We've finally come to the final post in our class blog this semester. To
wrap things up and to showcase your final projects, one member of each group should post a link
to your group's web-based lesson or activity as a comment before 5:00pm on Saturday (5/5). Each member of the class should view and comment on at least 3 other groups' projects by 7:30pm (5/5).
Since we were discussing Facebook in class I wanted to do a search for Facebook pages that are dedicated to helping English
Language Learners.I wanted to find a
page that not only had meaningful activities, but also interacted with the “friends”
on the page. It wasn’t easy, there are many ESL Facebook pages with unorganized, pointless information and little to no interaction, but then I
found Studying English with Shellee.
https://www.facebook.com/StudyEnglishWithShellee
Shellee is an American ESL teacher who teaches overseas. She
recently began this FB page, so she doesn’t have many “likes” yet, but one can
tell that just by scrolling through her page she is a very thoughtful educator
and is dedicated to helping ESL in a variety of ways.
Shellee’s lessons consist of “idioms of the day “slang
lessons of the day” and words with definitions that are paired with illustrations
to reinforce the concept. Shellee also has a music video posted with
accompanying lyrics and two tasks related to the song for the English Language
Learners to complete. She also takes the time to offer comments/suggestions and accepts request for lesson ideas.
So my questions are:
How might the approach that Shellee has taken to reach and
teach ESL’s work?
From what we have learned about technology in the classroom,
do you think a Facebook page is good place to learn English?
If you had a Facebook page, what type of activities might you
post?
*If you’re interested Shellee also has a YouTube channel and a Twitter account for
English Language Learners and she accepts lesson topic requests on both sites as well.*
I came across this video when I was doing some research on
alternative ways to learn a language.
Just watch the first five minutes.
OK, I am sure there is a lot of criticism on Pimsleur’s
method and I am quite skeptical of it.
(Comparing a child’s ability to soak up languages with an adult is like
comparing a genius’s ability to learn aerospace engineering with mine!) It reminds me of the scene from Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield
who learns French by listening to headphones while he sleeps.
I am not so interested in the Pimsleur Approach as I am in the criticism this video offers for the way we teach
language. I thought a discussion
on what experiences we have had on what works, and, perhaps more interestingly,
what doesn’t work would be helpful. For example I am a Russian speaker, but I
learned Russian from speaking it with people, not from learning it in a
class. This has had certain limitations,
such as my constant difficulty with word endings; however, my accent and
vocabulary are much better than someone who learned the language in a
classroom. On the other hand, I
have tried numerous times to learn Spanish in the classroom, but feel there is
always a ceiling I hit very early on.
I get bored with the worksheets; I never have practice; I never improve.
Some questions to consider: What experiences (good and bad) have
you had learning a language? In what ways does the classroom get in the way of
real language learning? Does the
way we teach language in K-12 have anything to do with the reasons why students
in the USA have such difficulty learning a language?
