Some ideas for making listening practice more accessible, providing activities at a variety of levels, where students have control over the audio player (can pause, repeat, re-play etc)...
...AND all of this with minimal prep time for teachers, as all of the activities 1 to 10 below are generated automatically based on a single text.
In the article on the link below Krashen and Jarvis suggest that the term CALL is obsolete because it focuses on conscious learning, whereas most students use technology to access online resources un-related to conscious language learning and acquire language as a by-product of their browsing. Have a read of it. It's only short - 5 pages - won't take up much of your time.
Jarvis, H. & Krashen, S. 2014. Is CALL obsolete? Language Acquisition and Language Learning Revisited in a Digital Age. TESL-EJ 17(4). http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2014_is_call_obsolete_pdf.pdf
The 2 results in the above paper are:
This is an output activity that can be used by comprehensible input teachers, no? (See my reasoning below if you're not convinced)
See if you can put the pieces of this text in the correct order. It starts with "¿Por qué...?" (=why?)
Can you understand the text?
Use the word list beneath the exercise to help you to understand the full text:
I just wanted to share this with readers of this blog, because it made me smile :)
Following my blog post yesterday about creating a sequence of several (mostly sequencing) activities based on the same short story, with the activities gradually increasing in difficulty, and with the focus on speed AND accuracy... today I received the following email on the moretprs yahoo group email, from Ann Schroeder of Cincinnati, Ohio:
"I have been playing with the Moggin sequence that you sent (http://www.textivate.com/sequence-w4njn1). I teach German and know just enough Spanish (from TPRS conferences, of course!) to impress the students. I don't really know enough to actually read that text (maybe 60-70%). I tried the activities to see how much my German kids really have to *know* in order to complete the work (versus using quotes and punctuation to guess.)
"The first couple were easy for me. Now, on the 3x5, I'm challenged, but I've seen the text enough times that it feels do-able. It's forcing me to look at the text more closely, distinguish between what the boy says and what the girl says, and understand the smaller words that I was originally able to ignore."IT'S BEAUTIFUL!!! It's exactly what I want to happen with my students! I can't say enough great things about textivate. And if you already subscribe, don't forget to browse the blog every once in a while for ideas like this. Fantastic!"
And then a little later, this:
"And an update: I just went to the Spanish teacher and retold a truncated version in Spanish during lunch! Yay!"
Really made my day :0)
This link opens the activity shown in the image above:
http://www.textivate.com/frames.php?ext=50069143432406z&res=m_1in4-50069143432406ze1
This is a cool way of checking and reinforcing understanding of key elements of a text. In this case it is a very short text, but the same principle could easily apply to any text.
What we have here is essentially a reading activity with a multiple choice matching activity. Note the following:
Below is a link to a sequence of Spanish reading activities which start easy and get progressively harder. Each activity has to be passed with a fairly high score. All of the activities are based on the SAME text, so the content is repeated over and over.
If you create a textivate resource which includes a text plus matching - as outlined in this blog post - it's dead easy to add a "Find the French" (or Spanish, German, Italian, Latin or whatever) activity, with just a couple of clicks.
So if you have a Text + Match activity such as this...
You may have come across this blog post based on using an image of a wordcloud to support a textivate resource.
Well I think that, essentially, the main benefit of a wordcloud is that it provides the student with a record of all of the words in the text, so that they have a reference for spelling, and so that if they are doing an activity such as the one shown in the above image, they can look at the list if they are stuck on a particular word.
Then this got me thinking that it would be even better if the list was in alphabetical order...
