Final Reflection: Assessment

So this week we talked about assessment; we compared pen and paper tests versus computer-based tests. We also read about multiple different types of tests like aptitude tests, placement tests, etc. It seems that computers are better for stable conditions, every test every time will have the same instructions, posed the same way as well as the same time limit and the same format, this can very when teachers write and or proctor tests. Computers are also able to figure out the test-takers level and only give questions that are in that students level, so none of the questions are too hard or too easy and the student potentially will have to answer less questions.
On the other hand, one major criticism with computer tests is that many students from different parts of the world are not familiar with taking tests on a computer and this could mean that they get a worse score just because they are unable to navigate the test effectively. To fix this students either ned to be trained beforehand, like through tutorials, or they should be offered the choice to do a pen and paper version of the test if they feel uncomfortable with a computer version. Additionally, many times there are technical problems with taking tests on the computer. When I took my Spanish placement test in order to study abroad I was unable to play the audio in the listening section of the test. Due to this I was unable to correctly answer any of the following questions and unfortunately no one I contacted was able to help me or allow me to retake that part of the exam. I just failed that section and was placed into a Spanish section that ended up being too easy for me. Another technical problem I have come in contact with is that fact that I use a Mac. Not all software is compatible with both a mac and a PC this is a problem because then I can't successfully finish a test or I have to try and find a different computer for that test. These problems all must be taken into consideration when deciding whether to give students a computer test or a traditional test.

Week 12 Reflection

For this weeks reflection I am going to write about teaching culture through CALL (since this is what the week was about). CALL can be used in many different ways to teach different cultures to students. It is also important to keep in consideration that the material you decide to use in the classroom does not give an essentialist view of culture, but that it gives a varied perspective and makes the students aware that not everyone from the target culture acts the same way just like in the culture they are from.
With those thoughts in mind one can use authentic materials form the internet, like news articles about or from the target culture, Youtube videos that describe some aspect of the target culture, online articles, etc. Another way the use CALL in order to expose the students to the target culture is through CMC. CMC like Skype, email, Google chat, etc. allows students to have direct contact with people from the target culture and allows them to ask questions and get a natives views from inside the culture in order to get a better all around view of the target culture and see how that culture differs and is similar to their own culture.
It is important that students are taught to think critically about the material they study and about the target culture that they have learned about so that they are able to realize that the culture is a fluid thing and is different for everyone in the target culture. One way to get this through to the students is to have them talk about their own culture as well and compare their own culture and their own views with that of the target culture and the views that they are exposed to through the class.
Culture is very important when learning a language because the language itself shows a lot about the culture that speaks it. It is impossible to separate culture and language completely so it is important that students learn both within a language classroom in order to learn how to function within that culture and to learn how to be proficient in the L2.

Activity to Teach Culture Through CALL

For this activity my partner and I decided to use Youtube videos because they can be interesting for students and they are easily accessible. We decided that our students would be intermediate level high school students and the videos that we would show in class shouldn't be more than a few minutes long so that we didn't inundate our students with too much language at once. Once we had the video we wanted (there are many to choose from on Youtube, we chose one called "christmas in the U.S.") that talked about one aspect of American culture, we picked a segment of it to show to the class. Then during class time we would play the video with instructions for students to take notes on the video. The notes would focus on what the differences and similarities there are between the American culture and the students own culture, as well as just whatever the student found interesting or unusual or something that they weren't expecting. In small groups (2-3) the students then discuss the content, how it is similar to their own culture, how it is different, what is interesting, etc.This allows them to think critically about what they have just seen and practice their speaking skills at the same time.

Finally, as a whole class have them discuss their thoughts and views. Every group shares their ideas. Teacher can ask some questions/have questions prepared if they want to to help students think critically about what they viewed and realize that not everybody in that culture will follow exactly what the video showed  for a non-essentialist view of American culture. 

This activity can be adapted to fit teaching any culture as well as can be added to to make a longer lesson (like a pre-listening activity where students share the stereotypes they are aware of from/about the culture they are going to learn about). For homework the students can write up what they have learned from the video and how it differs and is similar to their own culture.

Week 11 Reflection

This last week was a bit hectic for me all around and now thinking back on it I don't remember it in too much detail. I do remember that I was intrigued by the phase idea of lesson planning when we talked about it on monday. I think that putting a long project in phases can help break up what my seem like an impossible task for the students and a lot of work for the teacher. I like how Elola and Oskoz wrote some examples of phased activities into their article because it gives a good starting point for any teacher who may want to try this kind of approach in their own classrooms. The phases can help students not feel overwhelmed by a larger class project than they are used to and it also eases them in to using the technology and gets them familiar with how they will use the technology before they  have to use it on their own. I would use this kind of lesson planning in my future classes if I wanted a long and more in-depth project created by my students because I feel like this type of planning would help me handle the students early confusion more adeptly as well as help the students cover the large amounts of material they would need to be familiar with to complete their own assignments.

Materials Development #2

Overview

This lesson is designed for a class of upper-intermediate to advanced learners English. This class in mind contains between 14 and 20 students who are all international students at a University in their English language program. The class overall is an integrative skills class that focuses on all four major skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking) over the course of the semester with this specific lesson focusing on speaking and listening skills, but integrating some writing skills in too. The students come from a wide range of L1’s so the use of the students native languages by the teacher rarely, if ever, occurs. English is the language spoken for all aspects of the class from instructions to class discussions.

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce students to podcasts and interviews in podcasts. The students need to learn about podcasts because eventually in the course they will be creating a podcast of their own by interviewing and recording a person who is in a field that interests them. This lesson is the second phase of this multiple phase task. The phases in this lesson are based on the phases from Elola and Oskoz (2011). This lesson will expose the students to the type of technology they will be using later on in the course and also provides examples of what they will be doing for their own projects. 

This lesson focuses on listening and speaking skills in order to target both fluency and accuracy in student speech. By listening to podcasts the students get a feel for what they will need to sound and act like in their own future podcasts. Additionally, listening helps build their listening comprehension skills of authentic material that is for native speakers. By discussing the podcasts the students are speaking in the class and developing fluency which will help them in their own podcasts when interviewing because they are learning the vocabulary needed for interviews as well as becoming familiar with the words by using them multiple times. Finally, using podcasts and interviews keeps the students interested and motivated because they are able to bring their own interests into the classroom and center their final project around what they would like to know more about. This helps the students to participate more and feel more involved and autonomous in their language learning.

Lesson Plan

Level/Course Name: High-Intermediate ELL’s in a University English Program (15 students from various L1 backgrounds)

Lesson Written by: Haley Winters

Lesson Objectives: 

• Students will become familiar with podcasts
• Students will be able to identify podcasts and what makes an interview
• Identify what makes an interview interesting and vocab needed for interviews

This lesson includes (check those that apply):

• Individual work
• Whole class discussion
• Comprehensible input
• Links to past learning
• Listening, speaking, and some writing skills

Pre-lesson Inventory:

• Things to bring to class: List for podcasts, podcast clips needed
• Equipment: Need a computer in the class
• HW to assign: Listen to a podcast on the list on their own time and be ready to discuss next class

3 mins: 

• Take roll
• Review class agenda  

Warm-up Activity (10 min.):  

Teacher and students review interviews from the last class. The question is ‘What makes an interview?’ Class talks about questions, answers, interviewer, interviewee, etc. Teacher reviews the different types of interviews they have seen so far: video interviews, newspaper interviews, radio interviews, news vs. sports vs. celebrity interviews.

Transition: Today we are going to look at a new tool used to give interviews and record them: Podcasts

Pre-listening Activity ( 15 min.): 

Teacher gives some information on podcasts and lets the students know that they will be using podcasts in the future for their next project and giving interviews based on their own interests. While listening to the next podcast clips the students need to keep in mind what interests them and how the participants in the podcasts go about asking questions and talking about the information they have received. Next the teacher will go over the vocabulary needed for the students to understand the following podcast clips. The teacher will write the vocabulary on the board and ask the students if they are familiar with any of the words and then together they will all go over the definitions so that the students have time to write them down and can ask for clarification before going on to the clips for the listening activity.

Transition: the teacher explains that now the students are going to listen to the two podcast clips and they need to pay attention in order to use what they learn later in the semester. 

Listening Activity ( 15 min.):

Interview with Frank Forencich clip; from 50 interviews podcast (5 min)

Interview with Kathryn Mobley clip; from NPR podcast (5 min)

First clip is about a book and the authors life, second clip is about money and business. The teacher can play these clips from Itunes for the students. Before listening to the clips the students are instructed to take notes on what makes the interview interesting or uninteresting and just what they liked and didn’t like about each of the interviews and why.  Once they have listened to the clips the teacher gives them another 5 minutes to finish writing down their thoughts and collecting their notes. 

Transition: The teacher now transitions the students to a discussion. She gets them in to small groups (3 people) and tells them that now we will discuss these clips.

Post-Listening Activity ( 20 min):

Once the teacher has split the class into groups of three she instructs them to discuss their notes with each other. See if they have any similar notes. Did the students in their group like the same things, were they interested by the same parts of the clips, if yes/no then why. Once they have had time to discuss their own thoughts in their groups then the teacher will bring the discussion back to the whole class. As a class the teacher will ask what interested them and what they liked. The teacher will write down these things on the board so that everyone can see the list and can think about these things for their future podcasts. This discussion will help them to start to think about their interests and how they will want to set up their own podcasts. It is the transition to the next phase of this semester project and next they will learn how to use the technology needed to create their own podcast.

Homework (5 mins): 

For homework the students will be given a list of websites that have podcasts that the students can listen to on their own time. These podcasts all involve interviews and for homework the students need to listen to one or more of these podcasts and be ready to discuss these during the next class.

 

Back-up activity (variable-time activity): 

If there is for some reason extra time then the teacher can have the students start thinking about their own interests and writing down ideas for what kind of topic they would like to do for their own interview. They can share these thoughts with classmates and start seeing who has similar interests so they can pair up later to do their own podcast interview.

Assessment: 

Teacher will know if students have understood the activities by their participation in the class discussion and how on task they are during the class period.

Interview Podcast List

BBC The Interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/interview 

NPR Music Interviews: http://www.npr.org/sections/music-interviews/

NPR Interviews: http://www.npr.org/sections/interviews/ 

The Good, the Bad, and the Joblo Movie Podcast: Celebrity Interviews

http://www.joblo.com/movie-podcasts/ 

50 Interviews Podcast: http://authors.podbean.com/ 

Podcasting

This weeks reflection is about podcasting. It will be short because I am gong to integrate podcasting into my Materials Development #2 assignment and don't want to talk too much about it. There are a few things that i want to say though. Before this last week I had no idea just how popular and how many podcasts there actually are out there. I have used Itunes for more than six years and up until now I have never looked at Podcast section of the Itunes store, even though I knew they were there. Since this  class I have now found out that Itunes has the largest selection of podcasts anywhere out there and that there are multitudes of topics that podcasts cover. Another trick I learned is that if you change the country of origin of your Itunes account you can get all the podcasts in the language from that country. I now listen to a few Spanish podcasts to keep up on my Spanish listening skills as well as a few in English that are just interesting. I believe that using podcasts in class can be beneficial and motivating because students can listen to both podcasts that are there to help them learn English as well as podcasts originally for native English speakers that students are interested in. They can be fun, interesting, and exciting for students.

Reflection on Test #2

For this weeks reflection I wanted to reflect on the material that we talked about for the second test of the class. We wrote on Asynchronous CMC, Synchronous CMC, and corpora used for language learning purposes. These have all been discussed before so I will likely make this reflection a rather short one.
First of all I believe that all three resources above can be used in a language learning classroom and can be very effective when done properly. They would all take time though to implement because students must be thoroughly taught how to use the software/website before they can complete any activity/task/project. Also each resource have different advantages and disadvantages:

• For ACMC the benefits are that the students would have time to formulate their thoughts into coherent passages before sending them to anyone else which allows for greater focus on forms and accuracy. ACMC is also good for more input and output for the students and can provide a more informal register for them to practice their L2 like in a blog or through email. 
• For SCMC on the other hand students must have to think on their feet so to speak. This is beneficial when practicing real life situations and conversations and will force the students to focus on negotiating meaning with the other participants as well as thinking quickly in the L2. This also provides more input and output opportunities than a traditional classroom through Skype or an Instant messenger.
• Corpora can be beneficial especially within the realm of reading and writing. A corpus can show learners how the language is really used by showing them real-life data collected by researchers. This can help students learn strategies like inferring meaning from context because they are able to search for words with their collocates. Also, one can be a good resource to use instead of or in addition to a dictionary which can sometimes be confusing and hard to understand if a word has multiple meanings and the corpus can help clarify the definition. Lastly, corpora can be used when teachers are teaching different registers to their students and showing how academic prose and conversation differ, for example, or what parts of speech most commonly occur in a specific register.

These benefits are just a few of the benefits that students can get from these resources. Teachers should definitely research the different options out there to help spruce up their class material and provide the students with access to the L2 in different ways. As long as the teacher keeps in mind the possible difficulties that could arise with using any of the resources above they should be successful in implementing the technology into the classroom and facilitating learning through its use.