Tweeting Through The Intermediate Plateau by Angelos Bollas

What to do with Twitter in (and out of) the classroom:

1. Communicate with your students outside the class.

Keeping in touch with the students outside the class helps them develop from group to team. We can use the class’ hashtag to tweet about everything: an interesting movie, an educational article, a note about their homework, a question that we want our students to think about before coming to class, to communicate through Twitter.

At first, it takes a lot of effort from the teacher’s part mainly because teachers need to act as moderators and follow up all students’ contributions. Gradually, though, once they see that there is an interest in what they are saying, they become more and more involved.

2. Let them keep notes while in class.

This is particularly useful in contexts where lecturing is unavoidable (e.g. English for academic progress). Let your students use the classroom hashtag in order for them to post their reactions, questions, and comments to what is going on in the class/lecture theatre. It is extremely interesting to let your students share their ideas, provided, though, that we will follow their tweets up, holding a post-lecture discussion, for example.

3. Twitter Essay Challenges.

Students, especially teenagers, enjoy participating in online challenges. For example, each of their tweets is one of the each student’s main points, they could then use the tweet as the topic sentence of a paragraph that they, then, would expand. So, from a twitter essay, they can create a whole ‘ordinary’ essay.

4. Connect with learners/classes from around the world.

What’s the best thing Twitter has done for us, teachers? We followed other teachers whom we admire and we keep on learning from each other. Why don’t we do this for our students, too? Find colleagues that use Twitter with their classes and ask your students to follow your colleagues’ students. Set up collaborative projects and let them communicate for anything that satisfies their appetite.

Purpose of the writer: The writer's purpose is to inform the teachers some fun and useful ways that can use to develop students' ability in English.

Opinion : I guess this article is pretty useful for teachers that actively use social media. The teachers can use those examples of activities in the Twitter. Moreover, students would be  interested with those activities because those are simple and they often use social media for communication, so these things will be useful.

Resource: http://eflmagazine.com/tweeting-intermediate-plateau/

Listening With Our Eyes by Nik Peachey

Listening is a vital skill to develop the students’ language abilities. In order to reinforce the development of listening skills, we can use video clips from the internet, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and other video sharing platforms that can help to motivate students and make them feel more empowered by taking their English listening skills into the real world of the internet.

One of the best ways to help students develop their awareness of the visual information in a video is to allow them to watch the clip silently before they listen. Here are a few of the ways in which watching can help students to understand.

• Students can focus on the context in which the language occurs and find parallels from their own language culture.
• Watching a clip helps students to form a framework for comprehension by understanding the structure of the clip and building up a sense of what is happening.
• Students can access their understanding of genre. For example, if they are watching a news clip they will have some understanding of what normally happens in that genre of media, e.g. starts with new headlines, followed by major news stories, includes interview with on the spot reporter, etc.
• Watching the clip helps students see the way the characters interact with each other which helps them understand the relationships between the people.
• Students can focus on the facial expressions of each person and understand their attitude to each other and what they may be feeling.
• Watching the clip before listening can also reduce student stress and cognitive overload as stated earlier.

Here are some suggestions for activities.

• Get students to watch the clip and try to imagine what each person is saying. This is best done in short play and pause bursts, especially if you expect the students to write anything down.
• Students can watch and count how many times each person speaks. This could be done with a simple dot graph or students could have an image with the people on and draw the lines of interaction between the people.
• You can give students images of each person in the clip and they can watch and build a profile for each one, including the relationships between them and any aspects of character they can detect.
• You could create a storyboard template of the clip and get students to complete it. Again if you expect them to draw anything, they will need time to do this so you may have to pause the video or give them time once they have watched. Alternatively you just get them to order cut up storyboard images from the video as they watch.
• You can ask students to focus on cultural aspects of what they see and ask them to identify features which locate the clip within a certain location or culture. They could also look for differences between the culture of the clip and their own culture.
• If you have the facilities to do split viewing you could put students into pairs and get one student to narrate what they are seeing to their partner.
• You can show students a silent clip and ask them to think of questions that they want to know about each person and what is happening, these can then form the basis of their first listening task when you have the audio on.

These kinds of activities don’t just help to focus students and support their listening skills, but they can also help to reduce the stress that students sometimes feel when faced with comprehension tasks based around authentic materials.

Purpose of the writer: The author's purpose is to help teachers to develop their students' listening ability by using video clips from the internet.

Opinion : I think this is a good article for teachers especially if they want to increase the students' listening skill. Video clips are an attractive way to use because the students nowadays are active in internet.

Resource: http://eflmagazine.com/listening-with-our-eyes/

From Intensive to Extensive Reading

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=f7Fq5fU5eQ8

From Intensive to Extensive Reading

by

Dr. Richard R. Day

            Reading is a number of interactive processes. It means not one ways but two ways between the readers and the story and reading and the text. When reading, the readers use their knowledge (knowledge of the world, knowledge of the language, knowledge of the topic, knowledge of the author) to create, to construct,to build meaning so it means that to readers who have different knowledge background different languages.

Reading is also magic and fun, because reading can take us to wonderful places, it can take us to different times, different cultures, different universes that we never lived or shared. Psychologists who study brain have discovered that when people are reading, enjoying and involving the reading, they lose their track, they forget where they are and what time it is. It's called flow experience.

How do we learn to read?

We learn to read by reading. The more reading we do, the better readers are students beecome, the more opportunities we give are students to engage in reading the better readers they become.

Differences between strategy and skill. 

Strategy is things that we do conciously to help do something, it's kind of concious behaviour. 

Skill is things that we do automatically or unconciously.

A good reader and reader to learn will have good comprehension and fluency.

Comprehesion gets meaning from the text. The basic comprehension in reading are:

·         Finding main ideas

·         Recognizing point of view

·         Recognizing reference words

·         Define meaning from the context

Fluency is really important and it's different with comprehension. It helps the students move away from word by word reading.

·         There are strategies to help the readers' fluency:

·         Scanning

·         Projecting to the topic:  looking at to the text, title or picture quickly.

·         Skimming

How to teach reading strategy ?

1.              We have to teach strategy in context.

2.              We have to provide a reason for the strategy.

3.              Recycle, repeatation. Give a strategy to the students in context and explain, practice is important.

The importance of Fluency

Reading is not read word by word, it's inappropriate. We have to build up fluency, it makes the readers move to the word. If the readers are not read fluently, they will not comprehend the text well. So, fluency is the best comprehension in reading.

One way to build up the fluency is extensive reading.

Extensive reading involves the students in reading large quantities of material in the new language. The goal often goes beyond learning to read and improve students' overall language proviciecy and their attitudes toward English and motivation for learning. It can be blended into any language course and program, regardless of the focus at methodology.

The benefits of Extensive Reading

1.      Better reader

2.      Increased vocabulary

3.      Incidential

4.      Improved reading skill

Extensive Reading Activities

1.      Timed repeated reading

2.      Rereading, helps to build fluency

3.      Predicting, what is the story about

4.      Thinking about the story

5.      Listen to the recording, making the connection between sound and symbol

6.      Easy, the book is easy. if the book is hard, students will difficult understanding the text.

7.      Speed, it can build understanding.

Reading a book is not hard, it is easy. If the book is hard,  student will difficult to understand the text.

Reading teacher should give an appropriate material, suitable with the level of the student. Don't give the students material for L1 reader, don't use an authentic material because it is too hard.

Intensive Reading helps the students read to learn.

Extensive Reading helps the students learn to read.