discussions and reflections

Vocabulary is the basis of any language to be learned, so to instruct new words to the learners is significant in teaching English. One such tools is games in general and online games in particular. There are lots of computer games that can be effective in vocabulary acquisition. As these games create interactive and motivating contexts, where Ss can easily or subconsciously share their information during playing, they are effective for vocabulary learning. Ss playing online vocabulary games tend to learn more appropriately and can retain the new words for a longer period of time. So I have chosen an educational type of computer game for learning vocabulary. These type of games, in general, are beneficial in vocabulary learning as they enhance Ss' ability to memorize words, improve their communicative skills. I think that teachers need to use effective ways to help Ss to develop their vocabulary knowledge in order to enhance their language comprehension and production abilities. Un...

A digital story assignment can be on any topic. For my EFL Ss I would assign to create a personal digital story that is an "identity text". This assignment will be for a 9th grade in a secondary school. This kind of assignment focuses on multi-literacies including critical literacy, social justice, digital media literacy, creativity as there is a different approach or emphasis on the learning process. Ss will be given opportunities to chose the most appropriate ways for effectively communicating their opinions, thoughts and feelings to an audience. This requires from them to be critical readers in making choices. Another element of critical literacy is that Ss think about responsibility, fairness and respect. Through this assignment Ss will explore their identities and will take great pleasure in expressing their identities in this wider space using all the tools of digital media such as images(still and moving), sounds(voice narration, music, song), gestures, text on the s...

A google doc is an interesting place for a virtual team work for me. There are many steps to be taken to complete a final learning product. It is a powerful tool for collaborative writing and knowledge development. Here the designed writing task should be collaborative in nature to ensure and encourage collaborative learning. There can be 2 processes here: cooperation and collaboration. In the first process the group members split the work, solve sub-tasks individually and combine all the segments into a whole. But the second process is synchronous activity and the focus here is on the process of working together. Our homework for this coming week is cooperative as we can divide the parts and complete individually. There is a big concern here that some Ss will contribute very little and there is no penalty for each student's lack of participation, the task or assignment may not be taken seriously. So, as a teacher, I see that there are 3 factors to facilitate Ss' involvement in...

In Armenian schools compared to private language centres the class time is 45 minutes, so there is not enough time to practice pronunciation, including the intonation and prosody that is patterns in individual words of stress, pitch and tone. On the other hand, lots of teachers don't enjoy or they don't know how to teach pronunciation and they think that Ss find it boring. They tend to view pronunciation as the least useful of the basic language skills, so pronunciation is neglected or left out in order to spend valuable class time on the other areas of the language. However, teaching or training pronunciation can occur in the upper levels.  So I would like to give extra listening opportunities to the 8th grade and up by having them listen to simple-in-content podcasts. Podcasts are used in a variety of ways in all levels of education. It is very important ,when using podcasting,  to keep the emphasis on pedagogy, that is practicing with pronunciation, listening and speakin...

Based on the investigations carried out among Ss in EFL classes I came to conclusion that podcasting assignments are essential in their learning process. Podcasting promotes active learning opportunities to extend communication.  Student-produced podcasts enhance their self-reflection and improve performance, idea development and creation. Though some researchers point out that podcasting is associated with passive learning as the learners focus on the audio facility instead of actively engaging with the lecture content. On the technical side, Ss may have lack of digital literacy skills and podcasting wouldn't be effective for them if they wouldn't be trained beforehand and be involved in designing, creating, editing podcast lessons, downloading or playing podcast files. I would recommend using podcasts in Armenian secondary schools started from the 9th grade and up. But again this can be done if the school is equipped with computers. I only taught in village schools near my t...

Twitter is a quick and easy tool for informal communication and the most frequent usage types of it are daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. As Twitter can be accessed for a short time period by cellphones as well this can be a good tool for improving communication skills for the 12th grade students in an Armenian secondary school with low proficiency level in English.

A blog writing activity is a good task for EFL learners in Armenia which will enable Ss to improve their writing skills. I would recommend this task for the sixth class schoolchildren in a secondary school who have low proficiency in writing. The task topic can be 'Your day'. Email messaging to the class free-writing blog, reading the classmate's blog and responding to it, writing opinions about the log topic, grammar quizzes, videos, face-to face pair or group discussions followed then by writing tasks in blogs would be tools for them to learn the language, time restrictions only could be an obstacle for the 45- minute lessons. However we have a huge problem in Armenian schools that are lack of computers or don't have computers at all.