Thursday, August 28, 2008
How can we support EFL students with writing?
As I mentioned in class, writing in a second or foreign language is a difficult task. It's challenging to find the words and grammar to express what you want to say. We have looked at two very different technologies today to help motivate and assist students with this process: Wordle and Inspiration. How do you as a teacher plan to motivate and assist your students--both WITH technology and WITHOUT it? Please put your comments here.
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Even for us that have been studying English for many years, writing is very difficult, and we also make some mistakes.
This two softwares are very interesting for teaching, because always colours and use of computers make the class more interesting.
But I think that we can use first this softwares for the main ideas, brainstorming, an later use the same topic and ideas for a long period of time for creating a paragraph at the end of the semester without mistakes.
This could motivate students to use technology, but also for learning step by step how to write. They have to be very patient!
I know writing is a very complex task, however, we can challenge our students to do it using this fantastic tools suchas INSPIRATION and WORDLE. I believe students will really enjoy to do this during classes furthermore I also understand that it is very helpful for them. This kind of tasks are quiet difficult for all of us, so it takes a lot of time and practise.
There are a lot of websites that help to improve writing, the website that I chose was Wikipedia and I think it is very helpful in the writing area because students can create articles, they can also modify articles that are already online. I also think that Wordle, chatting and Chatbots are also very helpful, entertaining and with chats students can write on a real context.So with Internet we can motivate students into writing, giving them feedback and guiding them, giving them different ideas through the different websites that are available.
Writing in English is very difficult task, because it implies a lot of grammar rules that I must follow in order to make my discourse coherent.
This two pages are quite interesting because through them we can get students involved in an specific activity in which they can practice the skill they want to improve.
Inspiration could be a very useful tool for teaching writing because of its funny activities, pictures, and colors. Because of this, students could feel more confident in writing, in expressing themselves, their ideas and thoughts.
As an English Teacher I would use this two kinds of technology (Inspiration and Wordle), because they are very interesting and innovative for my. On the other hand,if I do no have technology, I should make our students write somethig that they like, I would consider their interests in order they feel motivated.
How do you as a teacher plan to motivate and assist your students--both WITH technology and WITHOUT it?
We have to plan our lesson always having in mind the ways in which students learn, their learning styles and types of personalities. This is very important and we have to take it into account before planning our lessons.
Besides, we have to motivate our students through different strategies and having in mind that not all students learn in the same way. we have to be prepared to use what is called "multi modality" in order to students get the goals that you propose to them.
In our country, teachers have always had problems teaching writing in English language or even in Spanish. However, I think that we would motivate our students by asking them to write articles, essays, stories, and so on, that would be interesting topics for them, for example: arts, sports, music,etc.
And technology can help us as teachers, for example we can use, wordle, inspiration, blogs, facebook, or what ever you would like to use to write.
Both tools, Wordle and Inspiration help us to increase the student learning, but just at the beginning of their writing learning because these web pages have a clear objective,motivate students to write at least their main ideas about something,then we have to find another way to encourage their motivation to write, I consider that their favorite books and topics have to be used in order to motivate them.
That's a difficult question. As I have learned in Chile, each educational situation is unique, each group of students have their own needs. I think is important to evaluate our students needs first and then use any kind of technology that fits best with them.
There's no doubt that the two devices we worked with today can help in different situations.
It is complex to explain how to motivate students because to me is already difficult to write in English but with training and with this fun activities I think that I can achieve my goal,but until that that won't happen I prefer not to do a comment on how to motivate student...
But always you have to keep in mind the different kind of interest that you students may have.
I think that first of all we have to take into account how the teacher is going to use technology in order to achieve a certain task, if the teacher is creative s/he will get the students engaged in the task, the class will be motivating, interesting, useful, meaningful. the use of technology is very useful if it is used correctly, there a lot of programs that we can use such as inspiration, wordle, blogs, these are very motivating for children even for adolescents.
I think that it is so hard to motivate our students in terms of writing, because most of the students think that writing is kind of bored. But I also believe if we use this innovative and creative internet softwares can be a little bit interesting. However, Inspiration and Wordle can help you to make an activity more interesting. But, you have to keep in mind that is up to you to make the students get interested in writing.
From my point of view we can use this two pieces of technology in schools in Chile. I think that Wordle and Inspiration can make the writing process less complicated and more meaningful to the students. But of course we have to take into account the different ways in which learning is achieve by the students.
We have to be able to motivate our students, with or without technology. But I think nowadays is more easy to motivate them with these kind of activities, wordle is a very entertaining page, because children can create texts with their own styles, but if we don't have these tools we can motivate our students with interesting topics for them, it depends on their personalities.
I think that as teachers of English we have to be able to develop the 4 skills in our students, this is something difficult because not all students have the same interests nor learn in the same way, so we have to keep this in mind.
Motivate students into writing is really difficult specially when talking about another language, because many students can feel frustrated when trying to express themselves in English so this two pages: wordle and inspiartion are very good to motivate students, but we also have to be able to motivate writing when there is no technology available by allowing our students to choose the topics, and use their imagination, helping them with grammar and other things.
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