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Happy Spring!

This is Part 1 of my Final Exam

EFL537

• [RSS] del.icio.us/efl537
• [RSS] EFL537.com Main Feed
• [RSS] English Through Stories
• [RSS] Englishfeed
• [RSS] ESLpodTV
• [RSS] Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing
• [RSS] jefflebow.com
• [RSS] Latest Issue of Computer Assisted Language Learning

* [RSS] del.icio.us/efl537–This is the del.icio.us links for our EFL537 Class. It is included here to provide a cross-section of sites relevant to this class and the topics we have discussed.

* [RSS] EFL537.com Main Feed–This is the link to our class information site. This site acted as our Blackboard for our class activities and communications.

* [RSS] English Through Stories–This site contains short stories that are good for English language learners. The language used to tell the stories is very clear and words are explained within the context of the story. This site would be good for older students who need listening practice.

* [RSS] Englishfeed –This site also has short podcasts on a wide variety of subjects for the adult English language learner (i.e. business meetings, word stress). Each podcast includes some written text on the page for vocabulary explanations. New podcasts are posted monthly.

* [RSS] ESLpodTV–This site sounds the audio from short TV shows (stories). The stories have a tone similar to soap operas. This site would also be more appropriate for older students (certainly not for young children).

* [RSS] Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing–This is where Grammar Girl lives. Her podcasts are all about explaining and clarifying English grammar. The content is clear, informative and accurate with a little humor thrown in for good measure.

* [RSS] jefflebow.com–This is our (Winter 2007 EFL537) fearless leader’s own website. It is a blog venue. It is new and there are only a few blogs.

* [RSS] Latest Issue of Computer Assisted Language Learning–This is the location of one of the CALL online professional journals. I included it here because this is the type of computer content one could subscribe to (yes, they do have a subscription fee) and receive online. This is the current state of the art for many professional journals.

This is my first podcast. It is a reflection on my first half of EFL537, Computer-assisted Language Learning.

Click Here to Listen.

This is my Chinswing discussion on using computers to teach English language in the elementary grades. Please join the discussion. Just click on the link.
Chinswing

MY DEL.ICIO.US LINKS

CITATION HELP

Online! Citation Guide

This is an excellent resource for any kind of academic writing. The site offers APA, MLA, Chicago Style, and others. It appears to be a thorough, accurate resource for citing research material sources. The language used is easy to understand.

CULTURE

Ethnologue, Web Version

This is an excellent site for identifying a student’s home language, home culture, cultural customs, and the student’s home country’s political climate. This site is especially helpful for teachers of refugees.

PODCASTING

Chinswing

This is a BETA Test version of a site where people can post podcasts to conduct discussions on a wide variety of topics. It is very easy to use after the necessary registration process.

POWERPOINT

How To’s

This site was created by Christine Bauer-Ramazani (one of my EVO PowerPoint online course moderators). The site provides helpful explanations and solutions for PowerPoint users, novice to advanced.

Plug-in Free Streaming PowerPoint and Video

This is a free download for compressing large PowerPoint presentations. It would be excellent for the longer PPT presentations sometimes required for lessons that are taught during block-scheduling and are longer than the normal 15-20 minute lesson presentation timing usually seen in American schools.

PowerPoint 2002 Tutorial for PCs

This is a tutorial for learning PPT or answering questions about creating a PPT presentation. The sub-headings are helpful for honing in on the exact nature of a PPT challenge.

SlideShare

This is a website that makes it possible to share PowerPoint slides with others who do not have PPT on their computers. The slides are easily uploaded and exported to another web address. Animation and slide transitions are not included in the transformation, but slides are transferred unchanged.

Style Workshop

This site provides a free trial download of flashy PowerPoint accessories: templates, special effects, buttons, backgrounds, stock photographs, clipart, graphics, and a lot more. The designs in this software have a little more “pop” than the standard PPT accessories.

PRONUNCIATION

Eva Easton’s Authentic American Pronunciation

This is an excellent site for American English pronunciation. The site is good for language learners as well as language teachers. Audio is very good.

The Tongue Twister Database

This is a large source for tongue twisters to use for pronunciation practice for the sounds of English. Twisters are not listed in any order, yet the broad selection is worth the effort it takes to find a twister for a particular sound.

Tongue Twisters

A great site for tongue twisters for English pronunciation practice. Twisters on this site are listed in alphabetical order for quick searches.

READING

BBC - Skillswise - Words - Grammar

This is a great website for grammar: rules, explanations, games (with sound), quizzes, worksheets, etc. Of course it is British English, but it is still excellent for grammar.

Dolch Kit

This may be the best English sight-word website. There are lists for students, lists and record keeping materials for teachers. There are game templates, games, flash cards, and much more. This is a must use sight for elementary language teachers.

Learn to Read

This is a great site for beginning readers to practice and gain confidence in their reading skills. This is where Zac the Rat, and other rhyming friendly animal characters live. The site provides practice for alphabet sounds, short and long vowels, blends, digraphs, stories, sight words, and much, much more.

Phonics Interactivities

This site provides interactive computer phonics games grouped by level: Pre-K–k, grades 1-2, 3-4, 5-6. Alphabet, vocabulary with pictures and words, vowels, consonants, blends, digraphs. These activities would be great for use in language usage centers in elementary English language classrooms.

Reading is Fundamental

These are interesting stories for young children to listen to and read along with while simple animated illustrations are displayed. This would be good for children who do not have anyone at home to read aloud to them.

TEACHING

All Kinds of Minds

This site offers brief explanations and helpful tips for some common problems often presented when teaching children. It is not specifically for language learning but for learning and teaching in general.

BBC - Skillswise - Words - Grammar

This is a great website for grammar: rules, explanations, games (with sound), quizzes, worksheets, etc. Of course it is British English, but it is still excellent for grammar.

TEACHING ELL

Dave’s ESL Cafe

This site contains everything imaginable for the English language teacher and learner.The is the site for ELL ideas, lessons, links, explanations, podcasts, discussion forums.

TESL/TEFL/TESOL/ESL/EFL/ESOL Links

This site is maintained by The Internet TESL Journal. It contains more than 12,000 links for students and teachers of English. Links are to articles on language teaching and learning, lessons, language teaching methods, games, jokes, and much more. This is an indispensable resource.

everythingESL.net

EverythingESL is a resource for ELL teachers. This site has good links to other resources. It also contains lesson plans, links to relevant articles, printable materials, and much, much more.

VOCABULARY

BubbleShare

This site enables the user to add text explanations to images that will be used in websites and other media presentation. The unique feature of this site is that the text can also be in audio form. Each image can have up to 30 seconds of audio attached to it. Files are easily exported.

Flickr - Photo Sharing

This site is a very easy-to-use place to store and manage images found online or one’s own photos. Images can be stored and exported to websites or used for other media presentations for ESL/EFL lessons.

UVic’s Language Teaching Clipart Library

This site offers a wide variety of free to use clipart for language teaching. Searches on the site are made easier by the topic galleries. Great place to look for clipart for vocabulary illumination.

FreeFoto.com

This wonderful site has more than 100,000 open source photos available in over 3000 categories. Photos are good quality and easy to use. Excellent resource for teaching vocabulary.

Freeware

This site is the jumping off point for open source images that are so helpful when searching for material for ELL vocabulary lessons. The links provide clipart as well as photos.

Here is a link to My Del.icio.us 

This is one of my first CALL projects. It is a quiz that would be taken on a computer. I created the quiz with software called Hot Potatoes.

HotPotatoes Quiz

Here is an example of a lesson plan I originally wrote for teaching without technology. When I participated in the EVO (Electronic Village Online) Session on PowerPoint I decided to adapt this lesson to a slide presentation. I thought the lesson might be more effective using slides on a computer screen. The first 2 items are the original lesson plan and the report/reflection on the plan after I taught the lesson. The third item links to the original PowerPointPresentation of this lesson.

• Lesson Plan on Subject & Object Pronouns
• Report and Reflection on Subject and Object Pronouns Lesson
• Link to PowerPoint Version of this lesson.

HINT: Listen to this podcast by clicking on the mp3 icon at the end of this post.

Hello. This is Kelly

And this is Jamie.

KELLY: Jamie and I are going to talk to you about ways to overcome common obstacle faced by ELL teachers who want to implement CALL in their English language classrooms.

Probably the most common obstacle to implementing CALL in public elementary schools is the school administration’s reluctance to support the use of computers in English language instruction.

In order to address this obstacle the administrators will need to see some proof that CALL can really help language students learn English.

• First, do your research and gather some solid data from studies that show how well CALL works in improving specific language skills.
  • For example—Studies showing improved recall of vocabulary through electronic glosses could be cited like the research done in 2000 by Laufer and Hill (Levy & Stockwell, 2006 p. 187)
  • Or the research conducted by Nikolova in 2000 and Yeh and Wang in 2003 (Levy & Stockwell, 2006, p. 187) that demonstrated how pictures and video clips enhanced vocabulary acquisition.
  • Other studies on the effectiveness of CALL for learning pronunciation and improving reading could be cited.
  • Educational websites could be introduced and briefly discussed. Give a hard copy list of good sites for students to use in CALL. You could also send links to the sites in an email to the administrator.
  • For example—sites like:

• Starfall.com site for word work and stories
• Rif.org Reading is Fundamental site for stories
• SadlerOxford.com site for work work

JAMIE: An issue I have is that I travel from school to school and don’t have a set computer to use; especially for record keeping. I need to try to convince the administration that as an itinerant teacher it would be beneficial for me to have a laptop computer.

KELLY: Another major obstacle to implementing CALL that we face is the lack of funding for computer hardware and software.

One solution might be to write a grant for funds for equipment and or software. Often grants can be written to cover initial expenses of hardware purchases. Other grants can be written for additional peripherals like software to address specific language learning needs.

• Another solution is to use open source software to set up CALL activities is another option:
  • HotPotatoes Quizes
  • The open source slide presentation software through Open Office
  • Audacity

JAMIE: There are also many websites available that can be used for little or no money at all. Some examples of these would be:

1. Bloglines (teacher can create a page for students to write their own blogs)
2. Blogger (another site free site for students to write blogs)
3. Chinswing (students could start a discussion thread about any topic they wanted)

KELLY: Frequently the only computers available to us as ELL teachers are the old computers that are being discarded by the mainstream staff.

These computers often still work but not with the newer software and they may also have trouble handling the state of the art Internet connection.

Here are some solutions:

• Use the basic language activities that do not require the most up-to-date computer operating systems. Use games that do not require flash plugins.
• Often older software is still available on-line or on disk or CD for reading, rhymes, and other phonics skills.
• Sometime teachers have older software CDs they can no longer use because they have new computers in their classrooms. They will often be glad to give their old computer CDs to the ELL department.

JAMIE: Another obstacle that Kelly and I both deal with every day is a limited internet connection. In my teaching environment most of the computers do have internet connection but I often find that the connection is down more than it is working. Kelly has expressed that she has a similar situation. Kelly and I came up with a couple of solutions to this obstacle.

• One solution is to use more downloadable games and activities from the internet. Kelly and I have found many sites where games can be downloaded to the computer’s hard drive and be used that way. There are also a variety of software games and such that can be used so we don’t need to connect to the internet.
• Another solution is to use PowerPoint presentations for teaching. This alleviates the problem of having to even be connected to the internet. I also think that having student do more things like PowerPoint for projects would be beneficial.

KELLY: Limited computer access is a difficult challenge for both of us, especially when the mainstream classrooms have regular access to computers but we as ELL staff, and our ELL students, do not have easy regular access to computers.

• Often the school library will have computers which can be used for limited times. These computers are usually best used for quiet (no sound) vocabulary building, phonics and other reading activities.
• For small groups—use one notebook computer that students can see at the table. Conduct the lesson with material (images, video) on the computer screen.
• For larger groups—use the data projector with one notebook computer for presentation of media content to enhance the language lesson.
  • PowerPoint (or similar) slide presentations lend themselves nicely to this format

JAMIE: One of the obstacles that Kelly and I face in our current teaching situations is limited instructional time. Kelly sees her students for 30 minutes a day while I see most of my students for about 40 minutes a day. This short time is an obstacle because by the time the computer is set up 10 minutes has gone by. It is especially a problem for me because I spend about 10 minutes of my time period picking up the students and trying to find a place to work. Kelly and I came up with two solutions to this obstacle.

• The first one is to try to have the computers set up and ready to go before the class begins. This would help to alleviate wasting the 10 minutes it takes to log all students on and get them to the correct screen. This would mean that time could be used to explain the instructions or what the task is for that day. This would help to maximize the time that students have to actually be working on the computer.
• Another solution is to find ways to use the computer as a teaching tool. Instead of having the students working on the computers we could show something on the screen to begin teaching a lesson. For example, we could use PowerPoint to help present the vocabulary of a lesson.

Conclusion

KELLY: There are many obstacles commonly faced by public school ELL teachers who want to implement CALL in their teaching. These are some workable solutions. The implementation of CALL requires patience, perseverance, and creativity.

JAMIE: With a little organized effort many of these obstacles can be overcome and our students will reap the benefits. Their language learning will be more effective, and they should become proficient speakers, readers, and writers more quickly because of your efforts.

Resource Levy, M. & Stockwell, G. ( 2006). CALL Dimensions: Options and issues in computer-assisted language learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Obstacle Analysis: Obstacles to CALL Implementation in Public School

This website is a portal to my efforts to incorporate computer-

assisted language learning (CALL) in my teaching. I welcome

your review and comments. Thank you for your interest.

MY CALL TOOL KIT

• SeaMonkey–an easy to use tool for creating web friendly text documents. This software has more options than Xinha for manipulating text. It’s features are more similar to a word processor than Xinha. Links can be created and images can be imported in SeaMonkey.

• Xinha–a tool which enables the manipulation of text in a website post or page. Text can be entered with some interesting features (i.e. different fonts, font sizes, colors, bold, underline, etc.). Links to other websites and images are also possible. The text manipulation features of Xinha are not as broad or flexible as SeaMonkey.

• Wordpress–a website building tool. This program is very easy to learn to use for building and managing a website. There are many themes available with a variety of column formats.

• FireFTP–a tool to use to upload files onto a website. This is a handy alternative tool to use for loading files to a website.

• Audacity–recording and editing software. Audacity makes voice recording and editing very easy. This is an excellent “must use” tool for creating and editing podcasts.

• PowerPoint–software for creating media presentation slides. Slides can be animated, narrated, scored with music or other sound effects. PowerPoint is intuitive for users of word processors.

• Slideshare–a website for sharing “slides” (i.e. PowerPoint presentations and similar content). This site enables slide content to be uploaded on to websites.

• Flickr–a website for storing and managing images. This site is a good depot for images found on the web during a search for later use in creating content for ESL/EFL lessons.

• Irfanview–software for editing images of all kinds (i.e. images found on the web, digital photos). Images can be resized, cropped, enhanced or altered in several ways.

• Google Images–Image arm of the Google search engine. Note: images must be cited properly when used; licensing for images must be respected. Open source images are also available.

• FreeFoto.com–website for open source images. This site has over 100,000 photos that can be used for free. Searches are easy to conduct. Photos are generally good quality.

• Technorati–a blog search engine. This is an easy-to-use search engine for blogs on just about any topic.

• GoogleScholar–a search engine for scholarly resources (i.e. journal articles and other academic and professional research reports). This is a good search engine for finding articles in a wide variety of journals. It is not at academic as Academic Search Premier or EBSCOHost but it is an excellent resource if an academic library is not available to the user.

• Chinswing–a podcast discussion forum website. Chinswing is very easy to use after the registration process. There is a broad scope of topics from which to choose for both listening and participating in discussions.

ClipArt Source:

100,000 Clipart & Web Images. (2001). Global Software Publishing, Ltd.