Reading/Writing Skill-Building Websites

Reflections on Week 4

Part One

Here are my reflections on what I did and what I learned in the fourth week of Webskills which mainly focuses on the development of reading and writing skills and vocabulary.

I read two of the three articles assigned. I found them really interesting and useful. The first article entitled:  “Three Extensive Reading Activities for ESL/EFL Students Using E-books” is written by Mei-Ya Liang (2004). The URL of this article is : http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Liang-ExtensiveReading.html.  The writer guided the  students to read authentic e-texts outside of the classroom and to improve their overall reading skills. The lesson aims at EFL college students. The students were given the chance to select 3 e-books out of 10 based on their interest. The writer concludes the article by mentioning that with appropriate guidance, students will increase not only extensive reading, writing and thinking skills, but also their confidence in and motivation for reading L2 texts.

After that, I reviewed many reading and writing web sites in order to evaluate and select three useful activities for my context in reading and writing skills development and publish two posts on Nicenet.  In the first post, I focused on the useful activities that could be used in my own classes for teaching reading. I was really impressed by the variety of passages and activities that are really useful for teaching my students reading. The most useful passage that is useful for first level university students is entitled: Searching the Internet. The URL of the passage is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/stories/searchingtheinternet.html . Culturally the passage is useful for all EFL students. The topic is a general one and not very long. It contains about 600 words. The new words are written in bold. What is interesting is that you click the mouse on the new words and a dialogue box appears giving you the definition of that word. For example, the word URL is defined as “The URL of a website is its address, often something like www.google.com.  Technology has made language learning and teaching fun and easy. This technology tool reminded me when I was a student at college. I used to spend much time searching for the meaning of new words in dictionaries. Today with the advancement of technology just pass the curser and press it over the new words and its definition is ready at your disposal. Isn’t that amazing and saves a lot of time. After reading the passage, you go to a quiz that consists of 15 statements about the passage and you select whether the statement is true or false. After that you check your answers.

The second passage that suits my students is entitled: “Working at the Bank”. Its URL is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/stories/ihtm1bank2.html . This passage is suitable

for my students. After reading the passage, you can test your vocabulary and comprehension by selecting one of 3 alternatives and immediately you get the feedback. When you finish this exercise, you can get your score and you can try again. This exercise is followed by a nice activity that gets the students to think about the story and use their own imagination to decide what will happen next and to write what will happen next.

The third passage that I found suitable for the students of Level One Reading course is called: “Recycling and the Environment”. The URL is http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/call/recycling.html

Again the new words are in bold and you can get their definitions by clicking the mouse. The passage is followed by interesting exercises to check comprehension. In short, I found those three passages useful for teaching reading and vocabulary to level one university students of EFL. I recommend them to the teachers who teach Reading 1 in our department.

The ABCD Objectives for the previous three reading activities will be as follows:

Condition (C): Given a reading passage that is technologically enhanced and followed by interesting exercises, Audience (A): the First Year university students, Behavior (B): will be able to read the passage, accurately identify the main theme of the passage, and complete the comprehension and vocabulary tasks that follow, Degree of Mastery (D):  with 90% accuracy in their scores.

The second article is entitled: “Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction”. The URL of this article is : http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html. It is written by Jarek Krajka et. al. (2000). It is really an interesting article. The writers explore the use of the Internet as a teaching aid in which students are taught how to write different writing genres. After that I reviewed some websites for teaching writing in order to select 3 suitable ones and to post my second post on Nicenet. I focused on the useful ones that can be adapted and used for teaching writing.

The most useful Website is that of the American University in Cairo which is useful for first level university students. It is entitled: “Ten Steps to Writing an Essay”  http://www1.aucegypt.edu/academic/writers/. It is useful to be used as the first lesson in a writing course of the First level at the university level. The 10 steps start with researching the topic and finish with editing the first draft linguistically for grammatical and stylistic errors. The 10 steps are illustrated.

The second useful Website for teaching and learning writing is Enchanted Learning. It is mainly for subscribers, but it has many activities and ideas for teaching writing for free. The URL of the page is http://www.enchantedlearning.com/essay/writing.shtml. There are some good ideas for writing students’ own books journals on topics such as A Book About Me, Vacation Memory Book, School Memory Book,..etc.  Students can print some templates to help them write such topics.

The third useful site is Creative Writing Worksheets. The URL of this site is : http://www.tlsbooks.com/languageartscreativewriting.htm . It has many useful activities that can be used for first university students in my teaching context.  For example, the students can write about “When I went to……”. (a city they have visited).  The worksheet helps them write an essay by answering 10 questions.

Again, The ABCD Objectives for the previous three reading activities will be as follows:

Condition (C): Given a writing worksheet, e.g., “When I Went to ….” which is printed from the website, Audience (A): the First Year university students, Behavior (B): will be able to write an essay about their trip to a city that they have visited , Degree of Mastery (D):  in about 300 words using transition words and without grammatical  errors.

To be Continued