This summer I'll be teaching a new class in our Premium English program. There is no course description or fixed aims for the course but the general idea, as explained to me, is that we are providing motivated students the opportunity to hone their skills through writing and debate on controversial issues… whatever that means.
So one thing that will definitely be necessary for the course is a place for students to find content. One of the links on the resources page, the California Distance Learning Project's Adult Learning Activities site, looks like it may be quite a good place for this to happen.
The site is organized by category on the first page and each category contains a large number of articles on each topic but there is more to the site than that--there are also built in vocabulary and comprehension checking activities for the students to use.
Using these activities is fairly straightforward. The page is visually quite clean and the directions are clear enough. A user can navigate many of the activities simply by pressing the NEXT button. It's a site designed for independent work and a lot of individual exploring of the material there and I don't see learners having any major issues navigating the site.
The site appears to be designed for learners at about an intermediate level. The articles are somewhat authentic but as far as I can tell they've been edited for length, grammar and vocabulary to facilitate lower-level learners. Many of the texts have accompanying audio tracks to further help the learners. The vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, review, and writing activities following each article seem like they may be challenging but the fact that there are so many of them, and that they mostly all allow a learner to check his/her work lead me to believe than an intermediate user could handle them.
As a whole, it seems like quite a good site. I think it would most effective for helping learners to practice their reading skills, and to learn to vocabulary. It wasn't clear to me how the site was able to evaluate the written responses but these are the last of the activities and perhaps the idea behind them is more of a self-reflection activity than anything else.
I will recommend this site to motivated students who are interested in additional work outside of my class for sure. I also believe it can be used in other ways.
As I mentioned already, the articles are organized by topic and there are quite a lot of them. This means that I could also use it as a sort of research tool either in class or at home. Reading skills activities could also be taught using these articles.
The site appears to be designed for learners at about an intermediate level. The articles are somewhat authentic but as far as I can tell they've been edited for length, grammar and vocabulary to facilitate lower-level learners. Many of the texts have accompanying audio tracks to further help the learners. The vocabulary, spelling, comprehension, review, and writing activities following each article seem like they may be challenging but the fact that there are so many of them, and that they mostly all allow a learner to check his/her work lead me to believe than an intermediate user could handle them.
As a whole, it seems like quite a good site. I think it would most effective for helping learners to practice their reading skills, and to learn to vocabulary. It wasn't clear to me how the site was able to evaluate the written responses but these are the last of the activities and perhaps the idea behind them is more of a self-reflection activity than anything else.
I will recommend this site to motivated students who are interested in additional work outside of my class for sure. I also believe it can be used in other ways.
As I mentioned already, the articles are organized by topic and there are quite a lot of them. This means that I could also use it as a sort of research tool either in class or at home. Reading skills activities could also be taught using these articles.
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