Teacher Discussion Forums

[kang seonhee]

Hi, I'm an English teacher in Korea. I want my students to have a chance to use English in this ESL Cafe especially Students Forum- reading and replying .

it's not easy for them to read and write at first, so i'd like to help them.

Have you ever done that? If you have, i really want your tips or advice as soon as possible., Please~~~~

and if you know a good site to do that , please recommend

[emile]

Hi Kang,

There are three things you want to consider: chatrooms, message boards (or forums) and blogs. You can set up all three for free, for example, http://www.boards2go.com/signup.html for a free message board and it's really simple to set up.

I suggest using Dave's (or your own) forum like this:

1 Post a message on a board to set up the discussion. For example, Would you like to travel in space? Why? Why not? on the Students=> science board

2 Guide the students to the site. Explain that you would like them to write a paragraph or two (for example).

3 Go back a couple of days later and you will probably find that others have taken up and continued the discussion.

4 You can print out the discussion and use it for sentence analysis

I actually recommend setting up different discussions for different groups of four students. Otherwise, if you have twenty students posting at one time, they tend to lose the thread. If you set up a few topics on different forums, the students will enjoy going and reading the messages left by other groups.

So that's it Kang. it's a very wise decision to use forums as a teaching tool. My students love it.

Emile