English grammar practice on the Web

(This post is part of the 2nd ESL/EFL Carnival)

We know some SLA authors say explicit grammar teaching is not the most efficient way to help our students learn a language. However, many teachers believe that specific grammar work is needed in order to deal with some difficult grammar points or structures and some students, especially those who are older, want to have grammar explanations and practice because they prefer to learn the rules before attempting to use the language in communicative situations (or because they need it to pass their exams). Anyway, many teachers and students demand grammar practice exercises and we can find a lot of them on the Web. As Levy & Stockwell (2006:185) have written:

"Despite this general movement away from drill-based grammar instruction, it is perhaps ironic that many people new to the field consider this type of activity to be the essence of what CALL is. Drill-based activities most certainly still have their place in the language curriculum."

The main ESL directories have wide grammar sections which include links to sites with grammar tutorials, exercises and activities.

Some of the websites which offer good repositories of grammar quizzes and exercises in their servers are the following:

• About.com : With quizzes for different learner levels and grammar topics.
  
• Activities for ESL Students : Grammar Quizzes about Places and different levels (Easy, Medium and Difficult).
  
• Basic Grammar : For lower levels and review.


• Clicknlearn : Multimedia activities for Spanish Secondary Education students.


• E.L. Easton : Grammar section with links and exercises related to different parts of speech (Adjectives, Articles, Conjunctions, Nouns, Prepositions, Pronouns, Verbs).
  
• English4U : Alphabetical classification and level rating.


• English-Hilfen : Excellent German site with tutorials and related exercises. You can subscribe to their newsletter with the latest news.


• ESLGold : From low beginning to advanced.


• Learnenglishfeelgood.com : English grammar tests that focus on topics that ESL students often find difficult to understand.


• Manythings.org : Some of the quizzes you can find here are also at the A4ESL site.


• NonstopEnglish : If you register and login you can see which tests you have done and how successfully.


• Road to Grammar : More than 300 interactive exercises and a section for younger learners.


• World English : Exercises and tests covering the main areas, including a diagnostic grammar test.

Other sites with grammar games and other activities are the following:

• BBC Skillswise Games : A lot of linguistic games.

• English-Online Games Zone : Language games to download and play online.

• Grammar Gorillas : Parts of speech game.

• Grammar Ninja : Arcade game to identify parts of speech.

• Grammar Safari : Suggestions for "hunting" and "collecting" examples of specific words and structures as they are used in documents accessible to anyone on the Internet.

• Grammarman Comic : Comics to learn grammar.

• Happy Verby Gang : Created by Isabel Pérez to teach tenses.

• Learnenglish.org : British Council site with interactive grammar games.

• Netgrammar : Lesson plans on grammar contents with explanations, exercises and skills practice.

• Starship English : Verb tenses game.

• Tenses : English tenses tutorial.

Now that you have visited all these rich grammar practice sites, you should forget about them according to Steve Kaufmann's language learner's manifesto.

Of course, grammar games and tutorial exercises are not the only way to learn grammar with Web resources, there are more possibilities, just in case grammar should be taught at all. Levy & Stockwell (2006) see three main types of grammar instruction with computers:

"Grammar teaching in CALL generally takes one of three forms: grammar tutorial exercises, learner-centered grammar instruction, or communicative grammar instruction...

...(Learner-centered grammar instruction) places greater emphasis on the learners to deduce the rules of the target language for themselves. One means of doing so that features regularly in the literature is the use of concordancing and corpora...
...The only way in which learners are able to have access to 'unlimited' language input is through authentic communication, be this with native speakers or with other learners of the language. The choice of the appropriate form of computer mediated communication is a difficult one, and different types of CMC allow for emphasis on different aspects of language learning."

With regard to grammar learning in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) activities, Chapelle (2005) comments the following:

"Whereas much grammar learning might best be carried out through explicit grammar teaching, we have seen that CMC tasks offer a wealth of opportunities for learning through language practice that is not directed specifically at the teaching of any particular grammatical point... CMC provides a mechanism for valuable communication, but shaping the mechanism into valuable opportunities for learning is the pedagogical challenge. Here the research is very difficult to interpret because researchers have studied a variety of phenomena, but the overall finding is that teachers need to plan for good CMC exchanges."

(This post takes part in the 2nd ESL/EFL Carnival)

Types of web resources for language teaching

From Woodsy’s photo gallery

This post is part of "The First ELL, ESL & EFL Carnival"

It is frequently said that the Web is full of teaching and learning resources.

What kind of language teaching resources can we find on the Web?

What do we mean by "web teaching resource"?

Teaching resources in general are a source of aid or support that may be drawn upon when needed to enhance the quality of teaching and therefore facilitate learning. They may be physical (board, book, poster, video projector, chart, ...) or conceptual and methodological. When we refer to web teaching resources we are talking about the different kinds of materials and tools that we can find on the WWW, with the same purpose of improving the quality and efficiency of learning in activities which make use of those resources.

Therefore, a first distinction can be made between materials, which provide contents, and tools, which let us process those contents, create our own materials or interact and collaborate with other people in learning environments. The type of web resources to be used will depend on the kind of activity to be developed.

As we know, when we search for contents in the Net, not only can we find text documents, also images, videos, audio files, presentations, conceptual maps or documents with a diverse kind of interactivity and graphic or multimedia combinations. Whatever their form of presentation, in my view, there are three general types of web materials for educative use:

1. Teaching materials. They are usually created with a curricular didactic aim and may include different kinds of documents and activities: practice exercises (grammar, vocabulary, skills), tutorials, simulations, games, etc.
2. Authentic materials. Their communicative or social function is authentic; they haven't been modified or adapted for teaching purposes. They can be used as a resource in discovery based learning activities and web tasks for language learning.
3. Reference materials. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, manuals, concordancers online.
   

Web tools used as a teaching and learning resource can be classified according to its function:

• Navigation
• Search
• Office online tools
• Social Bookmarking
• Content syndication
• Communication
• Content and learning management systems
  
• Social networking
• Multimedia edition
• Didactic materials authoring
  

This could be an initial sketch to be completed and developed. Internet as a language learning resource is not only an immense network of contents with multimedia facilities, but also a communication technology that promotes interaction with other people and the media, providing the conditions for a more socio-constructive, cooperative and student-centered kind of learning, which takes into account the learner needs and fosters her or his autonomy.

7 ESL / EFL links directories

The Internet TESL Journal Links













Larry Ferlazzo’s English Website



Rong-Chang Li

Because of YouTube!

Sing along changing YouTube for MyBlogs, Twitter or Facebook.



Via eCuaderno

"Blogs vs. Wikis" JFK-Nixon fictional debate

7 groups of NBLT activities

Network Based Language Teaching (NBLT) is language teaching that involves the use of computers connected to one another in either local or global networks. Whereas CALL has traditionally been associated with self-contained, programmed applications such as tutorials, drills, simulations, instructional games, tests, and so on, NBLT represents a new and different side of CALL, where human-to-human communication is the focus. (Kern & Warschauer, 2000)

However, language learning activities which involve the use of the Internet needn't be limited to computer mediated human-to-human communication. Traditional CALL activities can also be developed in NBLT and are actually found in most LT sites.
As we know, the Web is full of authentic, reference and didactic materials useful for language learning. It also provides excellent tools for the interaction with those materials, processing information (input) and student production (output). And for linguistic contents and skills work, either integrated o specific.

Here is a list of 7 groups of LT activities using the Internet (or NBLT activities):

1. Lexical quizzes, games and other vocabulary learning specific activities (e.g. lexical maps, concordancers use, class dictionary building ...).
2. Grammar tutorials, exercises, simulations and games.
3. Listening and pronunciation virtual lab activities.
4. Reading and writing webtasks: treasure hunts, webquests, ...
5. Multimedia webtasks: scrapbooking, samplers, podcasting, tasks with authentic multimedia materials from social sites, ...
6. Computer Mediated Communication activities (email exchange, collaboration projects, CoP, ...)
7. Use of blogs and wikis for individual or group language learning e-portfolios.
   

CALL and its dimensions

M. Levy & G. Stockwell (2006) looks in depth at seven important dimensions of CALL:

1. design
2. evaluation
3. computer-mediated communication
4. theory
5. research
6. practice
7. technology

"There are 10 chapters in this book: an introduction, seven chapters that cover the dimensions of CALL, and two concluding chapters that complete the book."

The concluding chapters deal with ICT integration ("what integration really means and how it might be accomplished in institutional settings such as schools and universities") and the distinction between emergent CALL and established CALL.

"One of the real problems for the language teacher, software designer, or researcher who wishes to use technology in second -or foreign- language education is how to absorb and relate what has been achieved so far, and how to make sense of it. The kind of understanding that comes from a critical reading of a substantial literature in order to develop a balanced and detailed knowledge of the field is not easily achieved.
CALL Dimensions has been designed to address this problem."

It certainly does, with an excellent academic review of research done in the period 1995-2005, giving an accurate picture of the development and diversity of CALL in those years. Each chapter is divided into two sections: description and discussion. The description section reviews the recent literature of each dimension, identifying themes and selecting representative projects. The discussion section provides some analysis with further ideas and opinions from teachers.

However, as a teacher, don't expect ready to use materials, lesson or syllabus plans or even a selection of web resources. It isn't the aim of the book. This is mainly a research and theoretical review of CALL dimensions. But some important recent developments are missing or only just mentioned and not seen in depth: the educational use of wikis and its possibilities in language teaching, the use of blogs as language learning eportfolio, the use of new multimedia online tools and social web tools, podcasting and videocasting, the development of communities of practice (the important work developed by Webheads in Action is not mentioned) and the use of webquests in language teaching is only mentioned in a couple of pages. It seems that this rich dimension of emergent CALL is still to be developed or is being developed in the language teaching blogosphere and social networking.