AN EFL WEBSITE

Hi everybody. :) This week, my task is to write a post about an EFL website. I hope you will like my post and the website I will introduce here.

Teaching English has many different aspects including grammar, vocabulary, etc. However, one of the aspect is generally ignored; which is phonology. There are many learners who can use the grammar of English but they fail when it comes to speaking. They say that they neither understand native speakers nor they themselves are understood by natives. There is a website about pronunciation of English developed by the University of Iowa; which is Sound of Speech. Here is the picture of the website's main page:

In the website, there are some categories such as manner, place, stop and fricative. You can click on them and see the English sounds that belong to that category. When you click on a certain sound, you can see an animation showing the production of he sound, the production of the sound in different places of a word. Here are some pictures:

This website can help learners a lot when used effectively by teachers. Teachers can ask students to imitate those animations, for example. This is all for this week, I hope you liked the website. See you next week. :)

THE IMPORTANCE OF RSS READERS

This picture is taken from this website.

Hi everybody. :) This week, my task is to write about the importance of RSS readers. RSS readers allow its users to follow blogs regularly, without being have to visit those blogs everyday. Every time you turn on your computer, RSS readers get activated and show you a page on which you can see the posts of the blogs you follow. If there is a post which you have not read yet, you can easily read it by clicking on its name. I use Feedreader as an RSS reader. I use it, because it is very easy to use, its instructions are clear. Here is a screenshot from my RSS. On the picture, you can see the blogs I follow.

Among the blogs I follow, I can recommend you to follow Filling My Map. It is not focused on English teaching, but the writer is an American teacher and she writes about her experiences in different countries. For example, she once visited Finland and listed the things that make Finland succesful when it comes to education. So, thanks to this blog, you can learn things about the education systems of different countries.

So, that's all for this week, I hope you liked the idea of using an RSS reader, see you. :)

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA

This picture is taken from this website.

Hello everybody. :) Our task for this week is to write a film review by using wiki! For this task, me and my friend Canan formed a wiki page about the film Bridge to Terabithia. Wiki is a useful website for especially teachers because students can share their own projects there and teachers can see all the projects in just one page. Other websites such as blogs are not that useful for such projects because teachers have to visit every blog prepared by studens in such a case. Again, this is also an advantage for students because they can see all the works done there.

A group work for a task like ours is better because while writing a film review one person may have difficulties with describing the film or may miss some points. So, in such a situation, the other person can help his/her friend. When it comes to our collobarition, the only problem was that we couldn't watch the film together. Other than this, everything was good for us.

The link for our wikipage is here, and below, you can see the screenshot of our film review.

CHANGE THE WORLD!

This picture is taken from this website.

Podcasting can be a very useful tool in education, especially when it is used in an interesting and funny way. It is my task for this week and I recorded a podcast with my classmate Canan. Our recording is about changing the world!

I recommend teachers to use podcasts because they allow students to listen to their own voices while recording and it lessens the anxiety most students feel while speaking in the class. The language used while podcasting is more natural since it's recorded mostly at student's houses which means in a relaxed environment. This activity also allows teachers to listen to every student; because in crowded classes, even if every student is volunteer to participate in the class, time may not be enough to listen to all of them. Teachers can use this activity with students from all age groups but for students younger than 14, a clear explanation about how to use websites in order to form a podcast is necessary. So, without a clear explanation, this task can be very hard and complex for young learners.

Here is our podcast, listen to it and tell us your ideas! Our Podcast

THE WELCOME POST

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Hello! I am Gülsüm from Turkey. I am an English Language Teaching student at Marmara University. In this blog, I will share my experience during my education and things I find interesting about English teaching. Since English is the lingua franca of the world today, blogs about ELT are important and they can be beneficial to both me and you. I hope my blog will be helpful to you and you will like the blog. Also, I would be happy if you could comment on my posts. :)