Week 3: Developing listening skills, creating a Delicious page and discussing a sample project report

First I read Lindsay Miller's article “Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials” which helped me reflect about the importance of teachers’ choice of methods and materials to help learners develop their listening skills.

When taking a look at some of the lesson plans provided, I found some activities that fit my Cultural Studies class and students. I looked at all the skill-building websites suggested but could not find anything that would work in my class. So I searched for alternative websites and found good lesson materials that would enhance my college students’ listening skills.

I am also glad to have created a Delicious page to store all the sites to use with my students and for my professional development, something I had never been able to do before, with the advantage that now I can access my saved websites from any computer and I can have them classified, find them easily and of course share them. This social aspect of the page is what I like most because everyone can collaborate and contribute to other people’s professional needs and interests.

I chose Aleyda Linares’ Project Report because her class was very similar to the one I have selected to work my project on: undergraduate students, mostly women, learning English as a Foreign Language at a National University in a Latin American country (Honduras), whose ages ranged between 19-30 and all of them having Spanish as their mother tongue.

Even when her first course goal was to develop students´ grammatical competence and mine is to develop students´ intercultural competence, I share another main course goal with her: to develop students’ ability for independent learning as well as critical and creative thinking.

The issue that gave origin to her technology-related change project, which I share in my own teaching situation, was the need to motivate students to learn outside the classroom and at the same time develop their ability to learn how to learn. As in my case, that was the first time she had the opportunity to include a technology-enhanced project in one of her classes.