English as a Second Language Podcast

I found an interesting podcast episode,"talking to a mechanic", from the ESLPOD website. I would like to use it in my ESL class for students’ practical English conversation. The episode itself does not directly teach us how to speak English perfectly in terms of grammar or structure. However, I think it is useful because it focuses more on our daily life conversation that could possibly happen anytime under certain circumstances. Here, the podcast introduces us how to speak to a mechanic, when we have a problem with a car. After providing an sample conversation, it also explains for the details on vocabulary and some informal expressions which are usually used in a colloquial language. It is going to be useful if I play this podcast episode as a resource of practicing English conversation in my classroom, and I might also ask learners to make their own conversation that they could use in a certain place or situation.  This can be used as a part of listening and speaking practices in learning English as a second language as well, and more interesting episodes regarding ‘everyday life conversation’ can be introduced for ESL learners in the same way.   

ePals..

ePals is a great learning space providing various resources and effective ways of learning for K-12 learners  all over the world. It is useful especially for today’s society, which is globalized digitally advanced because anyone can participate in the digital network learning and get information  from each other without paying too much money. To me, the most effective aspect of ePals seems that it is aiming for global community and leads a lot of collaborative classrooms over different countries. By joining a variety of classrooms learners benefit in finding their own interest field in wide learning areas and they communicate with other members. It also provides a map which allows learners to easily find the country they want to learn about and its characteristics as well. In terms of this collaborative learning system, it can  be very useful for language learners. Students can improve their language skills by communicating and exchanging resources via emails or blogs each other and get more insights of different cultural perspectives too. Thus, I would encourage my students to take advantages of finding information or resources they need for their second language learning. Also, I might share my own work and philosophy in teaching, as a teacher, with other teachers who have the same purposes of teaching as me. Such feature of ‘international reading association’ may provide me some good ideas that I can adopt for my own teaching.    

A digital story - four skills in language learning.

Try our video maker at Animoto.

In this video, I discussed four skills that I will be focusing on during my lessons. Since this is an ESL classroom for adults, I think that students need to be fluent in all areas of language skills, reading, writing, listening, and speaking. In terms of that, this video will work as an introduction in my first class to show and emphasize the four skills as a goal for this course.

Digital Storytelling (part 2)

Read my story here

I created a story which will open up my lesson in first day of the class. This is my own creative introduction to welcome my ESL students and to introduce the goals of learning a second language before beginning actual lessons. I think this story will encourage students by allowing them to have an idea of what they are expected to do in this classroom and to prepare accordingly. Although this is a short story, I hope it comprehends everything meaningful that I want to convey to my students.

Digital Storytelling

Illustration By Frits

According to The Educational Use of Digital Storytelling, “digital story telling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories”. In today’s education, it can be used in a wide range of learning content with various ways of exploring stories.

For example, we can use images, video, movie, audio or narration as a means of telling a story on our computer. Utilizing digital stories is a very effective way of learning especially in today’s globalized society because people from any cultures can share their stories and participate to collaborative learning freely through the computer-based tools, without border barrier.

7 Things You Should Know About Digital Storytelling  talks about the functions of  digital stories, which can be “instructional, persuasive, historical, or reflective, and the resources available to incorporate into a digital story are virtually limitless, giving the storyteller enormous creative latitude”. Although educators can use it for any topics and contents with his/her own creation, it might be especially useful in a language classroom because such tools like audio, video, or images allow students to learn more about cultural aspects and different perspectives of people from other cultures as well as to improve their listening ability.

Thus, we could use digital storytelling as one of teaching methods for following purposes:

-Illustrating cultural background in a language classroom.

-Providing visual aids to help students better understanding of learning contents     

-Encouraging learners to be more motivated to their learning with authentic and interesting materials.

-Providing opportunities for sharing one’s thoughts and experiences on a specific topic.

-Creating a space for communication and independent learning  outside the classroom.