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

Chapter 3. Vocabulary Activities

When I ask students what aspect of languages they most like learning, they often reply: "vocabulary". That is closely followed by "speaking" and "pronunciation". The reason they give is almost always something like: "Because it makes me feel rich", "It helps me to do things in the language", "I can express my moods better", "It means I can get what I want". Clearly, vocabulary has an important role. This chapter demonstrates just some of the ways we can use Moodle to help students learn, practice, and review their vocabulary.

Students usually have their preferred way of learning vocabulary. Apart from simply doing a vocabulary-gap-fill or vocabulary-matching exercises (Activities 11 and 12) several times — which could get tedious if done in excess — they can refer to glossaries, or even better, build their own glossaries (Activities 1 and 10). It's not too difficult to enhance these activities by adding annotations, recordings, pictures, and translations to...