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 4. Speaking Activities

Speaking and listening are at the heart of most people's foreign language learning. Moodle makes it easy to practice speaking by helping students at various stages in the development of their speaking skills. For example, they can practice identifying sounds they need to use. They can also do lots of helpful repetition practice — think how that can save your voice. They can prepare vocabulary and other language material for class activities, and they can actually practice speaking on Moodle. With those ideas in mind, this chapter's Moodle speaking activities are divided into four areas:

  • Pronunciation — identifying sounds

  • Listening and repeating activities

  • Preparing for speaking in class

  • Online speaking activities

Pronunciation exercises: Activities 1 and 2

Exercises like these on Moodle can help low-level students practice basic pronunciation by identifying correct sounds and matching sounds. To prepare these exercises, we'll use core Moodle modules together with...