Improving Speaking for ESL

listen to ‘Tıps for improving speaking in English’ on audioBoom

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.

Social Media Usage Stats in 2012

By looking at the chart above, in the 20th century, we can see clearly that almost every student use social media sites to reach others.(especially Facebook). So in any aspect it will be necessary to use social media in our teaching life as well. Because these sites are their communication places and if we want to reach them we must be on these places as well. Also it will be beneficial to our teaching as well, like sharing videos, pictures or posts that are related with our lesson. In short, as we can see from the chart, nowadays is and also in future all around us will be technology We have to adopt ourselves to this unstoppable change.

TED Ed - Being a Teacher in the 21st Century

When I graduate and start teaching, I don't think I will have a problem using technology because I search, follow and use new technological stuff in my daily life as well. Since I think that technology makes students more comfortable in the class, I’ll try to become a digital teacher for better teaching-learning environment. So, for sure, I will become a teacher who uses technological sources very often. Also, this will make better connection with me and my students. However, there might be some obstacles about using technology in my classroom because I will need school administration's approval and their sources as well. If everything goes fine with these aspects, I will try my best to exploit technology as much as possible. It’s way much better easier and effective to teach and learn because of technology. In short, technology is all around us. In today’s world, no one has a chance to say that he doesn’t need to use it, especially we, teachers of future.

Reflect on the Literacy Skills [ w3 ]

Teaching is the one of the jobs that needs hard working and also to keep pace with new developments. It is not a static job and its nature has lots of variable from students to school, from region to language, from class materials to gender. So in order to be an effective teacher, sometimes you have to take the shape of the container you are in. As my previous sentence suggest, I think the most important feature of teaching is to be flexible and creative. But for sure, learners will demand much more than this. Since they will see you the source of knowledge you need to be ready for them to be innovative and mentor as well. If I compare my secondary school education sufficiency with my university's demand in order to whether if it was efficient enough or not, I may say in my secondary school I couldn't find chance to practice my skills. But since teaching and learning is such complex, I don't know how accurate would be to compare those times' teachers and now's. As I said before teaching is not a static job and of course teachers will be more and more aware of the coming developments and will learn how to be a better teacher. ------ 21st CC teachers ------

Use of Technology in Teaching in Turkey [ w3 ]

According to (2013), ( Worldbank.org) World Bank report from earlier this year (Promoting Excellence in Turkey's Schools) notes that "The education system in Turkey has shown remarkable improvement since 2003 in terms of better student performance and reduced inequality with a concurrent and sustained increase in enrollments." As the report suggests Turkey did some great progress in recnent years and technology usage was the key point in this process. The most important project of this technological leap, Fatih project, which means "Movement to Increase Opportunities and Technology" was started by the government in 2011. It includes large numbers of tablets and interactive whiteboards that will be placed in classrooms, labs and teacher rooms. Even though it didn't effect as much as predicted, I think this project is still in its crawling phase and will be much more usefull in coming years. Since it will be easier to reach information in classes and homes both for students and teachers, learning and teaching process will be easier as well. When we graduate from this university, I'm sure of that there will be some technological developments that we did not see before so it will take some time for us to get used to it. But no matter what the technological stuff will be, that development will make things easier and easier.

Available technologies - is the world a fair place for all.