ziaul karim

Friday, October 14, 2011

Week-3: Reflections on Skill-building Websites for Oral/Aural Skills and Saving Bookmarks with Delicious

There is no doubt that this web-skills course is day by day equipping me with many wonderful resources that I can employ in my teaching. This week Robert has provided us with three very important articles on listening, employment of CALL in teaching and new perspectives in teaching pronunciation. I've read the last two. In the nicenet discussion, many have talked about RP/BBC English or American English and in case of pronunciation whether native-like accent is the target or not. My opinion is that in case of teaching English we should focus more on the clarity of speech and pronunciation, i.e. speech and pronunciation should be understandable by people from anywhere. I basically talk about the English that aids the global communication.

Let me now talk about this week's activities. I've created a blog on delicious.com and have added some important links. For the project work and task, I'm going through some prior readings that are really bountiful and are enough to clearly guide a teacher to prepare his tasks and projects. But due to the tremendous pressure of script checking of my students and because of getting disconnected from the internet server from time to time without any information, I'm passing a real hard time. No pains, no gains. If this is true, I'm sure if a teacher struggles harder, s/he is sure to gain something valuable for his/her own professional development.

I've surfed some effective lesson plan sites (Speaking lesson plans at One Stop English, Conversation lesson plans at esl.about.com, Communicative lesson plans at ESL-galaxy.com) and found that many of them are really of great use in the class. In addition I liked this website: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-speaking-english/ for teaching speaking and this website: http://www.real-english.com/reo/1/unit1.html for teaching listening.

All these are opening up a new horizon for working as an online teacher in future. Every week's reading articles, blogposts, discussions, comments, writing and preparing new tasks and project works, weekly reflections and commenting on others' blogs are keeping me always busy. I feel as if I were sometimes in a classroom, often in a computer lab, in a library discussing and gossiping with classmate about preparing assignment. What an amazing experience!

Many thanks to my instructor Robert and also to my classmates.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Webskills, Week-2: Reflections

I am teacher in Bangladesh Agricultuaural University, Mymensingh, Bangladesh. I teach mostly ESL/EFL foundation courses that include English Reading and Writing Skills, Listening skills and Speaking skills. I also take a course on Business English in a private university in Dhaka. In addition I take part-time classes in a collegiate school and teach English to students of Class ix to xii.

From this webskills course, I've greatly learned how to teach online. I've already instructed my university students to make individual blogs and post comments under the lessons that I publish in my blog. I've told them to comment on others blogs at least once a week and write whether they like the lessons and lectures in class. For the college students, I searched fairy tales and other stories through www.noodletools.com and found some interesting stories with pictures. I learned that there are many other search engines apart from google and advised my learners to search topics using variety of search engines.

I find this webskills course very interesting and challenging. Thanks Robert for your directions and guidelines.