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 6. Reading Activities

Why would you want to use Moodle for teaching reading? There are the advantages that all Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) like Moodle have. For example, you can use Moodle to store and organize large numbers of texts. They can be long or short and in different languages. You can also set up a variety of interactive activities based on reading texts. It's particularly useful that students can work in their own time. So if they're having problems with reading, they can take their time, go over texts and exercises several times, or go back to half-finished activities when it suits them.

There is a pleasing variety of activities that we can set up in Moodle, as we'll see in this chapter. As always, don't be daunted by the amount of time it takes to set up a reading activity. Start with a simple project. For example, produce one reading text and write some questions for it. Get colleagues or students to try it out. Then, as your confidence grows, try another activity...