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 2: Using the Lesson module to get students to notice grammar points


Aim: Help students identify grammar points

Moodle modules: Lesson

Extra programs: Audacity, YouTube

Ease of setup: ***

One useful process is to help students spot grammar points as they are actually used in real life; for example, in authentic texts. This authenticity makes it easier for students to see the meaning that the grammar has, and authentic texts are often interesting and therefore motivating for students, if chosen with care. Of course, this requires a bit more work on the teacher's part in terms of selecting and preparing texts, but the payback is good.

The texts could be written, audio, or video. The written texts can usefully be illustrated with images. Videos and audios from websites that provide embeddable code (such as Google, TeacherTube, and YouTube) can very conveniently be included in your lessons. See Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle for help with embedding videos. Here are some ideas for...