Week4: Reading/Writing & Lesson Plan with Technology

Week 4 is over! I finally can't finish my assignments and my reflection in time. Poor me! Reading and writing is my weak point of all four skills. I myself like to teach listening and speaking. It seems lot of activities and exercises to have the students practice during an hour. Actually it is not what I thought, Internet as a technology is the great resources that provide various of authentic materials in English and benefit students at all level. They can ascess it with no cost. It is convenient for both teachers to prepare their lessons by integrating this wonderful tool which is suitable for their students' level and what skills they want them to improve and for students themselves, Internet provide opportunities for individualized learning when they work alone. Internet can provide forums in which students can share their works with otheres. As from Jarek Krajka's article "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction" (http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Krajka-WritingUsingNet.html)showed the idea of the three main elements for using Internet in writing, websites an authentic material to find information both for students need and teacher’s also, e-mail to help written interaction while communicating in writing with their peers who have the same interests, and web publishing to create students' website where they can post their own writing. As from Chao-chih Liao’s article “E-mailing to Improve EFL Learners' Reading and Writing Abilities: Taiwan Experience” used e-mail to improve students’ reading and writing competence. He argued that after students joined Computer Pals Across the World (CPAW) their intercultural and communicative competences were improved. They not only grained more those competence but also their reading and writing skills were developed.

During the week and having read the posts from other participants I found lot of wonderful websites that are really truely benefit in teaching language for all skills especially reading and writing in week4 assignment. Mary Grace Magcanam suggested some sites to use reading to teach writing:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4471443_use-reading-teach-writing.html
In improving writing skills, the site http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/70-ways-to-improve-your-english.html has 70 suggestions to improve the English language. She suggested that it has a lot of activities that are easy for teachers to prepare.

http://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Writing-Skills this sites also offers some tips in improving the writing skills. Lot of subcategories that is very useful in giving suggestions and activities that are truly useful available for us. And for reading test exercises she adviced this site http://www.usingenglish.com/comprehension/intermediate.html
There are several Readings and follow up questions to test reading comprehension of the students. We can use this http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/writingexercises.html for writing test. It has a varied topics to test the writing skills of the students. And also these sites from our professor
http://a4esl.org/
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
http://legacy.lclark.edu/~krauss/toppicks/toppicks.html
http://www.manythings.org/
http://fog.ccsf.edu/~lfried/

In this week I also have a task to write the example lesson plan with technology. In fact I spent most of the time read my classmates' and tried to imagine of how could I integrate this tool to help my students improve their reading and witing skills. After reading my classmates' example lesson plan I found that everyone is done all assignments perfectly and shows their good examples for me. Well, I am going to say thank you for everyone and that is all for this week.

Best,
Garunyawun