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 8: Promoting fluency writing using Chat


Aim: Help students improve their ability to get their meaning across quickly through writing

Moodle modules: Chat

Extra programs: none

Ease of setup: *

Most of the activities in this chapter have been about providing frameworks for students to improve the accuracy of their writing in one way or another. There is something to be said for just letting students write without being corrected with the aim of getting their meaning across as efficiently as possible. The Chat module is perfect for this. It encourages students to use strategies such as back-channeling (showing the other speaker that you're following what they're saying), paraphrasing, reformulation, and asking for clarification so that they can write a meaningful conversation with others.

As in Chapter 4, Speaking Activities, Activity 7 and Chapter 3, Vocabulary Activities, Activity 7, be careful not to include too many people in your chat session. If you have more than six people, for...