Llengua anglesa a secundària. Competència digital

The newest trends in EFL nowadays include blogs and podcasts.

According to Learnthenet, “Weblogs, commonly referred to as blogs, are a relatively new form of personal publishing. (…) A blog is similar to an electronic journal or diary. The writer, known as a blogger, makes periodic entries, sometimes as frequently as a few times a day. Blogs can be on any subject.”

The entries appear in reverse chronological order - the newest at the top - and may include photos, links or audio files. They always allow for comments from the readers.

Wikipedia offers the following definition of podcast: “Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, over the Internet using syndication formats, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. (…) The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. Usually a podcast features one type of ’show’, with new episodes released either sporadically or at planned intervals such as daily or weekly.”

The possibilities that blogs and podcasts present for language learning are just starting to be explored, but they are specially suitable to encourage reading and writing (blogs) and listening and speaking (podcasts). In this practice we will see some good examples of the pedagogical use of both.

The ECML Project has been running for the last school year. Students and teachers from 14 European countries were involved.

Each teacher in the project had a personal blog where he/she set up a topic for debate with the pupils and gave them instructions. Each student (or pair of students) had their own blog as well where they posted their task. The activities also included visiting blogs from other countries and posting comments there.

Let’s have a closer look at the Spanish contribution from IES Manolo Hugué. About every week, the teacher made an entry, and included a section - To my students - with a detailed description of the task. These tasks were very varied and included saying goodbye (the last post), explaining Spanish culture, giving an opinion on the Spanish school system, describing an admired person or writing a film review. Sometimes the students had to visit other blogs and look for information there, or add a comment to postings from other students.

Go to the |Spanish blog and read the teacher’s posts. Find the one published on 08 March 2006. Read the comments other teachers and students made (click on comments [8] at the end of the entry). Read the task.

Find the following students on the list on the right and read their entries: Aleix Blog, Ferran, Oriol & Pedro. Read also the comments from other students and from their teacher.

The objectives behind this project had to do mainly with stimulating students to produce different types of texts while reading and communicating, and learning from other cultures by using a different tool.

Podcasts have several advantages: they can be listened to online, or they can be downloaded and listened to offline. Downloaded casts may be transferred to an iPod or an mp3 device and listened to anywhere. They are also very easy to produce, the only requirement being that the final product is in mp3 format. Therefore, it is quite easy for students to create their own.

In the following websites we find different examples of podcasts for language learning:

CK’s Listen and Repeat English. These podcasts are intended to teach the pronunciation of irregular verbs through repetition.

http://www.eslpod.com/ Over 200 dialogues on a variety of everyday topics. Click on the title of the podcast for the transcript. Paid subscribers get a learning guide with vocabulary, the transcripts and a general comment on the podcast.

http://eflbridges.net/ have a conversation club held twice weekly. English language learners and teachers can meet each other and engage in conversation using Skype (a free voice and video conferencing program). Sometimes they set specific topics, and other times they talk about whatever is on people’s minds. Occasionally there are meetings for teachers only.

• Resources:
  • students participating in a blog should have a worksheet with instructions on blogging, apart from the task.
  • if you are using podcasts, you can easily prepare a worksheet dsllm5ftx5.odt with listening comprehension activities.

Blogs are also a good meeting point for teachers.

http://crle-le.blogspot.com/ is not active any more, although the contents are still there. The present site is Servei de Llengües.

Blog-EFL Observations and comments on the use of weblogs, emerging technologies & e-learning tools for English Language Teaching.

http://www.englishcaster.com/ has a collection of websites that offer podcasts classified according to content, kind of English, level, age or nationality.

Something quite new which is starting to be used in the classroom: Twitter. Read this article by Elena Benito with some exploitation ideas.

Listen to English – Learn English Some of the podcasts come with vocabulary and a comprehension quiz.

PIE Podcasts In English offers podcasts at three levels. All podcasts are free for language learners and teachers, but only members receive the learning English worksheets, vocabulary tasks, webquests and transcripts.

ESL aloud offers guided practice in speaking English, and focuses mainly on grammar explanations: phrasal verbs, adjectives with prepositions…

Better @ English has real English conversations with a transcript and a vocabulary list for each podcast.