May Workshop Summary
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| 18 May 2008 - 09:44 | 83 |
| seymour Posts: 11 | May Workshop Summary Daegu KOTESOL Chapter Meeting 3 May 2008 Jason Renshaw “A world of news just waiting for your students” The meeting started off with Aaron Jolly encouraging members to nominate others or themselves for positions for the National Elections taking place at the October International Conference. More detailed information and job descriptions will be advertised in the July issue of TEC. Aaron noted that, at the moment, Jake Kimball is the only representative from our chapter on the national council. He recommended his position of ‘Nominations and Elections Committee Chair’, and ‘Secretary’ as easier for newcomers to the council. All in all, he stressed the difficulty in finding people to run for the positions and hopes that members from our chapter will step up and nominate dedicated and hard-working people. Jason Renshaw gave a great presentation and facilitated a lot of discussion on how to use the news in one’s classroom. The basis of his presentation revolved around a worksheet of discussion questions, some of which were completed after watching video news clips available from a news website he created (and which self-updates): http://www.onlinenglish.net/iView.html . Jason stressed the need for teachers to look for more global news with a variety of accents (both native, and non-native speaker) that could somehow be showed to be similar or tied to situations in Korea, instead of only talking about Korean issues and things directly related to Korea in class. For accent variety in particular, he recommended Reuters, and for objectivity the BBC. Steve also pointed out that moreso than accent, enunciation is more important than pronunciation. Jason uses video news as mostly homework with his Masters class at KNU. He has set up a forum where students can post their thoughts on, as well as comment on other’s opinions of specific videos. He briefly showed us the site, and in a class of about forty students, some of the posts had over 1000 hits! These students are obviously very active in the forum. If he has taught video news in class, he makes sure that he asks not only comprehension questions, but also questions to induce critical thinking. For a more student centered approach, Jason suggests having the students themselves choose the video news clips that they want to comment on. In this case, the different news sites allow the students to email the teacher the link, or even embed it in the forum. Furthermore, students will often choose videos at the level of English they are comfortable with, as well as subjects that interest them. Rocky mentioned a successful language learner who searches for a breaking news article published in three different newspapers within the same language as something people might want to try themselves in their own language learning, or with their students. Other websites recommended by attendees were http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com for already made lesson plans on current news stories and http://www.pandora.tv , a Korean site for online-streamed sitcoms and movies (as well as a great singing room site with many English songs http://song.pandora.tv/ ). The meeting ended at 5:30 and twenty-six people attended, with seven first-timers. Our June meeting will not be at KNU, but rather will be a part of the EXCO English Fair. More information is available at http://englishfair.co.kr/ (in Korean), but Steve will also send out an email to those on our list as well as information on how our chapter members can get free tickets for the event. Our presentation will still be at the same time, but the speaker has been changed from Aaron Jolly to Scott Miles, who will be giving a presentation on Extensive Reading. |
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