Week 3

Another very rich week in terms of readings and assignments. The readings on "Teaching Aural/oral Skills", especially the article by Lindsey Miller, Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials   showed us that listening is still a neglected skill even though  it is beginning to receive more attention.   Though listening is a skill that could easily be developed in our classrooms, I sometimes wonder why some of my colleagues almost never try it in their classes. Nowadays with all these  technology devices, listening should occur as frequently as possible. I used to have a five-minute listening activity as a warm-up almost every time I stepped in a classroom. Something I still remember and that makes me laugh is about my first teacher of English. She used to carry a heavy tape recorder in class for her listening lessons. Of course that was more than 30 years ago. Nowadays with mobile devices and software, the teacher can design his own listening material very easily. By the way, I would recommend this very easy-to-use open source audio editing software : "Audacity".

Teaching pronunciation is another skill to be developed. My question is whether we have to teach the phonetic symbols...

This week, we have been introduced social bookmarking. Though I am not knew to social bookmarking (I have been using Diigo), I do like Delicious.
Using Delicious is much more user-friendly and I think this is the social bookmarking tool I will be using

I devoted much time reading the sample reports in the course website. We have made another step further in our projects. Going through these sample projects was really a good thing, it gave me a clear idea of what is expected as far as the final project is concerned.

Week 3 is almost finished and I am looking forward to spending another great week with all my classmates and of course, Donna our great instructor.