Task 2: The Use of Blogs in ELT

Writing Buddy or Buddy System

The Buddy System consists of pair two people in order to improve their writing skills through giving feedback and correcting each other. The main goal is to foster the writing skill of the students and this have to be done through writing a lot and receive feedback of your partner. It is good to start with simple texts and advance until write academic texts and essays with proper vocabulary depending of the context that you are asked to write.

I choose this activity because enhancing the writing skill is a very important area where shy students can develop easily their knowledge about a language, it also improves the vocabulary and grammar aspects through the practice. I find it beneficial because you are having feedback, which is a very important thing when you are starting to write any kind of text, a second opinion about your essay is a very useful tool to improve it and I think this is a very useful activity to success in this.

The benefits of this activity are to foster the writing skill, the vocabulary and the grammar aspects with a partner. It is beneficial for each of the participants of this activity because this permit them to develop an output skill which is very important for me to communicate easily.

I would implement this blogging activity in pairs or group of four where students are asked to post weekly in a blog or web page an article, piece of news, or other text depending of how they are improving through this activity in order to give feedback to other groups and correct grammar mistakes if it is necessary.

Task 1: The 4 C's and Technology in ELT

The 4 C’s, which are Communication, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Creativity, are a very important resource that we have to consider as teachers in order to manage our classes and improve them. The 4 C’s have to be considered in language learning because you can focus in one of them depending on the types of students you are working with and apply one of the four C’s to success in the learning of a foreign language as English. It is also important to develop the knowledge of the students through these skills.

We can see that the 4 C’s can be also connected with technology, how is this possible? As teachers, we can develop the communication or creativity through the use of different technologies as the internet, software that are designed with the purpose of teaching, or using other softwares which are not specifically for teaching, but we can design task to use them to success in the learning of the languages. The use of technology to develop the language learning is a really good resource nowadays because not all the students learn with the same methods. Combining the technology with one or more of the four C’s would probably show great results in the improve of the learning of the kids if we know how to create the correct tasks for them.

To foster the four C’s in my classes I would probably use a software like Photoshop, a video editor, and I would assign them tasks every class using different softwares in order to create and present a group project at the end of the semester about a topic of their importance which has to be related with the learning of the English language in our Chilean context and how important is it nowadays.