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 1: Using Forum for a book discussion


Aim: Help motivate students by discussing what books to read

Moodle modules: Forum

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: *

A key element in any activity is motivating our students. This is particularly so with reading, which requires stamina, concentration, and time for many students.

We can use the Forum module to personalize the choice of reading and build up excitement and anticipation.

In this activity we're going to focus on setting up a simple discussion in which students discuss what books to read. Before we do that, we need to think of some good questions to start a discussion. One could be an open question like:

This month our class is going to read and discuss some books in English. What books would you like to read? Post your thoughts and say why you chose your book!

If it's difficult for your students to suggest books themselves, or you would like them to consider a specific set of books, you could suggest some titles, describe them briefly...