This website is an absolutely fantastic website for learning English and it is amongst my favourite ones. What gives this website its distinctive features is the contemporary nature of its texts. It also caters to different needs and interests in that it does have a profoundly extensive list of various topics ranging from science, technology, and political news, to gossiping, famous people, and holiday making in different parts of the world. It also comprises a huge collection of exercises to vary the learning pace.
Why to use it:
1- This website utilizes naturally-occurring authentic texts and harnesses them for the purpose of learning.
2- It substantially increases learners’ autonomy and involves them into making decisions about their own learning by consulting them with the use of texts that appeal to their interests and area of expertise.
3- It is extremely easy to use and to access.
4- It saves the teacher marvelous amount of time by making use of its activities and pre-planned lesson plans.
5- It could be used for lower levels as well as advanced ones due to division of its exercises and levels into normal and easy levels. There is even a separate built-in website for using the easy lesson plans as you can see in the bottom left corner in the next image.
7- This websites makes use of decreasing the discrepancy between learners’s individual and competitive aims and incorporate them into a collaborative one by helping each other to achieve the tasks at hand.
8- By making use of the varying pace of its exercises, it steers English lessons from falling into the pits of repetitiveness and monotony. With the wise use of teachers, learners will not predict beforehand how the course of events will go in English lessons.
9- It pools down all four skills into one session since it has listening, writing, text building, pre and post-listening tasks.
10- It makes use of SLA theories in that it does not have mind-numbing exercises that make learners fill gaps with one right choice. On the contrary, it creates interest, engage, and instigate discussions between learners to make use of the information in order to solve the tasks.
11- It depends on the working memory that instead of repeating the information and drilling it, there is a constant repackaging of the same questions. In other words, it takes learners from the stage of passively receiving the information actively to constructing it and building up knowledge. This can be seen in text-builders and online quizzes which give learners jumbled pieces of texts to build it into one coherent one.
12- The tasks are great source of warmers and wrappers in that they contain thought-provoking questions before the beginning of a lesson and amazing reflective writing and speaking asks.
13- These tasks make use of the expectancy values and goals theories. Since learners will have chosen texts of their own areas of interest, they will value the tasks at hand and expect to do well in them. As regards the goals theories, learners will set themselves proximal goals by taking recourse to different leaning strategies and tap into their knowledge of the world to achieve the distant goals of achieving the tasks. SLA theories in motivation suggest that by doing so Acquisition of language occurs. This brings me to the following point, which is motivation.
14- When learners do an activity of their own choice, they will enjoy it and will be engrossed in an unconscious feeling of achieving the task. This distinction appeals to a kind of motivation called intrinsic motivation that comes from within. On the other hand, their realization of how important it is to acquire knowledge from these tasks because they are up to date and authentic appeals to another kind of motivation called extrinsic motivation that is a result of external drives.
Ideas on how to use it in the classroom:
• To involve the learner in making decisions for their learning, teachers can introduce the website briefly and give students the opportunity to choose from the various areas of interest available on the site.
• I would strongly suggest that by first giving students the ready-made warm ups on the site to discuss in five minutes.
• In the next stage, I would direct their attention to the listening part and encourage them to turn off computer screens and make some notes to get the overall meaning, or the gist.
• Then an extra five minutes is given so that they can discuss what they have understood in groups.
• A state-of-the-art exercise available in the list of exercises is called no letter, or big filling. This one will display a screen with an empty paragraph for students of group of four or five can collaborate to fill from the recording they have just listened to. It is a great exercise that motivates the learners and activates their working memory and offers multiple opportunities for negotiation of meanings. By doing so, they will assign a leader who presses the button on behalf of the whole group, negotiate, discuss, argue, reach a decision about their learning process and activate shared goals towards the achievements of their task.
• What I particularly like about this task is that it is not a one-way exercise like filling in the blanks or missing information. On the contrary, it takes students from cooperation to fill missing information to collaboration in order to work together to unlock the text at hand.
• In the next step, students are given the chance to practice the matching exercise to figure the meaning of new vocabularies in a context they are already familiar with. Word meanings are given at the top part and students have to tick the right choice among the words at the lower part.
• At the final stage, students are given the on-line quiz or sentence jumble which enables learners to construct the text part by part, and sentence by sentence. This type of exercise follows a constructivist approach in that it activates precious knowledge students have and it empowers them by knowing the internal constituents building up the text such as, clauses, sentences, punctuation marks, even the genre. This task also follows a reward and final score to give students a sense of achievements.
• If there is any time left, students can discuss the topic they had already read and have a whole-class discussion to develop their fluency with minor or no correction from teachers to alleviate anxiety which is shown to facilitate the process of second language acquisition.
• For homework, students can do the writing task in the displayed worksheet, or just have more game practice a home by doing hangman or crosswords tasks.
Limitations:
01 Teachers should have clear-cut aims for these lessons by doing extra preparation because it could be a time-consuming process with no particular aims.
02 If for no obvious reasons computers do not work or the links get broken, teachers should have a downloaded mp3 file for listening and printed copies of the exercises they want to use.
03 Some of the topics might be culturally appropriate or simply taboos areas that cannot be discussed in some countries, or contexts. For example, in some countries, it is frowned upon people to talk about gender or sexual issues not to mention religious, and political ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment