in the next sections why and how to use it.
Why to use it?
• It’s completely free and easy to access.
• A repository of authentic materials.
• It caters to every student’s interests from which they can choose among topics from news, pop culture, and sports. Therefore, it’s learner centered rather than teacher centered as seen in the main entry's image.
• It can be used in scaffolding in that learners who mastered Basic levels can instantly click on Intermediate and Advanced skills.
• Learners can add their new words to a box that is on the right while listening and reading the articles. This box is called Word Bank that saves the new words and creates later a word-of-the-day entry of the recently-learnt words. Subsequently, learners will have a final Passport that reinforce their sence of achievement for discovering extra materials and links, and thereby foster SLA.
• It corresponds to Bloom’s taxonomy in that once learners have listened, read, added their list of new words to their inventory box, and taken the simple quiz, they can then click ‘yes’ to 'Too Easy' choice to take them to another set of options. Here’s the list of these options:
These options are analogous to a teacher’s way of saying to a learner ‘I have checked your answers and shall we move on’, or a way of employing higher cognitive skills by taking learners to a much harder process in which they have to recreate the authentic articles in a meaningful way after they have understood, applied, and analyzed the constituting parts of these articles.
• Since newspapers are full of idioms and collocations, they are a great source of exposure to these in an appealing and interacting interface.
• This tool offers a formative informal assessment for students because it focuses on quality rather than marks. In addition, its informality creates a relaxed ambience for learners who can take the exam as many times as they desire. It also provides marks at the end of each exam. It’s by far best of both worlds!!!
• Learners who can check their improvement on their Dashboard that tells them how much progress they have made.
• They can check other learners’ improvement by checking the score board and compete against them. That develops huge amount of intrinsic motivation for students who both enjoy and achieve the required tasks.
REAL-LIFE skills:
According to Johnson, he distinguishes between theoretical and procedural knowledge. To cut a long story short, procedural one corresponds to learners’ communicative competence and their ability to communicate efficiently in different expected and unexpected situations by employing certain skills. Real-life skills can shoulder this problem in that it offers. Here are some of these life skills this tool offers:
• Finally, it puts exercises and other kind of quizzes in games framework in order to relieve the pressure and tension that comes with such a scholastic name. It’s also motivating for learners to have checkpoints of their progress in order to be driven to achieve and learn more.
• Learners as well can use flash cards games to know the meanings of words and translation to Spanish for Spanish natives or learners like me.
How to use it?
It can be used in a variety of ways as warm-up listening activities, and then learners can read and guess the answers. They can compete against each other in terms of time and points for every session. The most important quality it possesses is its ability to promote autonomy for learners at home.
Limitations:
The only limitation I can spot after close examination of this tool is the availability of only Spanish language to be translated to when using flashcards. Having said that, this doesn’t at all confuse learners or set an obstacle in the process of them acquiring a language since Spanish is only needed for one activity, namely ‘flash cards’.
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