Introduce yourself to the group

Task Discussion

• 
  Spencertown Scholar   Sept. 27, 2012, 7:17 a.m.

  Hi, my name is Thomas and I am new to this website.

• 
  webcore   Aug. 27, 2012, 3:18 p.m.

  My name is  Khicchu  Chowdhury . I  am a student of EETE .

  i am Bandladeshi.

     

• 
  Sébastien Vigneau   Aug. 8, 2012, 9:37 a.m.

  My name is Sébastien. I am French, originally from Toulouse, but I also lived for five years in Paris. I am now in Philadelphia, where I have been living for the last four years. I am doing research in biology as a post-doc. Among my many interests beside research, is learning new languages and contributing the best I can to the open, peer-to-peer movement. As for this course, I am helping Ian setting it up and running it, while following it as a student as well (I am new to Wikiotics like most of us).

• 
  erinrussia   Aug. 7, 2012, 4:20 p.m.

  My name is Erin. I'm an older American teaching English in Moscow, Russia. I've published some Young Learner course materials here over the last 8 years and I'm currently working on creating Beginning-Elementary Level course books. As a teacher, I've worked with a broad variety of materials in my 23 years of teaching English to non-native speakers (British, American and Korean). I have broad experience with students of all ages (3-73) and all levels and have also done teacher training here in Russia.

  In September, my teaching load will increase considerably so I hope that in the next three weeks I'll be able to master what I need to contribute. Although I handle the computer pretty well (and learn quickly), I have no technical training in this area. For assignments in this direction, I might need to be walked through the steps by someone more experienced.

  At this point, a few concerns I have are:

  1. I'd like to understand if this project is intended to be "generic" in terms of general communication skills and functions for all languages, all ages and all levels or something more targeted?

  2. I think we will need some exercises that go beyond just vocabulary and grammar points to include appropriate expressions in interactions and dialogues. These could include listening to simple (two-voice) dialogues and multiple choice responses.

  3. Two very essential skills in any language are the proper forming of questions and understanding (mostly) direct spoken questions adressed to oneself. These are always a challenge for learners up to high intermediate level. How can we best cover this area?

  4. I think storytelling is a very good idea, but would be further enriched if we could add dialogue and speech bubbles for the characters. I also think classic tales are a good start but some everyday newstories (real life stories/biographies) could also fit well in this category and reach more mature learners (especially men)..

  I'm thankful to be part of this interesting project.

• 
  Ian Sullivan   Aug. 9, 2012, 3:23 p.m.
  In Reply To:   erinrussia   Aug. 7, 2012, 4:20 p.m.

  Hi Erin,

  Thanks for the introduction and the great questions, let me see if I can help answer them

  1. I'd like to understand if this project is intended to be "generic" in terms of general communication skills and functions for all languages, all ages and all levels or something more targeted?

  The wikiotics tools we are using are designed to be general purpose tools that you can use to teach any language at any level. In the p2pu course we are going to focus on building introductory level English languge lessons for teenage and adult students. This is in line with the public campaign at thelastlanguagetextbook.org and gives us a shared place to focus during the class but the skills and tools we use will work equally well in other contexts.

  2. I think we will need some exercises that go beyond just vocabulary and grammar points to include appropriate expressions in interactions and dialogues. These could include listening to simple (two-voice) dialogues and multiple choice responses.

  Those sorts of lessons are actually supported on Wikiotics. Take a look at this introductory Mandarin Chinese lesson for an example of the audio portion: http://wikiotics.org/user/ian/FSI-Mandarin-Module01-Unit01 and this lesson for an example of a simple multiple choice lesson: http://wikiotics.org/en/WANY_Hospital_grammar

  If you built a short podcast lesson that just contained the example dialogue you could then have a multiple choice lesson, a picture choice lesson, or any combination of other lessons that build from that dialogue.

  3. Two very essential skills in any language are the proper forming of questions and understanding (mostly) direct spoken questions adressed to oneself. These are always a challenge for learners up to high intermediate level. How can we

  I think podcast lessons can do some of this is you use direct questions followed by pauses to allow students to form an answer to the question before you give them the answer you want to teach them. Beyond that I think we can do a lot by collaboriting directly with students. We could build lessons that provide half of a dialogue and then have students go in and add their own answers to complete the dialogue. Students could also work together to create both halves of a conversation.

  4. I think storytelling is a very good idea, but would be further enriched if we could add >dialogue and speech bubbles for the characters. I also think classic tales are a good start but >some everyday newstories (real life stories/biographies) could also fit well in this category >and reach more mature learners (especially men).

  Absoutely! I don't know how complicated adding in those kinds of graphic editing capabilities would be but if you want to work together on building some stories, I would be happy to edit the pictures and put in speech bubbles, etc.