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 9: Using Assignment to submit and evaluate semi-authentic writing


Aim: Provide students with feedback on written assignments

Moodle modules: Assignment

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

We usually write a text in response to some sort of stimulus. If we receive a letter, we reply to it. If we see a job ad, we send a letter of application and a resume. In fact, it's quite unnatural when a teacher tells students to write for the sake of it. So to help motivate students and to provide a more realistic, semi-authentic situation, we can use the Assignment module to provide a stimulus and set up a writing task. Here are just a few of the stimuli we could consider using together with suggestions for appropriate responses:

Stimulus

Response

Letter

Reply

Job ad

CV and letter of application

Invitation

Reply

New music track

Review

Film

Review

Agony aunt letter

Reply

Once we've decided on a stimulus, we need to find a good way to present it on Moodle. Here are some options for...