Week 7 Toughts

Hi,

This week I continued implementing my project and also reflected about learner autonomy. I could notice that it will take time for my students become autonomous considering the use of technologies. It is a process and besides that, I have been facing difficulties to access internet or use Power Point presentations at my institution. So, I suggest that students access sites and activities online without doing it in class, that is, setting up a model and helping them to understand how such technology works. Maybe that is why it took about a week for some students to start using Vocaroo to record and send me a sentence - but if they started it is a sign that they are starting to become autonomous.

Well, this week I started  with vocabulary related to clothes which was proposed in the lesson.  I wanted that students noticed that the way we write a word is not the way we say it. Most of the times Brazilian students try to read the words in English based on their knowledge of Portuguese, so, most of the times they say speaking English is difficult because they try to “mime” the way they speak Portuguese when they speak English. That was not possible to access the internet again, so I downloaded and recorded an audio from Elllo. This audio corresponds to the description of some clothes items, such as socks and shirts. Using the audio transcript and the  dictionary I prepared an activity. Students had to guess which word was the one transcribed in phonetic symbols (a word related to clothes). Then, they would listen to the audio and check which words the speaker was referring to. For example:

OK, let's talk about kl(th)z. The first bit of clothing you wear on your feet and they keep you feet warm, now you wouldn't want to we()r these on a really warm day and you want to make sure they stay dry. If these get wet, they're no fun to we()r on your feet.

After they did this part of the activity, wrote the words on the board and they could compare the way the words are “written” with the way the words are “spoken”. At the beginning of the task many of the students got puzzled by the phonetic symbols since it is the first time they have contact with them and also because they thought that the saying the word corresponds to reading its letters, something that they noticed was not true. At the end of the lesson I noticed that they could understand that speaking is different from writing and that how a word sounds depends on the combination of sounds of letters, that is, reading a letter is not simply spelling it. Also they noticed that every word has a stressed syllable. Since there was no access to the internet in class I suggested that they could access http://www.elllo.org/english/Games/G025-Clothes.html and take the quiz proposed at home. It consists of listening to the speaker and choosing the image that corresponds to the clothing item he is describing. I considered important that students did this activity because the more students practice listening the better they will speak. To follow their activities at home I created a Paddlet where they could comment on their results. They did not comment yet - hope they do it.

I also started writing my project report and found a partner to work with. Ola, I hope we can do a great job together!

Ju

Brazil