Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

Overview of this book

That word Moodle keeps cropping up all over the place ñ it's in the newspapers, on other teachers' tongues, in more and more articles. Do you want to find out more about it yourself and learn how to create all sorts of fun and useful online language activities with it? Your search ends right here. This book demystifies Moodle and provides you with answers to your queries. It helps you create engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform. It has suggestions and fully working examples for adapting classroom activities to the Virtual Learning Environment. This book breaks down the core components of a typical language syllabus ñ speaking, pronunciation, listening, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and assessment ñ and shows you how to use Moodle 1.9 to create complete, usable activities that practise them. Each chapter starts with activities that are easier to set up and progresses to more complex ones. Nevertheless, it's a recipe book so each activity is independent. We start off with a brief introduction to Moodle so that you're ready to deal with those specific syllabus topics, and conclude with building extended activities that combine all syllabus elements, making your course attractive and effective. Building activities based on the models in this book, you will develop the confidence to set up your own Moodle site with impressive results.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Activity 6: Preparing for class speaking practice using a Wiki


Aim: Help students prepare contents for later class speaking activities

Moodle modules: Wiki (or optional, OUwiki)

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

Sometimes useful preparation can be done for speaking without actually doing any speaking. In this kind of activity, students prepare content for a speaking activity that they will later do in class. The class activity could be a role-play, an interview, or a debate, for example.

The following examples show how we can set up dialog practice (Variation 1) and a debate (Variation 2). In each case, students will have time to think about what they would say in advance, and to look up words, if necessary. Also, in the dialog in Variation 1, it is only by reading the subsequent part of the dialog that the student can work out what to say. So the student will also have valuable reading practice.

We can adjust the number of students responding to the wiki by making groups with one or two...