Can a VLE help absent students to catch up on their studying? The fact is that students miss class for several reasons, from very personal to medical ones. A VLE can provide students with a tool to work on the very same material covered in class. PPTs, handouts, practices, videos, pictures, and so on can be available to any student who did not show up for class. Although I do not actually use a VLE per se at the university, I created some blogs in which I embedded a blog content bar for students to get the corresponding material per week. Absent student can also catch up, or regular class attendants can go back and review material already covered.

My Ideal Pronunciation Class

EFL/ESL colleagues, who have worked with me at Universidad Latina or at Centro Cultural Costarrincese-Norteamericano and know me from ESL/EFL teacher conferences, area fully acquainted for my passion towards English pronunciation. In terms of lesson planning for these particular courses that I teach at Ulatina, I really enjoy digging the Web to find suitable material for my classes, to provide students with further practice to be done at home anytime they want, and to consolidate the expected language learning goals for pronunciation.

In the sample plan I provide below, exercises that will be monitored by me, the instructor, are labeled so. However, the idea is to have students work on the plan themselves to become responsible for their pronunciation learning. Of course, if they are able to bring their laptops to class, for those of them who happen to have, the lesson plan will be highly effective.

Most activities planned here are intended to be part of a long-term plan regarding regular past tense pronunciation. Some questions or extra activities might arise spontaneously, but we have a computer connection in class to troubleshoot doubts and the like.

Enabling students to use higher level thinking skills can be achieved by going beyond the application of pronunciation rules and by having students analyze, synthetize, and self-assess the way they are pronouncing regular past tenses. For this purpose, students will be required to give a two-minute presentation to talk about a memorable moment in their childhoods. This can be recorded before class and uploaded to a class wiki to be later used in some kind of peer correction task.

Give this sample lesson plan a try, and then let me know how it went. Please, feel free to contact me to jonathan.acuna@ulatina.ac.cr or jonathan.acuna@centrocultural.cr.

Sample Lesson Plan: The one-computer classroom / Past tenses ending in -ed

Class: BIN-06 Pronunciation II

Duration: 2 hrs. 30 min.

Materials

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M7xIwAqy9I

2. http://www.scribd.com/doc/11966921/Pronunciation-Of-the-final-ed

3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1413_gramchallenge26/page2.shtml

4. http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1413_gramchallenge26/page3.shtml

5. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8139322.stm

Other material:

· Speakers

· Textbooks

Introduction

As we have already studied in previous lessons, we have already noticed that –ed regular past tenses vary in their pronunciation. Here we will review the concept of voicing to fully understand when and why –ed is pronounced as /t/, /d/, or /ɪd/.

Objectives of this lesson (tell students about them):

Once students have reviewed the concept of voicing and watched a video explaining the –ed pronunciation in past tenses, they will be able to apply the rules to pronounce past tenses with 80% accuracy while reading or speaking.

Procedure

· Presentation

o There will be no real presentation by the teacher at this point.

o Students will watch a video in which a teacher explains how –ed in past tenses is pronounced and classified.

o Students will be asked to take notes.

· Tasks’ sequence

o Activity 1: Group work: Students will be asked to work in groups of three to analyze the information provided in the following link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/11966921/Pronunciation-Of-the-final-ed. This will help them match the importance of consonant voicing and –ed pronunciation, as well of the exceptions.

o Activity 2: Quizzing students: The next two links that will be used –with the whole class- will be a way to review/quiz/assess student understanding of the rules. The links provide two interactive quizzes, so it is a nice way of assessing student understanding of rules.

§ Quiz 1

§ Quiz 2

o Activity 3: Assessment: Students will be give a copy of the article published by the BBC on Monkeys recognise 'bad grammar'. They will work in pairs to highlight the past tenses ending in –ed and to practice reading the passage.

o Activity 4: By changing partners, students will be asked to talk about the possibility of animals to understand language. They will be asked to tell their partners to discuss about their pets when they were kids. And if they believe in animal communication. (These questions will be shown to students on power point.)

· Learning styles addressed: sensory/intuitive learners (procedural info); visual/verbal; sequential/global; logical/mathematical [A wide range of learners are addressed with this practice.]

· Technology alternative (in case things don't work as planned): book CD and additional worksheets

Review before the end of the class session:

Before the class is over, a general review of the rules will be given to students. At random, students will be asked to provide how each rules works.

Homework:

· In the class blog, a couple of links will be provided for students to continue practicing: http://www.english-room.com/pasttense_6a.htm and http://www.eslgold.com/grammar/simple_past.html

· Besides, students will be able to prepare a two-minute presentation talking about a memorable moment in their childhood.

Lesson Plan developed based on Deborah Healey’s proposed lesson plan with technology. American English Institute/Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon

P.S. Find a digital downloadable copy of my pronunciation lesson plan at http://www.scribd.com/doc/27776445/Pronunciation-Lesson-Plan-Sample if you feel like using it.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

How to Become a Good Leaner throughout Life

To become a good leaner throughout one’s life implies the creation of a PLN or Personal Learning Network. PLNs are personal networks we all create, no matter what we do in life, to keep ourselves updated in our working or teaching fields. A PLN allows us to gather and process new and innovative information that otherwise would not be available to us.

Understanding the maxim that states that “it is the student the one who must take responsibility for his/her own learning,” PLNs are ways to nourish our knowledge and to gain control over what we want to learn. PLNs reflect, in essence, memorable learning experiences that can allow us to recall and then convey to others, such as our students. “Being a good teaching professional implies being a good learner.” And this is true because, as learners, all of us make use of our learning networks to quench our intellectual curiosity and desire for learning way beyond we know in this very moment.

At this point you may be wondering what a PLN actually is. Well, a PLN is the way in which a human being expresses his/her need for learning. To get access to this learning, a person uses different resources to achieve it. A Personal Learning Network can include attending conferences or talks by experts in given areas, signing up for a virtual or non-virtual course to learn or develop new skills, reading articles online o journals, writing one’s reactions and reflections regarding our working and learning experiences on personal but professional blogs. All this highlights one’s enthusiasm, pleasure, imagination, and curiosity to develop and build one’s knowledge.

To create and strengthen a learning network has some special ingredients to make it successful. Taking the initiative in one’s lifelong learning process to become better teachers, instructors, or facilitators is one of these ingredients that our PLN can help us achieve. Honesty in our teaching day by day can also help us self-assess ourselves. By doing this, we can be able to strengthen our weak areas. Self-discipline can allow us to set realistic learning goals that can be accomplished with a bit of effort and dedication. Diligence can have us work individually towards autonomous learning.

The building of my Personal Learning Network will allow us to learn more and in a focused way. As a logical consequence of one’s focus, this can allow us to share one’s newly or recently acquired knowledge with one’s students, colleagues, and peers. A PLN implies cooperating with some other colleagues and students to build our collective knowledge. A PLN must be one of our lifelong goals as teaching professionals. It will pay off in the end.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica

Integrating Technology into College EFL Classes

Going through the four different models of language integration (supplemental, partially blended, fully blended, and full online), I have asked myself where I want to be a year from now. My own answer for this question is that I want to consolidate my role of partially blended instructor at Universidad Latina.

Based on my current teaching situation, I must say that this partially blended model is the one that fits my teaching scenario the most at the university. The reason for this choice is simple; our Learning Management System (LMS) platform is not at its best yet, and I do not trust it yet. I prefer to use free Wiki or blog’s hosting services that we can access through a common ground such as Google email accounts.

Analyzing my students’ learning situations and considering how best technology fits into our course syllabus, this partially blended model allows students to create their own online posts (blogs), become their own editors (blog’s posts), foster independent learning (learner autonomy), and work at their own pace (within deadlines and objectives). And once the course is over, their own products will continue being available for them, not like in the LMS scenario in which material gets “confiscated” by the Mooddle system.

In hindsight, the 2010 academic year became an interesting change in my teaching style at Universidad Latina. Our first term –January to April- marked the beginning of the use of blogs and WebQuests in my Reading Skills 2 classes in a supplemental integration of technology into this course. It was a nice try, but at the end, I felt I could have done more of what I implanted in class. Our second term –May to August- helped me consolidate my supplemental module and move into a “supplemental partially blended” way of integrating technology in two other courses I teach at the university: Pronunciation 1 and Reading Skills 1 with a class blog. This last term, -September to December-, marked my debut into a more partially blended approach to teaching and fostering learning.

Although I have not achieved all I want for my courses and for my students enrolled in those classes, all the ideas I have gotten through this course, Teaching with Technology, and the exchange of ideas with my course partners have marked me positively to venture myself into other technological ways next academic year. In the future, perhaps a year from now (or a bit more), I would be more than happy to move into a fully blended model of education. For this, which is my very personal dream, I would really like my colleagues at the university to take the next step in this technology integration for the sake of our students’ learning. In the meantime, I must wait for that day to come because the fear of technology that some college professionals still have is something that needs to be cope with somehow and sometime in the future.

Jonathan Acuña

Universidad Latina

Costa Rica