Teacher Training on CALL for free

I will always thank to EVO sessions most of the things that I have learnt referring to CALL and e-learning in general. I encourage you to try to enroll one of the free courses offered for this academic year:

http://evosessions.pbworks.com/w/page/48510148/Call_for_Participation2012

Feel free to visit the page, have a look and do the course that you would like to follow ;)

CALL and Language acquisition

Nowadays the use of ICT in our lives is rather common. Read chapter two from your textbook and try to explain the evolution experienced in this area of knowledge.

After that, have a look at this recollection of links:

http://delicious.com/stacks/view/RjgSan

and try to relate it to the advantages of using CALL material created for language learning purposes vs general teaching material used to teach / learn languages.

Please, use the comments option to reply.

Welcome mesage for year 2011-12

First of all, I would like to apologize for not having written before in this blog. I would like to give you my warmest welcome to this course and invite you to read not only the entries that I am submitting through this way, but also all the links coming from the rss displayer on the right column of this blog.   To know more about rss and other kind of feeds, please, have a look at this brief seminar that I delivered some time ago. I will try to show you others more in relation with languages acquisition and teaching.

http://www.mariajordano.com/itc_tpd/taller_rss_juni_2009.html

Please, subscribe to this blog in order to receive updates from this blog.

Regards,

María Jordano

MacMillan Webinars

Have a look at the new MacMillan Webinars for this year...

http://www.macmillanenglish.com/BlankTemplate.aspx?id=43108

E-mail and the Internet

What now is perceived as something obvious, some years ago could seem science fiction. Read pages 95 to 100 from your textbook and try to describe here the changes you have perceive nowadays in language learning thanks to the emergence of Internet and the use of email. Think of the think you couldn't do before. Think about the use of VoIP nowadays. Did it exist during the time when the textbook was written?

Have a look, to these reference to find more information about this:

Emmerson, P. (2003). Email english Macmillan Education.

Stickler, U., & Lewis, T. (2008). Collaborative lenguage learning strategies in an email tandem exchange. En S. Hurd, & T. Lewis (Eds.), Language learning strategies in independent settings (1st ed., pp. 237-261). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Vinagre, M. (2005). Fostering language learning via email: An english – spanish exchange. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(5), 369.

Email writing http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/lesson-plans/email-writing

Good luck with your exams!

FLiT conference recordings

Would you like to see and listen to the author of your textbook? Yes? Then, click here and it's on the first link. You could also watch the rest of the talks, all of them plenary delivered by very important people related to CALL. 

Concept Map tools

On of the secrets to pass this subject is having a clear general idea about the whole book and every single unit of the course, so that once in the exam, you could be able to know what are you being asked in every moment. A rather good method to bring things clear to the exam is by elaborating your own concept maps. You can find now lots of tools to do this without effort. The most important ones are: cmap tool, freemind, xmind, visualmind, or smartdraw among others.You could also use these applications to teach and learn new words by means of semantic fields, similar to this famous online dictionary (Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus).

You have some of them in the virtual course (one per unit) created by a student from last academic year. Have a look and tell us your opinion ;)

Machine translation & CALL

As you could read from your textbook, machine translation (MT) has been linked to language learning and CALL in general from its beginnings. Nowadays, you could find multiple applications in the web, to elaborate dictionaries o even to produce software for grammar checking.

To know more about this, visit this article from the Wikipedia, read something more about its history, professional software and many other external links.

Try to visit any of the sites suggested here and leave us your own oppinion about the use of MT in language learning. Do you think it is actually effective? Is is worthwhile using a web-based translator to present your academic papers? Do you think that MT has evolved enough from the publication of your textbook?