The article "A Web-Based Approach to Strategic Learning of Speech Acts" by Cohen and Ishihara discuss their students' use of e-journaling in their study as a way of reflecting on their learning experience about the speech acts they had studied. They gave these students some structure so that there was a way of making comparisons between each student's journal and had them reflect on six different areas such as "Issues and confusions they had about the material" (10) and "Their experience using the speech acts in authentic out-of-class contexts" (ibid). Overall, most of the students seemed to feel like the e-journaling was beneficial and allowed them the chance to think through these speech acts in more depth and understand their cultural importance in ways they hadn't considered before.
As far as using e-journaling in a classroom to help develop oral language skills, I think a similar "awareness raising" purpose could be incorporated into an ESL classroom. For instance, in an intermediate or advanced class, students could use an e-journal to write down vocabulary or expressions they have overheard and then try to analyize or discuss the context in which they heard the word to get a better idea of how and when the word might be used. They could even write a short dialog or example sentences to process that vocabulary item. If it were a blog type environment, other students could provide feedback or other examples of sentences with that vocabulary item or they could help each other if said student didn't understand the word and simply wanted feedback/help about its definition.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure how or if e-journaling could actually tackle the pronunciation of these words. Any thoughts on this?
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1 year ago
Bill, I like your idea of using the e-journal as a vocab tool. The only way I can think of adding a pronunciation aspect would be to have students add links to an online dictionary or other tool that has a voice recording of the word.
ReplyDeleteI like the vocabulary tool idea, this gives the chance for the students to bring in problems or issues they come across in the real world, whether it's vocab, phrases, idioms, grammar, what ever the case may be.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments ladies. I appreciate the feedback.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of incorporating the vocabulary items into further activities in the classroom. I think that such activities would be good for reinforcing vocabulary knowledge and recycling terms in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of using journal writing for vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, by sharing their journals with each other, students could get individualized feedback, and also see how their classmates have explained and reacted to a particular lexical item.
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