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TEACHING ENGLISH VIA E-MAIL
8th August,
2005
These are some of the
ideas that we came up with at the TDF meeting.
Goal:
One of the main goals
in e-mail teaching would be to make the students autonomous. To give them
tasks that get them to search the Internet and solve English problems by
themselves (via Internet or other means depending on what resources they
have). You may after a time, e-mail them the answers.
Another objective is to
reduce teacher dependency to further their English. The teachers should
initiate the tasks, motivate the students and regularly send messages or
newsletters, but cannot over burden themselves with constant corrections. The
students should correct their own work or correct each other's work.
Ideas:
- Provide links to English
exercise sites (grammar exercises or other). Offer them the 'link of the
month' as opposed to 50 interesting links at one time.
- Form a 'newsgroup' (a discussion
group) by initiating group conversations.
If possible, create a 'Chat room' and set a monthly or bi-monthly
schedule where they chat together. It would be like having a class.
Teacher could set a theme each time (called: 'E-English Corner' or 'Virtual
English Corner' or other). - Find a problem that they
need to solve; one that is complex enough to have them do some research.
For example why can we say 'very hot' but we cannot say 'very
excellent'.
- Email them a 'tip of the
week' (or month). E-mail them the tips one at a time as opposed to many
of them at once as they may not read them if there are too many.
- Build a chain story - write
a sentence and have the students send it to each other in a linear order
(i.e. include the list of students in the e-mail, send it to the first
one in the list and instruct the others to send it to the next one and
so on). Make it come back to you at the end so you may email the
complete story to the group.
- Depending on the cohesion
of the group, you may ease your work by appointing one student to be the
secretary and gather the information.
Encourage the students
to join ESL mailing lists. Many ESL sites provide a service with a 'grammar
tip of the month' or 'word of the week'. For example:
http://esl.about.com/cs/onlinecourses/a/a_ecourses.htm
Free English Courses
www.owad.de
A German website that emails a 'word of the day'. Explanations are in German
however.
If any of you know of other 'mailing list' websites that students can join,
let us know.
More:
The following page has a list of great activities that can be used via e-mail.
Go to website: http://iteslj.org/Articles/Belisle-Email.html
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