Teaching English as a Foreign Language Online
Posted in Observations on Jul 31st, 2011
Almost every hobby that lets you evolve from a newbie to an expert implies learning hundreds of collocations within the first couple of months of intensive practice, which amounts to thousands if you continue for over a decade. Every time I meet someone who is interested in something I have not been exposed to much [...]
Posted in Commonly Made Mistakes, Learning Language Teaching, Observations, Testing and Assessment on Jun 24th, 2009
a mistake vs an error According to Corder (1967) cited by Ellis (2008), a ‘mistake’ is a deviation in learner language that occurs when learners fail to perform their competence. It is a lapse that reflects processing problems. An error, on the other hand, is a deviation in learner language which results from lack of [...]
Posted in E-Learning Design & Management, Educational Technology, Instructional Design, Observations on Jan 13th, 2009
Social presence is the degree to which an individual feels real or is seen as real while studying in an online context. The higher the degree of the learner’s social presence in a VLE, the lower the probability of the learner not finishing his/her studies.
Posted in Collaborative Learning, Course Design, Digital Storytelling, E-Learning Design & Management, groupwork, Instructional Design, language learning e-tivities, Learning Language Teaching, Observations, Teacher Skills, Using Blogs in EFL, Using Wikis in EFL on Jan 11th, 2009
It looks like more and more language teaching is being done on the web. Let me summarize what online language teachers have on offer, what they do or could do in theory. I will list several examples from Curtis J. Bonk & Ke Zhang’s (2008) Empowering Online Learning, pp. 62-63. Types of resources & activities [...]
Posted in Collaborative Learning, E-Learning Design & Management, groupwork, Learning Language Teaching, Observations on Jan 9th, 2009
Does studying 1-to-1 qualify as pairwork? And is it necessarily teacher-centered and bad? Anyone?
Posted in Course Design, E-Learning Design & Management, Instructional Design, Observations, Statistics on Jan 8th, 2009
According to research, e-learners are likely to be frustrated by technical difficulties communication breakdowns Source: Hara., N (2000). Student Distress In a Web-Based Distance Education Course.
Posted in Course Design, E-Learning Design & Management, Educational Technology, Instructional Design, Observations, Teacher Skills on Jan 5th, 2009
Let me list some of the topical issues that keep emerging and need to be addressed asap. usability – what I mean here is all the extra clicks that either my students or I make, which takes time. Distributing courseware in space often results in learners’ having to spend more time online than they would [...]
Posted in Instructional Design, language learning e-tivities, Learning Language Teaching, Observations, Statistics, Teacher Skills on Jan 1st, 2009
To begin with, I am not aware of any reliable statistics. I can only draw on my personal experience and summarize a number of related Google search results. It is obvious, I hope, that it is impossible to spend more than 3 clock hours talking without a break. I guess that’s the maximum. As for [...]
Posted in Course Design, Instructional Design, language learning e-tivities, Learner Skills, Observations, Teacher Skills, Using Blogs in EFL, Using Wikis in EFL on Dec 31st, 2008
‘Spent the day contemplating Clarke’s e-note-taking advice. Isn’t it amazing? They’ve got it all online but for proper note-taking tools. I mean Moodle doesn’t have such a module or activity as a notebook. Nor does Blackboard Vista. Well, they do have blogs and notes sections, but they’re so-o badly designed that I do not want [...]
Posted in E-Learning Design & Management, Observations on Dec 29th, 2008
Whenever I come across a book on web-based learning tools and technologies that seems remotely relevant to my current objectives, it talks about tools and technologies that are either as old as the hills and ever so often do not exist any more, or have been replaced by or evolved to to be something completely [...]
