The use of Internet resources in extracurricular activities in a foreign language.

Class work in a foreign language is very comprehensive, educational and developmental value. This work not only deepens and extends the knowledge of a foreign language, but also contributes to the expansion of cultural horizons, scholarship students, the development of their creative activity, spiritual and moral sphere, aesthetic tastes and as a result, increases motivation to study another country's language and culture, and through the the prism of this knowledge allows you to learn the culture of their countries more actively.

Shepeleva VI defines extracurricular activities in a foreign language as a "non-uniform system within the meaning, purpose and methods of educational and educational activities, which go beyond the mandatory curriculum."

In my class work are widely used resources of the global Internet. The World Wide Web is

? source of information for students in the preparation of a project or activity,

? Assistant to exchange experiences with colleagues (methodological developments published on http://festival.1september.ru site development colleagues to help build a better class work in English), proshkolu.ru- site teachers, which contains materials and teacher development in different subjects.

In the extra-curricular activities I use such e-learning materials as multimedia presentations, business games on country, the protection of abstracts, testing programs, development of videos.

If you have a computer network, you can organize a centralized collection and processing of test results using the log module MyTest.

Speaking about the effectiveness of this program, it is necessary to mention the increasing motivation to learn a foreign language. Free access to the Internet lined shell testing programs with the interface of various children's games, familiar to every student that only increases their attractiveness to students.

For example, in all classes of the tournament possible to Marine combat with the "Seabattle" program. With the help of interactive whiteboard students gladly drown ships opponents, responding with questions on English vocabulary and grammar.

On his website, http://eduenglishirina.ucoz.ru/, I use the opportunity to create a variety of tests - with the introduction of its response, or select from the above, followed by the estimation results.

These programs allow you to create your own test tasks of any complexity, which allows their repeated use throughout the period of study and not only a foreign language, but also to any other subject.

In the extra-curricular activities are also actively develops the creation of videos and crossword puzzles. Software for the implementation of this direction is the MPEG Video Wizard DVD, which is very easy to use and allows you to create simple effects. Having mastered this program, students can create simple videos. At the same time they learn a new program to create videos that provide the ability to use more bright and colorful effects independently. Students also write their own scripts, shoot, pick up music, mounted rollers. In creating crossword puzzles pupils use Crossword- program that can be successfully used by students with different levels of training.

The number of students participating in various projects and extra-curricular activities, is constantly increasing. There is a growing motivation to learn a foreign language and interest in the subject. It should be noted another positive effect of the use of ICT in class work. Attracting students do not differ by good behavior, to the implementation of such projects, there may be positive changes in their behavior, which appeared interest in the subject.

Thus, the use of new information technologies expands the scope of the educational process, increases its practical orientation. There is a growing motivation of students, which contributes to enhancing their cognitive activity in the process of working with information. As a result, effectively develop key competences of pupils, mainly news,

The main objective of foreign language teaching is the formation and development of the communicative culture of pupils, learning practical mastery of a foreign language. My job as a teacher of foreign language, is to create the conditions of practical language learning for each student to choose such training methods that would allow each student to show their activity, their creativity. My task - to activate the cognitive activity of students in learning foreign languages.

Unlike traditional methods where the teacher used to give and to require certain knowledge using interactive forms of learning itself becomes a disciple of the main acting figure itself opens the way to assimilate knowledge. The teacher acts in this situation, an active assistant, and its main function - organization and promotion of the learning process.

In foreign language lessons using the computer I am able to solve a number of problems:

? develop the skills and reading skills directly online using materials of varying difficulty;

? improve listening skills through authentic audio texts;

? improve writing skills, to fill up your vocabulary, both active and passive vocabulary of modern foreign languages, reflecting a certain stage of development of people's culture, social and political structure of society;

? familiar with the cultural studies knowledge includes speech etiquette, especially verbal behavior of various peoples in terms of communication, especially the culture and traditions of the country the language is spoken;

? create a stable motivation of foreign language learners in the classroom activities.

Thus, I believe that the substantive basis of mass computerization of education is certainly due to the fact that the modern computer is a technological tool that facilitates effective learning, and subsequently affect the overall development of students.

The main problem that I faced, mastering ICT, has been associated with lack of knowledge of how to effectively use them in teaching their subject. How not to apply new technologies to the familiar forms, methods and techniques for working with students? How to do it as well?

Planning lessons using the Internet

By this stage you will have found, evaluated and decided on a collection of web pages which you want to use as part of your teaching. The next area to consider is how a technology based lesson plan will look in comparison with the sort of plans you usually produce. What will the differences be? What might go wrong, and how will you deal with it?

The first thing, of course, is to plan your session well: visit the websites you intend to use and make sure you know your way around them properly. Try to use sites which appear to have a potentially long 'shelf life' - ones made by large institutions and commercial organizations, rather than personal homepages, which have a tendency to come and go with alarming frequency.

Make a note of the particular pages you want your learners to work on - you can use the Favorites option in Internet Explorer, or Bookmarks in Firefox to log web addresses for later use - and make sure you're familiar with the content. Your ability to answer questions as they arise will add to your confidence and also inspire confidence in your learners.

Planning a web-based lesson, rather than one where the web content plays an ancillary role, is not intrinsically different from planning a more traditional one. We like to divide a typical web-based session into three parts (www): warmer, web, what next.

The warmer part of the lesson is the kind of thing we all do as a matter of course, with introductory activities, interest-generating ideas, and so on. This part prepares your learners for what they are going to be doing in the web part of the lesson. Our view is that this part of the lesson is best done in the familiar environment of the normal classroom.

In the web section of the lesson, it's important to spend only as much time as you need working with the computers. We prefer to take learners to a computer room for this part rather than spend the entire class in there. This has the double advantage of allowing more groups to use the room and of keeping learners focused during their time there. It is also an opportunity for learners to stretch their legs and provides a change of pace. On the other hand, moving from the traditional classroom to a computer room does have the potential to disrupt your class, so careful planning of the logistics may be necessary.

If you have limited access to computers, or perhaps only one computer in the classroom, you can print off the web-based materials you want to use with your learners in advance, and simply use a print version. This is, of course, not as exciting as using computers themselves, but can bring the Internet into more resource-poor environments.

Of course, there are certain teaching situations where teachers are obliged to take their learners to a computer facility for one or more lessons per week. If you do find yourself in this position, you can adapt your lesson plans to make greater use of the Internet than we are suggesting here.

You may even choose to incorporate the use of websites more consistently into the curriculum of the course you are teaching - perhaps substituting a part of the course materials you are using for websites, f or example the reading texts or the listening material. However you decide to do this, it must be a transparent process for the learners, and they must be able to appreciate not only the thought processes that have gone into this decision, but also the relevance and value of the change. This can be achieved in part by helping learners to cast a critical eye over the materials they work with in class, and encouraging them to talk about what they like doing and what they don't.

It should also be born in mind that your learners will have favourite websites of their own, and it is well worth investigating whether these can be incorporated into your classroom teaching, partly as a motivator, but also as a link to their lives, interests and experiences outside the class. This again will help them to see the value of the technology applied in class.

It's worth remembering that once you put people behind computer monitors, it's easy for them to forget that you are there, and - more importantly - why they are there. So the two vital words here are time and task. Make sure your learners have a clearly-defined task to achieve and a clearly-defined time frame in which to achieve it.

Once the group has got what you intended from the computers, it's time to move them back to the classroom for the what next stage of the lesson. This part should deal with the tasks set for the web part and then proceed with more familiar follow-up activities to round off the lesson.

Movie stars is a sample lesson plan based on this structure. You can use this as a template for your own planning. It is worth noting that there is nothing intrinsically different from the more traditional coursebook approach here - perhaps the major value of this material is its intrinsic motivational element: real actors being interviewed for a real programme. This, plus the contemporary nature of most website content, make the web an ideal source of material.

A lesson plan ? Movie stars

This is an upper-intermediate to advanced lesson concentrating on famous movie stars and their lives and work. The language areas covered are: asking and answering questions, reacting to information, and showing interest. Learners will also explore interview techniques, and ways of interacting on a social level. The class uses the BBC website, and its section devoted to The Film Programme on BBC Radio 4, which you can see below.

Warmer

Introduce the subject by talking about learners? favourite movie stars and their work. At this level, a simple class discussion will work fine, but be prepared to prompt with various subject areas: favourite movies, recent visits to the cinema, forthcoming films, best and worst films, and so on.

Sample warmer

Talk to your partner.

- What kind of films do you

like?

- Who are your favourite actors?

- What's the best film you've ever seen?

- What's the worst film you've ever seen?

- When did you last go to the cinema?

Which movie star would they like to interview, given the chance, and what would they ask that person?

Web

Have your learners visit the site and find an actor they are interested in ? these are all audio interviews, with no transcripts. There is plenty of choice- note that interviews are archived by year.

Let each learner choose an interview to listen to, and ask them to make notes on the main themes dealt with, and to examine how the interview is constructed- how the interactions were started and developed (see task below).

Sample task sheet

Listen to your chosen interview.

- Who was interviewed? Who was the interviewer?

- What topics were discussed?

- How did the interviewer construct the interview?

- introduction

- initial questions

- reactions to answers

- follow-up questions and comments

- conclusions

- How did the interviewee react?

- getting started

- answers to questions

- additional information

- conclusions

Make a note of some of the useful interview expressions.

What next

Give each learner a chance to report back on what they listened to, who was interviewed and what the main themes of the interview were. What did they find out and what would they have liked to have found out, but didn't?

Developing a conversation with someone is a difficult skill to acquire in another language. Elicit some of the ways they heard the interviewer and interviewee working together to construct the dialogue. Write some of the language and techniques up on the board and analyse structures, purpose and so on.

There are plenty of follow-up activities to do here, including:

- speaking activity: an interview.

Give each pair a role (famous person or interviewer) and have them conduct an interview. This could also be recorded or videoed for later language work.

- writing activity: 'a day in the life'.

This is often seen in UK Sunday newspaper supplements, where a famous person is interviewed about a day in their life, or a particularly interesting day in the past week.

- writing activity: an interview.

As for the speaking activity above, but styled for a magazine or newspaper. This could be done individually, or in pairs - with one writing the questions, the other the answers. This could be presented as an email interview.

- writing activity: a biography.

A more formal written piece, exploring the life of a famous person. This might involve more research on the Internet.

Working with professionals at higher levels, you might also like to consider the differences in language and register between a social interview like the one they listened to and a more formal job interview.

Working with lower levels of language proficiency

One of the most often asked questions is if it is possible to work with lower-level classes and the Internet. The simple answer is that it is, of course, feasible but that the choice of websites will be far more limited than for higher levels.

A familiar worry for lower levels is how much of a given text the students will understand. Lower-level learners often feel they have to understand everything and this will lead to problems, if not dealt with beforehand.

Choosing the right websites can go some way towards raising their comfort levels, though you may need to have shorter lessons than the higher level one described above. Websites which are more suitable for lower levels will include:

- websites with simple, clearly presented text.

- websites with non-linguistic data which is easy to interpret (e.g. data in the form of a chart, such as a weather page).

- websites with visuals - a task can be based around the visuals only.

- ELI websites, where the content has been written, edited and prepared with this audience in mind.

Borrowed words

This is a low-level lesson concentrating on different languages and the words they have contributed to English. The language areas covered are countries and languages. The class uses the KryssTal: Borrowed Words in English websites:

Warmer

Ask your learners if they know of any words in their own language that have come from other languages. Build up a chart on the board. You may need to help with the English versions.

Web

Put the learners in to pairs( Student A and Student B ) and give each learner a copy of the chart opposite. Give them time on the website to complete their column, leaving the other column blank for the next phase of the activity. Note that they will not only need to identify the language and country for the given words, but also find words to go with the given languages or countries.

Borrowed words in English

Use the website to complete your part of the table.

In the next phase they will need to ask their partner questions to complete the other half of the chart. Go over the questions they will need to ask, as in the example (for Student A) given below:

- What language does the word sauna come from?

- What country does parachute come from?

- Can you tell me a Russian word used in English?

Give each pair some time to ask and answer the questions, and complete the table. Provide feedback on a model table on the board and help out with any vocabulary problems which may have arisen.

What next

This is an ideal opportunity to do more work with the country and language vocabulary areas covered above. You may also want to brainstorm English words which are currently used in your learners' languages, and build up their collective vocabulary in this way.

An additional follow-up project idea is for learners to 'collect' English words they find in their environment, if they live in a non-English speaking country e.g. English words on TV, or on advertising billboards and signs. These could be added to a poster in the classroom.

Web teaching dos and don'ts

Planning carefully and adopting a structured approach to the way you use websites in the classroom should give you the confidence to try out different ways of introducing your learners to Internet content.

Most of the time you will be using websites to provide your learners with knowledge and content which they perhaps do not know or would normally not have access to , or to supplement more traditional course materials. This can be highly motivating for them, leading to more language production and a higher stake in the success of the class.

It is worth bearing in mind that it is not necessarily the 'all-singing, all-dancing' websites - ones with a lot of animation, video, audio or other multimedia content - which will be of most interest or use in your classrooms. Don't discount simple text-based websites which might be very beneficial in your own context. Apart from anything else, they are less likely to malfunction or cause problems when you go to use them.

However, having said all this, things can and sometimes do go wrong. To round off this chapter, here are a few considerations and some contingency plans:

1. Whenever you use technology you should always have a backup plan in place. There might be times when the websites are down, or the computers crash or,

worse still, the electricity goes off. So be prepared.

2. Use the knowledge of other teachers and of your learners to help you with the technical side of the lesson. We often team teach with less experienced teachers, taking care of the small technical problems which occasionally arise, and leaving them free to enjoy the technology and to teach. Asking tech-savvy learners to assist takes the pressure off you and also gives them some investment in the successful or outcome of the class.

3. If it's a lesson that involves relatively few web pages, try saving them to your computer hard disk. From Internet Explorer, choose ?File...??Save As...? then give the file a name and makes uret he 'Web Page, complete' option is selected. This will save the web page and all its images and you'll be able to open the pages even if the connection goes down. You could even go so far as to print them out.

4. Unless you are working on something like an email pen pal exchange, it is rarely conducive to have learners working alone on computers. Pairs are best, but three to a computer can also work fine - just make sure that everyone gets a turn in the 'driving seat'. Pairwork and small-group work will help to encourage oral communication and break down the 'computer as barrier' effect often prevalent in technology-based classes. For the one computer classroom, use of the computer can be rotated between small groups, with the groups who are not working on the computer occupied with other stages of the same lesson, for example preparing a poster or text.

5. As was mentioned, try to arrange the computer room in such a way that you can easily maintain control over learner activities. An ideal layout is to have the computers around the outside walls of the class - allowing you to view what is on each screen and to help should the need arise - and a central table where learners can congregate for more communicative activities. This table will also serve as a storage place for pens, books and dictionaries, and thus help keep the computers free of clutter and easy to use.

6. Not all of the content that you come across with your learners w ill necessarily be suitable for them. The wonder of the Internet is that it caters for a wide variety of people, interests and tastes, so much so that you are almost bound to encounter what you consider to be questionable content at some point in your exploration, and the same can safely be said of your learners. We have generally found an open discussion about the kind of things the group considers acceptable in class has been enough to put an end to any further unsuitable exploration, but if you work in a context where this is likely to be a bigger issue then you may need to take more robust steps such as installing filtering software along the lines of Net Nanny (www.netnanny.com),which will limit access to a wide range of content

which can be user-specified and controlled.

Bearing in mind all these suggestions ? and taking into account the successful combination of these searching, evaluating and planning skills- you should now be in a position to fully explore the web with your learners.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 277