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: Practicing register using Lesson


Aim: Raise students' awareness of register and develop their ability to manipulate it in their writing.

Moodle modules: Lesson

Extra programs: None

Ease of setup: ***

Before we help students to use register appropriately in their writing, we first need to make them aware of it. We can then set up a task which gets them to use what they've learned. In this activity, students will be asked to distinguish between formal and informal styles of writing.

Formal writing is characterized by more attention to accuracy, clarity of meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and choice of more neutral vocabulary. By contrast, an informal style is often chosen where writers don't feel it is necessary to be so clear, because the situation is not formal or because writers know each other well and don't need things to be spelled out. Clearly, there are some situations where it is important to get the register right.

Let's have a look at a letter of invitation to a party...