CALL

CALL (computer assisted language learning)

Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Current Programs and Projects

Chris Higgins, Gallaudet University

For many years, foreign language teachers have used the computer to provide supplemental exercises. In recent years, advances in computer technology have motivated teachers to reassess the computer and consider it a valuable part of daily foreign language learning. Innovative software programs, authoring capabilities, compact disk technology, and elaborate computer networks are providing teachers with new methods of incorporating culture, grammar, and real language use in the classroom while students gain access to audio, visual, and textual information about the language and the culture of its speakers.

Computer-Based Foreign Language Programs

For many years, basic drill-and-practice software programs dominated the market in computer-assisted language learning (CALL). These programs focused on vocabulary or discrete grammar points. A vast array of drill-and-practice programs are still available; in addition, however, an increasing number of innovative and interactive programs are being developed. Simulation programs, while reinforcing grammar points, present students with real-life situations in which they learn about the culture of a country and the protocol for various situations. For example, the Ticket series by Bluelion Software and Recuerdos de Madrid from D.C. Heath are simulations that provide country-specific situations in a task-based format. PC Globe and encyclopedia-type programs are information programs that allow students to conduct research in the target language. Games such as the foreign language versions of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? by Brøderbund Software orTrivial Pursuit from Gessler publishers provide an entertaining environment for students to learn culture and the target language through problem-solving and competition. Writing assistants, like Salsa and Système-D (Davis, 1992; Garrett, 1991) aid students in writing compositions in the target language by providing help in grammar, style, and verb conjugation and use (Willetts, in press).

 More information: http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/higgin01.html

CLIL

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)

What is CLIL?

new ideas and concepts in traditional curriculum subjects (often the humanities), using the foreign language as the medium of communication - in other words, to enhance the pupils' learning experience by exploiting the synergies between the two subjects. This is often particularly rewarding where there is a direct overlap between the foreign language and the content subject — eg Vichy France, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War.

How does the CLIL approach benefit pupils?

Although it may take a while for pupils to acclimatise to the challenges of CLIL, once they are familiar with the new way of working, demonstrably increased motivation and focus make it possible (and likely) that they will progress at faster-than-usual rates in the content subject, providing that the principles of CLIL teaching are borne in mind during planning and delivery. CLIL aims to improve performance in both the content subject and the foreign language. Research indicates there should be no detrimental effects for the CLIL pupils (and often progress is demonstrably better).

Other advantages include:

• stronger links with the citizenship curriculum (particularly through the use of authentic materials, which offer an alternative perspective on a variety of issues)
• increased student awareness of the value of transferable skills and
  knowledge
• greater pupil confidence.

What are the practical implications of introducing CLIL into the school curriculum?
The content subject should always be the primary focus of any materials used in the CLIL classroom. CLIL should not be used as an opportunity to use texts as glorified vocabulary lists, or to revise concepts already studied in the mother tongue. However, it is impossible to transfer existing content subject lesson plans across without modifying these to take into account pupils' ability in the target language, and therefore the planning process is vital. It is likely that, especially to begin with, lessons will need to be challenging cognitively, with comparatively light linguistic demands. Schools need to design materials to suit the needs of their learners, and to enable them to develop until they are working at high levels of cognitive and linguistic challenge.


What is the best approach to CLIL teaching?
The diversity of CLIL activity in UK schools is striking. It is not possible to generalise to any extent about the subjects chosen, the type of school pioneering such approaches, nor the ability of the learners chosen to participate. The predominant language of the projects is French, although a number of projects are operating in German or Spanish. It appears, then, that no approach to CLIL can be set in stone. One of the purposes of the Content and Language Integration Project is to compare the outcomes of different approaches in a variety of different schools.


What about staffing?
Although availability of CLIL-trained teachers is limited, preliminary research carried out by CILT indicates that schools have adopted a wide variety of different approaches to staffing, from non-native speaker linguists with no specialist content subject knowledge, to native speaker subject content specialists, and every possible permutation in between. CILT's evidence suggests that CLIL teaching is frequently delivered through a combination of solo and team-teaching, often supplemented by collaboration between departments in non-contact time.

How do schools tackle timetabling issues?
CILT research revealed a range of different approaches to timetabling CLIL, from isolated lessons over the school year and 'bilingual days', to modules and even occasionally a whole year's commitment. Many schools are starting to combine such work with class visits and/or partnerships with link schools abroad. Some schools choose to launch fast-track GCSE foreign language courses in Years 8, 9 and 10, after an initial diagnostic period. These run alongside lessons where the foreign language learning is integrated with another curriculum subject. See also organisational issues.


What about national accreditation for courses and modules taught in this way?
There is currently no formal accreditation for bilingual work in the UK. This in part explains the preponderance of KS3 initiatives in the case studies that CILT is monitoring.

more from http://www.cilt.org.uk/secondary/14-19/intensive_and_immersion/clil.aspx

Writing Skill

Teaching EFL Writing

Teaching Writing in the EFL Classroom

We have created a podcast to complement this page.  You can download it from our podcast page.

Basic Concepts:

Teaching writing is often about teaching grammar.  If grammar comes up anywhere in EFL, it is in the writing classroom.  Most EFL students will have some writing skills when you get them.  But they will often have an idea that their writing is quite good and generally it will be quite poor.

Many EFL students will have had some experience with paragraph and essay writing, but, in fact, they often will have quite poor writing skills at the sentence level.  Therefore, you will need to take them back to sentence level and begin to teach them very basic structure and how to write simply.  Run-on and fragmented sentences will be very common until you correct those errors.

The more basic you get with your writing students, the better.  Once a good foundation is built, you can move on to basic paragraph writing and on to essays.  These skills take time to develop though and you will find that most textbooks will move your students forward too quickly.

Expanded Concepts:

Read and review these links:

General Writing Concerns

Sentence Writing Skills

Teaching Sentence Fluency

Two EFL writing manuscripts are available to you from TEFL Boot Camp – free.

Download them and read them and you will see EXACTLY how to go about teaching basic writing skills to your EFL students.

These two books are very methodical in their approach to helping students improve their writing skills.  When  you are teaching you will find that EFL writing textbooks move far too quickly from point to point and these books were written specifically to help students practice and acquire a skill and become competent with it, before moving on.

Sentence Writing Text Book – a draft manuscript for a sentence writing book – you can use this with your students too!  Downloads as a PDF file. 1.827kb

You can also download an “Intermediate” writing Textbook written for university  students.  The book prepares students for better paragraphs and eventual essay writing:

Intermediate Writing Textbook – draft manuscript – downloads a PDF file 2,420 kb

Specifically look over the contents of each section and the order of the contents of each book to get a good idea of what needs to come first, followed by what and what next and so on.

more from http://teflbootcamp.com/teaching-skills/teaching-efl-writing/

Reading Skill

Reading Activities. Pre-, While- And Postreading Activities

Reading is one of the ways of learning English or other languages. There are reading tasks in tests, exams and during learning process. In this post I offer the readers some typical ways of presenting reading tasks and reading activities for learners of foreign language according to PWP Model.

Pre-Reading Activities

•   Doing reading preference survey, reading activity survey
• Semantic mapping
• Discussion activities (“what does this word, picture, object make you think of?”)
• Telling a story
• Relating experiences associated with reading theme (“this story reminds me of…”)
• Explaining a concept or process (“How does xxx work?”)
• Asking students to explain a concept or process
• Describing an object that you bring in
• Keying on vocabulary from other pre-reading activities
• Taking a position (on a statement or a quote)
• Consensus forming (making choices as groups)
• Quick writing on a topic or a key word
• Taking a topical survey (what do all the people in the class think about xxx?)
• Making a questionnaire (group activity)
• Writing up survey/questionnaire results (group activity)
• Filling in a flow chart
• Filling in a modified cloze passage
• Guessing text genre from the title (why is text organized in a certain way?)
• Skimming in order to choose/make-up best title
• Posing questions about a topic (teacher or students) (know, want to know, have learned)
• Ordering chapter headings in order of perceived interest
• Ordering chapter sub-heading to predict arrangement of information
• Reading a letter that takes some perspective on the text, have students identify the writer
• Relating a topic to general course content
• Reading an excerpt—predicting the rest of the text
• Asking for and finding specific facts (coordinate with scanning activity)
• Writing a reaction or opinion after a discussion
• Listening to a lecture and taking notes, using the notes to compare with a section of a reading
• Looking at pictures, captions, and/or headings and then discussing or predicting
• Reading first sentences of each paragraph and predict
• Finding definitions
• Reading only sub-headings for discussion
• Reading only underlined sentences for discussion (teacher underlines)
• Seeing a film, video, slide set, picture sequence, TV show in order to discuss, write, debate
• Bringing in a person to talk to the class
• Taking a short excursion to a relevant location

• While-Reading Activities

• What comes next? List the possibilities
• Provide two summaries, which is most accurate so far?
• Give alternative chapter/section headings
• Use map, chart, table, etc. to outline progress so far
• Ask students to elaborate on some part of the text just read: a process, description, story, etc.
• Fill in skeleton story line up to the point of reading, same with outline—ask what will come next
• Do a flyer, poster, ad, or announcement based on reading to date
• Correct a summary full of errors
• List sequence of events or steps in correct order as a chart
• Make a news story from reading-to-date; report as reading unfolds
• Playmaking, role-playing
• Listen to a lecture excerpt related to a section just read, or to be read
• Make statements about the reading; have the students rate the statements for accuracy, opinion
• Ask questions, give definitions, focus on vocabulary—students find words they want to remember
• Give information for next section; students make appropriate questions
• 
  
• Post-Reading Activities

• Scanning for key vocabulary; given definition, have them find other occurrences
• Fill in or draw grids, charts, maps, tables, outlines
• Expand or change a semantic map
• Ask questions
• ETR (relate Experience, read Text, Relate experiences to text)
• Write a reaction (express opinion)
• Connect with information from other articles
• Match information
• T/F statements
• Fix wrong information in a summary
• Listen to lecture and connect to reading; note points of difference, points of similarity
• Write a summary, fill in a summary
• Students take/make sentences, state as T/F, other students get points if agree with right answer
• Report on reading from different frames (reporter, professional, editor, colleague)
• Ranking of importance of information in reading (start with a list of statements about reading)
• Flow chart the information
• Decide what information can be eliminated (have lists of statements)
• What is the attitude/viewpoint of the writer, what is the genre of the text, who is the audience? How do you know?
• List examples that appear in text; what would be better examples for the students?
• Write a reaction evaluation as groups
• Write newspaper headlines
• Write sub-headings for text sections

more from: http://passexam.cc.ua/reading-activities-pre-while-and-postreading-activities/

Speaking Skill

Speaking Skill

Speaking is an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing and receiving and processing information (Brown, 1994) It is a productive skill because speaker is the one who give information or sender. The receptive skill is reading and listening.

Teaching speaking mean helping students to understand voice, vocabulary, grammar, or linguistic competence. Speaking lessons can follow the usual pattern of preparation, presentation, practice. The teacher can use the"preparation" step to establish a context for the speaking task. In "presentation", the teacher can provide learners with a preproduction model that furthers learner comprehension and helps them become more attentive observers of language use. "Practice" involves learners in reproducing the targeted structure. (Brown, 1994; Burns & Joyce, 1997; Carter & McCarthy, 1995).

Speaking is key to communication. By considering what good speakers do, what speaking tasks can be used in class, and what specific needs learners report, teachers can help learners improve their speaking and overall oral competency.


more from: http://mark2mint.blogspot.com/2011/02/speaking-skill.html

Listening Skill

Listening Skill

Listening is one of the most challenging skills for our students to develop and yet also one of the most important. By developing their ability to listen well we develop our students' ability to become more independent learners, as by hearing accurately they are much more likely to be able to reproduce accurately, refine their understanding of grammar and develop their own vocabulary.

In this article I intend to outline a framework that can be used to design a listening lesson that will develop your students' listening skills and look at some of the issues involved.
  - The basic framework
  - Pre-listening
  - While listening
  - Post-listening

The basic framework

The basic framework on which you can construct a listening lesson can be divided into three main stages.

  - Pre-listening, during which we help our students prepare to listen. 

  - While listening, during which we help to focus their attention on the listening text and guide the development of their understanding of it.
  - Post-listening, during which we help our students integrate what they have learnt from the text into their existing knowledge.

Pre-listening

There are certain goals that should be achieved before students attempt to listen to any text. These are motivation, contextualisation, and preparation.

  - Motivation: It is enormously important that before listening students are motivated to listen, so you should try to select a text that they will find interesting and then design tasks that will arouse your students' interest and curiosity.

  - Contextualisation: When we listen in our everyday lives we hear language within its natural environment, and that environment gives us a huge amount of information about the linguistic content we are likely to hear. Listening to a tape recording in a classroom is a very unnatural process. The text has been taken from its original environment and we need to design tasks that will help students to contextualise the listening and access their existing knowledge and expectations to help them understand the text. 

  - Preparation: To do the task we set students while they listen there could be specific vocabulary or expressions that students will need. It's vital that we cover this before they start to listen as we want the challenge within the lesson to be an act of listening not of understanding what they have to do.

While listening

When we listen to something in our everyday lives we do so for a reason. Students too need a reason to listen that will focus their attention. For our students to really develop their listening skills they will need to listen a number of times - three or four usually works quite well - as I've found that the first time many students listen to a text they are nervous and have to tune in to accents and the speed at which the people are speaking.

Ideally the listening tasks we design for them should guide them through the text and should be graded so that the first listening task they do is quite easy and helps them to get a general understanding of the text. Sometimes a single question at this stage will be enough, not putting the students under too much pressure.

The second task for the second time students listen should demand a greater and more detailed understanding of the text. Make sure though that the task doesn't demand too much of a response. Writing long responses as they listen can be very demanding and is a separate skill in itself, so keep the tasks to single words, ticking or some sort of graphical response.

The third listening task could just be a matter of checking their own answers from the second task or could lead students towards some more subtle interpretations of the text.

Listening to a foreign language is a very intensive and demanding activity and for this reason I think it's very important that students should have 'breathing' or 'thinking' space between listenings. I usually get my students to compare their answers between listenings as this gives them the chance not only to have a break from the listening, but also to check their understanding with a peer and so reconsider before listening again.


 Post-listening

There are two common forms that post-listening tasks can take. These are reactions to the content of the text, and analysis of the linguistic features used to express the content.

- Reaction to the text: Of these two I find that tasks that focus students reaction to the content are most important. Again this is something that we naturally do in our everyday lives. Because we listen for a reason, there is generally a following reaction. This could be discussion as a response to what we've heard - do they agree or disagree or even believe what they have heard? - or it could be some kind of reuse of the information they have heard.

- Analysis of language: The second of these two post-listening task types involves focusing students on linguistic features of the text. This is important in terms of developing their knowledge of language, but less so in terms of developing students' listening skills. It could take the form of an analysis of verb forms from a script of the listening text or vocabulary or collocation work. This is a good time to do form focused work as the students have already developed an understanding of the text and so will find dealing with the forms that express those meanings much easier.

more from: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/a-framework-planning-a-listening-skills-lesson

CBI

Content-based instruction (CBI)

Submitted by NikPeachey on 13 August, 2003 - 12:00

In recent years content-based instruction has become increasingly popular as a means of developing linguistic ability. It has strong connections to project work, task-based learning and a holistic approach to language instruction and has become particularly popular within the state school secondary (11 - 16 years old) education sector.

• What is content-based instruction?

• What does a content-based instruction lesson look like?

• What are the advantages of content-based instruction?

• What are the potential problems?

• Conclusions

What is content-based instruction?
The focus of a CBI lesson is on the topic or subject matter. During the lesson students are focused on learning about something. This could be anything that interests them from a serious science subject to their favourite pop star or even a topical news story or film. They learn about this subject using the language they are trying to learn, rather than their native language, as a tool for developing knowledge and so they develop their linguistic ability in the target language. This is thought to be a more natural way of developing language ability and one that corresponds more to the way we originally learn our first language.

What does a content-based instruction lesson look like?
There are many ways to approach creating a CBI lesson. This is one possible way.

• Preparation
  • Choose a subject of interest to students.
  • Find three or four suitable sources that deal with different aspects of the subject. These could be websites, reference books, audio or video of lectures or even real people.

• During the lesson
  • Divide the class into small groups and assign each group a small research task and a source of information to use to help them fulfil the task.
  • Then once they have done their research they form new groups with students that used other information sources and share and compare their information.
  • There should then be some product as the end result of this sharing of information which could take the form of a group report or presentation of some kind.

What are the advantages of content-based instruction?

• It can make learning a language more interesting and motivating. Students can use the language to fulfil a real purpose, which can make students both more independent and confident.

• Students can also develop a much wider knowledge of the world through CBI which can feed back into improving and supporting their general educational needs.

• CBI is very popular among EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teachers as it helps students to develop valuable study skills such as note taking, summarising and extracting key information from texts.

• Taking information from different sources, re-evaluating and restructuring that information can help students to develop very valuable thinking skills that can then be transferred to other subjects.

• The inclusion of a group work element within the framework given above can also help students to develop their collaborative skills, which can have great social value.

What are the potential problems?

• Because CBI isn't explicitly focused on language learning, some students may feel confused or may even feel that they aren't improving their language skills. Deal with this by including some form of language focused follow-up exercises to help draw attention to linguistic features within the materials and consolidate any difficult vocabulary or grammar points.

• Particularly in monolingual classes, the overuse of the students' native language during parts of the lesson can be a problem. Because the lesson isn't explicitly focused on language practice students find it much easier and quicker to use their mother tongue. Try sharing your rationale with students and explain the benefits of using the target language rather than their mother tongue.

• It can be hard to find information sources and texts that lower levels can understand. Also the sharing of information in the target language may cause great difficulties. A possible way around this at lower levels is either to use texts in the students' native language and then get them to use the target language for the sharing of information and end product, or to have texts in the target language, but allow the students to present the end product in their native language. These options should reduce the level of challenge.

• Some students may copy directly from the source texts they use to get their information. Avoid this by designing tasks that demand students evaluate the information in some way, to draw conclusions or actually to put it to some practical use. Having information sources that have conflicting information can also be helpful as students have to decide which information they agree with or most believe.

Conclusions
While CBI can be both challenging and demanding for the teacher and the students, it can also be very stimulating and rewarding. The degree to which you adopt this approach may well depend on the willingness of your students, the institution in which you work and the availability of resources within your environment. It could be something that your school wants to consider introducing across the curriculum or something that you experiment with just for one or two lessons. Whichever you choose to do I would advise that you try to involve other teachers within your school, particularly teachers from other subjects. This could help you both in terms of finding sources of information and in having the support of others in helping you to evaluate your work.

Lastly, try to involve your students. Get them to help you decide what topics and subjects the lessons are based around and find out how they feel this kind of lessons compares to your usual lessons. In the end they will be the measure of your success.


more from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/articles/content-based-instruction