Improving Speaking for ESL

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Dancing Beauty

Lecture Summary Week 8

1. http://www.er-central.com/ogte/  It's a Online Graded Text Editor tool. We took a authentic text from bbc (2a) and look for the words' level to find out which words can be difficult to understand at certain levels ( beginner, elementary etc. ) We checked the text for 7.th level which is high-elementary. But the site has a little bit slow process so we just checked for the very first sentence.
2. http://www.wordandphrase.info  It's a site to analyze how frequent the words are used in English in 4 different levels. Also it shows where and under which genres the words are used. We checked the word " PROPOSE " and the site showed that its rank is 1702, other words the 1702. most common used word in Eglish. Furthermore you can find the synonym of the words for using when you do paraphrasing. We argued that it would be not correct to paraphrase all of the words because as a teacher we may need some guessing process from the students.
3. http://www.just-the-word.com/  It's a collocation sampler which show the combinations of the words, frequency of combinations in a statics. We checked alternatives for "HIGH VOLUME".
4. http://corpus.byu.edu/  It shows you the corpus list and gives a chance to search the word that you are looking for almost in every dimension. It's a great tool to improve students' lexical inventory.
5. http://ezarticlelink.com/articlespinner/free.php  and https://spinbot.com/ for some kind of automatic paraphrasing. But using these kinds of tools may ended up with plagiarism !
   

   

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Lecture Summary - Week 6 -

• We've searched for the number of words in English by looking  [ http://www.languagemonitor.com/1000000th-word/no-of-words/ ]  . I predict that there won't be more than 350k, but interestingly it showed us there are more than 1m. words in English.
• At " http://testyourvocab.com " we tested our vocabulary knowledge and get estimated results about how much do we know English words. ( Estimated 10.200 Words )
• On the internet at [ " http://vocabulary.ugent.be "] we tested our vocabulary level again with some real and fake words that we recognize them or not and it showed us what's the percentage of our English vocabulary knowledge. ( Estimated %54 of the Vocab. )
• http://www.learnenglish.org.uk/wff/ . I found this site very useful especially when the subject is teaching English to new learners.  It shows us 7 difficulty levels for English words. It will definitely helps us to shape our classes accordingly to our students level and provide better learning-teaching environment.
• http://www.lextutor.ca/freq/train/ . This site is for testing our word frequency intuition level.
• We examined DATA-DRIVEN Learning by following the tasks in http://cte319.pbworks.com/w/page/30720613/activity%20-%20introduction%20to%20ddl.  [ http://www.wordle.net/ - http://smmry.com - http://folk.uib.no/nfylk/concordle/ ] 

•   In the third hour, we started with " http://www.lextutor.ca " . It is useful to measure the level of the text that we have read or as a teacher we will submit our students.  To find out which words belong which context is the key concept for better comprehension of the texts. Especially with color representations it made the text very easier to analyze by "VOCABPROFILE ". Then with "KEYWORDS" part, it compares the usage of vocabulary items in the text we've analyzed and in general English. After that with " CONCORDANCE " , we could see the as the name suggest, which words accord with which words in the text.
• At " https://readability-score.com/ " we discovered the reading ease of the text by analyzing them in many different ways. It helps teacher to take authentic text and change the level of the text accordingly to the students level

 

Deeper Reflection on Assure Model

As I wrote before generally schools did not have enough materials to use technology or in other words we can say that technology was not this much developed in those times. Technological materails were only limited by projectors, tvs and radios. It's not even comparable with nowadays' technology. Today we can use our smart phones or computers to reach any kind of knowledge from anytime and anywhere we want. I believe this help a lot for learning. Brazilian most prominent language school conduct a project that is called " SPEAKING EXCHANGE ". By this program Brazilian kids found a chance to speak with native Americans who were at "nursing homes" in Chicago. That project shows us how technology can be beneficial in learning English. Maybe these kids won't be able to travel abroad and hear any natives in their life, but with this system they had a chance to improve their language. So utilizing technology in our lesson will always helpfull to get better results in learning. As ASSURE MODEL suggests teachers must be aware of technology and should apply to raise their effectiveness in teaching.

Ted-Ed | Technology Integration

When I become a teacher, I think that I am going to provide my students with “Authentic Learning” at the “Adaptation Level”. That means students will use technology tools to solve real-world problems meaningful to them rather than working on artificial assignments and also they will have opportunities to select and modify these tools. This also means that as a teacher, I have to help and encourage them to use technology to correlate their education the real world events. In addition, future’s technological life is inevitable. That makes more and more important to use teach and apply technology in classrooms. It will help teachers to raise students that are aware of world issues and that provides strong connection between them and others.

Assure Model [ Week 4 ]

I had a history teacher, her name was Suzan. I think she was effective in both ways either in the classroom or outside. Even today I still remember clear knowledge from history courses and also back in those days, I was watching her teaching style and classroom effectiveness as well. So whatever she did in high school, it seems that they fit to ASSURE MODEL. First of all, she was a great observer. She would know anything that happens in the classroom, outside the classroom and between students. She was able to identify the problems and also as assure model suggest, solutions to those. Although, the curriculum was so strict, she did her best to stretch the courses in order to make it more fun and understandable. In addition, she used many different strategies, even role-play that some students become kings or soldiers. It was obvious that she was working on her methods and materials so much. As I said before, participation was one of the key points in her teaching. She was aware of learning something is easier when you are involved in it. But at the end, I don’t think she was applying ASSURE model by purposely. She was just trying to be a better teacher and acted accordingly to that. So it seems that, assure model is the pathway to be a better teacher.