Re: George's query about using electronic media for teaching language
This is new, but very exciting, to me as well. As I see it, the biggest
difficulty is getting the technological tools to enough students to make
doing homework assignments on line a possibility. Even here at Purdue, a
school known for its engineering and scientific departments, only a few
off my students have e-mail.
As an intermediary step, I was considering the following for the spring
semester here: I thought of editing the already copious electronic files
of worksheets, old test copies and review sheets which I have on disk and
putting them on a site, perhaps my own webpage found under the
university's website. I would ideally entitle each section according to
the name of the grammar point being taught, then furnish a self-correcting
answer key at the end of each segment. By arranging the supplementary
material by topic, rather than gearing them to a particular chapter number
of a particular textbook, the pages could be used by students using any
grammar text. In this phase, I would make the material available for
self-help by students who want or need more drills. This would also be
more economical for them than requiring them to buy a photocopied course
packet as is frequently done for American university courses. Of course,
an online site would also be ideal for offering reading passages, with
questions to check comprehension and additional exercises to put new
grammar and vocabulary into practice.
Ultimately, using hypertext files to do the teaching would be great, but I
am not that proficient at constructing software.
One could also create "programmed learning" units on various grammar
points to take the students through a particular process step by step.
Wrong answers would cause a window to pop up reminding them to think of
"x"; correct answers would allow them to proceed. I have seen this done
for math and chemistry courses at Ohio University.
Buon lavoro!
Gloria Allaire
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