Week 4 Reading, Writing, and TELP-ing

Even though I have not used books for kids to be incorporated into my English teaching to adults and young adults, Larry J. Mikulecky's idea of "Using Internet-Based Children's Literature to Teach EFL" makes sense to me in a way that reading for vocabulary- acquisition can be encouraged through less challenging literature students can read at home. Assigning out- of- class reading to students also gives students more responsibility for their learning in addition to the fun they may have doing that kind of literature. The only thing I expected to read from Larry's article was the fact of increasing the level of difficulty of reading materials given to students as they go on reading children's books, since today's repeated "unknown words" will become tomorrow's "known words". Nevertheless, many things have been gained from that article with interesting reading sources like: http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SearchWorld and http://www.magickeys.com/books. Therefore, it is high time I encouraged my students to read children's e- books for the sake of vocabulary and fun.

After reading "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" by Jarek Krajka, I realize how useful, interesting, motivating and practical  web pages, e- mail connection and class website creation are in improving students' writing skills. The suggested varieties of writing genres have given me ideas of how I should vary the types of writing I can deal with in my classes and how I should exploit our computer lab in the language center I teach.

This fourth week, I have to admit that the TELP (Technology- Enhanced Lesson Plan) task was the most time- consuming one, ever. It consumed my time because every little detail related to the lesson plan's implementation rubrics needs to be considered. Among those minutiae are descriptions relating to:  type of student, duration of lesson, materials, lesson objective, technology objectives, procedures, plan “b”, follow up, and assessment. Fortunately, my current Advanced 1 Certificate class curriculum gave me the idea of addressing one of this class's needs, which is "students' ability to orally tell their past experiences". Based on that need, I designed this TELP, using StoryCorps ( http://storycorps.org/), that you can find at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XgYQ1XJ_S0Cdi_m9ng3caGIvQ-jYZu6MaEsrMj6lNFU/edit

All in all, lesson- planning is worth spending time for " Lesson plans are the foundation of our classes...", according to Robert Elliott, University of Oregon, American English Institute (Fall 2012).

In short, though hard work, this week 4 is considered as one of the foundation stones of our Webskill course.