Teacher Discussion Forums

[EnglishRaven]

onlinEnglish.net offers online courses for speaking and writing in particular. There are a couple of free classrooms for our "Global Friend" program opening soon, for those that are interested.

Thanks.

http://www.onlinenglish.net

[ap]

Great website for specially written grammatical songs.

http://www.letslets.com/teach_english.htm

Teaching Strategies with these songs.

Gap fills or close texts mix ups
Focus questions
True-false statements
Put these lines/words into the correct sequence
Indicate the word stress
Indicate the sentence stress
Phonetics and intonation
Dictation
Add verses
Add antonyms/synonyms of given words
Spirited discussion and creative writing.
Introduce slang in easy to remember context.

[cloudcafe928]

Indeed, the internet can provide both teachers and students with abundant resources which will benefit language learning and teaching. I've found various interesting websites offered by other participants in this forum. And I really appreciate the sharing.
However, I would like to suggest that EFL teachers should teach students to evaluate web sources so that students may gain reliable and valid information from the internet. Compared with native speakers, second language learners are usually unfamiliar with the cultural and pragmatic aspects of the target language so that they may be misled by some subjective, ideological, and commercial websites. For example, if you key in "whale hunting" and "whale killing" in google search, you may find that "killing" brings out more results of ecological protection.

[HARDY]

As the coin has two sides, learning English through internet also has two sides. The author has proposed above that surfing on the internet is convenient and entertaining for English learning. However, it is also easy for the teacher become out of control in this kind of class. It is hard for teacher to observe every student in the class whether they are making good using of the internet, or they are just surfing on the internet, or talking with their e-friends. What’s more, it is hard for teacher to draw students’ attention when they are surfing if teacher wants to give some important information on the course. Of course, studying English with the help of internet could be an efficient way for L2 learners, esp. it could provide the learners a good language environment. So, we should never abandon this kind of technology instruction even though it has negative aspects. I think when we are using it as kind of teaching methods; we should pay attention to both its positive and negative parts.