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 7. Writing Activities

I often get feedback from language teachers that their students really enjoy doing writing activities on the computer. Why is that? It's a medium they're comfortable with. They can easily add pictures and sound. They can change the color and size of the fonts and the font faces themselves. Younger students particularly like to be able to do that.

What writing activities do we have in mind exactly? Producing texts at word level or sentence level is a writing activity, but it is covered better in the chapters on vocabulary and grammar in this book. For example, the gap-fill in Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities, Activity 11 gets students to fit words into sentences. This chapter focuses more on helping students produce paragraphs and whole texts.

The chapter is divided into five sections which relate to the way writing is taught in communicative language teaching. Within each section, activities are ordered according to the ease of setup. That level of complexity...