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 7: Using Lesson for text prediction


Aim: Help students predict text

Moodle modules: Lesson

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: ***

Anything that involves games and guessing is likely to make learning more fun and effective. One way of making reading fun is to set up an anticipation exercise. The way it works is that we present some text — for example, a news item, a story, a poem — and then give students three or four options for the next line of the text. This gets students to think about the context and the language. The main thing is to make sure you've chosen a suitable text in the first place. There is not necessarily a wrong answer, but using the Moodle Lesson module, we can make different answers lead in different directions.

Let's take an example of a poem. Maybe you have a poem with different versions that the author contemplated, or that you made up. The different versions could become options for students to select. You could even get students to write their own texts and...