Week 3 Reflective Blog

Week 3 is one of the busiest weeks that I have experienced since the beginning of this course. A lot of materials to read and many tasks to fulfill. The activities and tasks are becoming more challenging than before. I find the area of oral/aural skills interesting. I read a lot of materials during this week in listening and speaking skills. The article written by Lindsey ‘Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials’ ESL Magazine article was of great concern to me . These two areas are to a great extent neglected in the school textbooks in Sudan. Lack of experienced and well trained teachers make it difficult to teach these two skills. So, you will find that our English school textbooks concentrate on teaching reading and writing skills. But , private schools , which are many nowadays do teach listening and speaking to their students. In addition to Lindsey’s article, I read to Julia Gong ‘The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second /Foreign Language Speaking Skills’. I had experienced attending video conferences organized by the American Embassy in Sudan. They were great and usually discussed hot issues in the area of teaching and learning foreign languages. Julia gives hints on the use of video conferences as well as electronic dictionaries. The latter are very popular, especially with MA students who study translation. To activate my memory I started browsing the websites that we had in week 2, searching for lesson plans . I recommend the following website for conversation lesson plan http://esl.about.com/od/conversationlessonplans/Conversation_Lesson_Plans_for_English_Learners_at_All_Levels.htm The second website that I find useful for teachers is : http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/first-day/550635.article Every day I discover more useful websites and search engines. What I forgot to say was that in my last lecture with my MA students I showed them how to search in the internet. I shared with them some websites like Noodeltools, Intute , and many others. We spent nearly two hours surfing different websites and trying different search engines. Then we come to the great and nice experience of designing our own delicious pages. Now it is our own e-libraries. Whenever I read an article, book, etc and if I consider it as great I just add it to my delicious page. I find the idea very near to that of Endnote! Isn’t it Donna? But , this one is easy to design and easy to use. Now I added more than thirty references related to my area of interest. I read many examples about reports of previous projects. They helped me to enrich my ideas with respect to my own project. This week we did tough, but challenging tasks and activities and I benefited a lot. Nada