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 1: Helping students improve pronunciation using the Forum module


Aim: Provide oral feedback on students' pronunciation

Moodle modules: Forum

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: **

How often have you listened to students' pronunciation errors, and thought "I wish there was an easy way for them to listen to correct versions and repeat them"? Well, one way Moodle can help out is providing a recording of the correct versions for students to listen to in their own time and as many times as they want. We can collect examples of errors we hear and then record a short commentary with examples of more natural versions.

Here are some examples of the sorts of pronunciation errors students might make that we could correct.

  • Individual sounds.

  • Elision (where a sound should be left out). For example, the "t" in "football".

  • Assimilation (where the first of two adjacent sounds changes to match the second one). For example, "Great Britain" sounds like "Grape Britain".

  • Intonation. This is used to express a...