TSL641 - Nur Wahida Zainal

Sunday, 27 November 2011

WWW LESSON PLAN

Form/ Level : Form 2/ Intermediate
Time : 80 minutes (2 periods)
Topic : My Dream Car
Language Content : Grammar - Adjectives, vocabulary
Educational Emphasis : ICT skills, multiple intelligence
Previous Knowledge : Students have learned on ways to obtain information using the internet and they also have learned basic knowledge of adjectives during previous lesson.

Objectives : By the end of the lesson, students should be able to -
a) understand the function and the usage of adjectives.
b) extract information from online materials.
c) practice their writing skills by using the information from the website.

Technical Requirements :
One computer per pair of students with an internet connection, a web browser and e-mail.
Each student should have an e-mail address.
LCD projector.

Websites :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmk5GIAqCLQ&feature=related
http://havefunteaching.com/worksheets/english-worksheets/adjective-worksheets/
http://havefunteaching.com/songs/grammar-songs/adjective-song/
http://www.mudah.my/Kuala-Lumpur/for-sale

Preparations :
Teacher needs to check the websites before start the lesson.
Teacher needs to make sure all the computers are working and the internet connection is functioning.

Procedures :
First activity
a) Teacher greets the students and gives instructions to the students before starts the lesson (share computer with a partner, rules and regulations in the computer lab)
b) Teacher asks the students about the previous lesson (basic adjectives) and asks a few students to give examples based on their understanding.
c) Teacher shows a video from the youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmk5GIAqCLQ&feature=related to the students and discusses the video with the students.
d) Teacher asks the students to open this website, http://havefunteaching.com/songs/grammar-songs/adjective-song/ and asks the students to open the lyrics.
e) Teacher plays the song and asks the students to sing along the song.
f) Teacher asks the students to click on the worksheets link and then choose English worksheets and click on Adjective worksheets. http://havefunteaching.com/worksheets/english-worksheets/adjective-worksheets/.
g) Teacher asks the students to do the second exercise with their partner and monitors the students' progress.
h) Teacher discusses the answers with the students.

Second activity
a) Teacher asks the students to browse this link http://www.mudah.my/Kuala-Lumpur/for-sale and try to find their dream car on the website.
b) Teacher shows an example of her dream car to the students and explains why she chooses that particular car. (brand, color, special features, price, etc)
c) Teacher asks the students to find out the reasons why they choose that car using their own creativity as well as using the information on the website itself.
d) Teacher asks the students to create a mind map using Microsoft Word and put those information in their mind map.
e) Teacher monitors the students progress and checks the students' mind map.
f) Teacher asks the students to e-mail the mind map to the teacher's e-mail address.

Conclusion : Teacher recaps the lesson and reminds the students to e-mail their homework on the due date.

Follow-up activity :
Teacher asks the students to do an essay individually based on the mind map that they have produced with their partner and e-mail the essay to the teacher. Students are allowed to change their dream car if they want to.

Appendixes :

Thursday, 17 November 2011

Niagara Falls

There are water falls with greater heights and there are falls which discharge greater quantity of water, but there is no fall as beautiful, popular, visitor friendly as Niagara It is also has the credit of being located closest to the mega cities like New York and Ontario making it very urban compared to Iguazu Falls or Victoria Falls. Niagara also remains as the most commercially utilized falls in the world. the facilities offered to the tourists make this site a heaven of pleasure seekers.

When people of US and Canada think of a vacation and visiting some wonderful natural spot; the first name that comes to their mind is either Niagara or The Grand Canyon. Tourists from far away places; when they pay a visit to the US first prefer to visit Niagara above all other exotic locations of this country. It is no wonder that this water fall remains as one of the best money spinners to the tourism departments of both states.

Niagara is a 56 km long river that carries the water of Lake Erie to Lake Ontario that is located in a much lower altitude. This river also forms as a boundary between Ontario of Canada and the State of New York. Niagara also has the credit of being one of the few rivers that flow northward in this continent.

This river water has in its course licked away a lot of sand and soft rock from its banks thus creating a not so small gorge on both of its sides, at one point it bifurcates and reunite giving birth to a large river island known as the Grand Island. This island is 33.3 sq km in area and has a population around 20,000 people.

The Niagara Falls on the River Niagara is actually a cluster of three falls coming between two nations, Canada and The US. It is just 17 miles south east from Buffalo,New York and 75 miles from Toronto, Canada. The falls in the Canadian portion –known as the Horse- Shoe fall; is the largest of the three. The US side has two falls The American Fall and the Bridal Weil Fall.

Horse-shoe Fall- the largest among the three; has a height of 173 feet and discharges nine times the water than that of the American fall. It is the second largest with a height between 70 to 110 feet; its straight crest width is 830 feet.One river island known as the Goat Island located between the two on the upper floor of the river separates these two falls.

Thursday, 27 October 2011

Assignment 2 - Article Review

A) Citation for the article:

i) Title : Online Domains of Language Use: Second Language Learners’ Experience of Virtual Community and Foreigners.
http://llt.msu.edu/issues/june2011/pasfieldneofitou.pdf

ii) Journal : June 2011, Volume 15, Number 2

iii) Author’s : Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou
Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou is a PhD student at Monash University, with a BA (Hons) in Linguistics and Japanese. She is currently working as assistant coordinator of Japanese under an assistantship program. Her main research interests are computer mediated communication and applied linguistics, after completing her honours thesis on language learners' informal use of bilingual intercultural chat.

B) Summary of the article

In general, this research looked into the effectiveness of computer-mediated-communication (CMC) as a medium of interaction to enhance second language (L2) learners’ communication and interaction skills of the target language. There are many arguments from other researchers in the past research on CMC regarding the usage of CMC in language learning as some of them said that online communication gives an opportunity for the L2 learners to hide their self-identity, appearance and accent and even appear less foreign. The other said online communication can somehow expose the learners to language variation in the form of popular grammar, slang, and regional dialects. In this research, the researcher has interviewed 12 Australian university students of Japanese who in turn invited their Japanese contacts to participate in this research. Overall, data was collected from 30 participants including the Japanese contacts based on the usage of blogs, e-mails, SNSs, online videos, etc. Yet, this research is focused on the social networking sites Mixi and Facebook. Besides, background interviews were also done to get the information of participants’ language and computing histories. There was a follow-up interview as well focusing on the participants’ most recent interaction in order to obtain more detailed information about their language use in context. The researcher analysed the data at the level of the e-turn, a unit analysis proposed by Thorne (1999). The researcher had divided the findings into four categories. As the researcher focused on the usage of Mixi and Facebook, the findings for the first category which is, Second Language Use According to Linguistic Domain showed that English, or a Mostly English variety was used on Facebook in their communication while Japanese or a Mostly Japanese variety was used on Mixi. The second category, Language Choice According to Domain showed that Mixi was identified as a Japanese domain while Facebook was conversely viewed as an English domain whereby Mixi was said as a “Japanese version of Facebook”. The third category, Interlocutors According to Domain showed that participants’ perception toward Mixi and Facebook based on its’ domain as well as demographic makeup somehow contribute to a greater influence on participants’ language choice. Last but not least, The Benefits of Virtual Community and Language Immersion showed that virtual community somehow provides a large variety of languages whereby people are surrounded by the language. Based on the data, the immersion-like effect of being surrounded by one’s target language the Australian participants to read and write more using their L2. As virtual community used by anonymous users, Levy and Stockwell (2006) stated that while anonymity in CMC can have positive effects such as giving L2 speakers more confidence to participate than they may have in face-to-face communication. Therefore, it can be said that networks or domains are influenced and continuously sustained by the social interaction of individual. In overall, CMC somehow has being one of the effective ways for the L2 learners in order to learn their target language.

C) Review

Honestly, when the first time I read the title of the research, I had no idea at all what was the title all about. After reading through the introduction, the research has taken my interest to finish up reading it and share my review on it. I think this research was well-conducted because as we can see from the researcher’s biographies, she is expert in technology and language specifically Japanese. Besides, the researcher is aware with current social networking system like Facebook. Facebook has become one of the most preferable medium of communication between people all around the world. Therefore, the users are surrounded with so many kinds of foreign languages and it somehow helps the users to learn something new and provide reinforcement to the users to learn new languages as their second or third language if they have virtual friends with different languages in this cyberspace. According to TeachingEnglish, British Council (2009), 69% of learners around the world said that they learned most effectively when socialising informally.

In relation to the Malaysian contexts, from my point of view I think social networking has been a very famous medium of interaction among the students. I believe most of the students in school have their own social network account such as Facebook, Tweeter and many more. It is accessible as they can login to their account anytime and anywhere by just using mobile phone nowadays. In terms of the teaching and learning of ESL, I personally think that it is one of the preferable ways for the students to learn the language yet, need to be monitored by the teachers or parents. For example, things like Facebook group, teachers can suggest to the students to join certain group which is beneficial for them in learning the language as the group may bring together students from all over the country to get a group mind view on some of the information or topic they come across. Besides that, we can see nowadays most of the youngsters (students) especially prefer to use English as a medium of communication in social network. They either copy and paste the quotes from the internet or they try to built sentences on their own, expressing their feelings or thoughts. Perhaps social networking does not really help in improving the students’ writing skill because as we all know, most of them use the SMSs’ language and short forms which sometimes create a confusion to the readers yet it helps in improving the students’ communication skill as well as their social skill. Therefore, in my opinion, social network can be considered as an informal way of teaching and learning the language. :)