Sunday, February 23, 2014

Pay me more!

This is Lara Aguila Feijoo. The aim of the task I have prepared is to provide students with a listening activity which could foster their interest in oral input. Furthermore, since the majority of students are mostly used to reading material and to extra activities based on written texts, a reading activity of a textbook has been adapted to devise another one which reinforces the students’ listening skills and which is different from their English learning routine. The topic of the exercise is jobs; specifically, the feeling some people have regarding the money they earn in return for their work. Work is a general topic which appears in many textbooks from different levels and, therefore, the listening could be reused in many contexts and the tasks involved could be adapted to each audience.

In this case, the teacher would use a Prezi Presentation as the main support to present and to manage the activity. Students would have to listen and watch a video twice as to give the questions of the exercise a reponse. Next, they would have to work in pairs and compare their answers. In addition, they would have to listen and watch the video again to check. In the end, the teacher would proceed with the correction of the task making students participate voluntarily. In short, 6 podcasts were recorded, a video was created and uploaded on youtube, and a Prezi presentation was designed.

PODCASTS: The 6 little pieces of writing were read by 6 student teachers from the Master’s Degree and the podcasts were created on iTunes. Having 6 different accents is a way of providing scaffold to learners for real life situations as English is not only spoken by natives.

VIDEO: Firstly, 7 power point slides were designed and saved as .jpeg images. The first slide presents the activity and the rest show both the picture of the speaker and the questions which need to be answered. Secondly, Windows Movie Maker was used as to match each podcast with its corresponding slide. Finally, after the video had been finished, the file was uploaded on youtube. It is important to highlight the fact that a youtube channel had to be created in order to upload the video.

PRESENTATION: Prezi was used as to give an introduction to the task and as a way of guiding students when completing the exercise. Prezi enables students to start the task with a general image of what they have to do and to have a roadmap all over the learning process.

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