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 8. Listening Activities

Listening is often a challenging activity for language learners. This could be because they have to deal with a range of accents and speeds or because the content may be difficult to follow. Sometimes background noise on the recording makes it more difficult to understand. In natural speech it is normal to interrupt, use ellipsis, or leave sentences unfinished. So recordings based on natural speech are also likely to be difficult.

Using Moodle, students can listen repeatedly to recordings until they feel more comfortable with them. We can also help students understand by using a recording program like Audacity to manipulate recordings, providing slower and faster versions of the same text. Certain Moodle modules, like Quiz and Lesson, can be used effectively to help students notice important features of texts, after which they are likely to understand the whole recording better.

The communicative language teaching classroom often focuses on activities that take...