Digital Tour Podcast n°1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBcWVhQVzjo

The easier way to travel...Digital Tour!!

This video is the first of a series of podcasts related to travelling, it is intended to be for students who are in the process of acquiring the English language; so in that way this video podcast will help them with the listening comprehension since it has a native English speaker and on the other hand you can find a non-native speaker explaining most of the things that are happening there.
The language of the students who will use this video podcast is Spanish, they are in the average of 18 years old, and they attend to an English course in Santiago, as my goal is to help students that are interested in learning English and improve it each day, this video podcast was made for people that need to have a intermediate level of English; and the aim of it, is for people to reinforce their skills (reading-writing-listening-speaking).

• Language Objectives (podcast):

1. The student must write about a trip that she/he did, or if they haven't done any, they can write something about a trip that they would love to do. (we need to know the background of the student first in order to choose what kind of assignment is appropriate for them).
2. At the beginning of the video there are some pictures of Seattle. They have to talk with their partner, (if it is in the classroom) and explain her/him what are the differences between Seattle and the city that they are living in.
3. Listening comprehension: The student has to extract some information about the Space Needle, that was given from the tourist guide and Nina. After that they will answer some questions: -How many inhabitants does Seattle have?; - How tall is the Space Needle?; - What is the name of the tourist guide in the elevator?; - What is the name of the oldest residential district?

• Language Objectives (series):

1. The students will do different kind of exercises related to reinforced the four skills.

• Content Objectives (podcast):

1. The student will know how to give information about what they hear and understand.
   

• Content Objectives (series):

1. The students will know more about other cultures, and also learn vocabulary related with what is shown in the video, moreover some facts that each different city has.

The students in Chile always need some kind of motivation to do their work good, and we can give them this motivation doing activities related with things that they are interested in, and in this case we have a trip, which is always good since young people love surfing on the net looking for pictures, and places that they can not visit in real life but they can do it digitally. With the video podcast I am trying to reach that gap, showing to them those places.
In the podcast you can find some explanation and definition of things that may the student don not know, in the same way the video starts with pictures and calm modern music, and after that starts the speaking part, so in that way the student can engage immediately with what is shown in the video.
Finally in this video podcast you can see the use of the four skills in the activity, listening, reading (the information that appears in the video), writing and speaking. The use of realia in the video, when Nina is in the cab, and also you can see the use of teaching through content; with the vocabulary.

If only he knew....

In my shadowing teaching as I say many times before, I saw problems with the writing part with some students in the classroom, I think that Mr. X used a good methodology to teach English, but it is not the most effective one, he doesn't worry about each student he only see the whole group, and the information that he is missing in the classroom is that, to acquire a new language, first you have to be literate in the native language; the Russian kids do not know how to write in Russian nor in English; even though they have a teacher who is from Russia too. The situation is the following, how the school can allow that big gap in those students having a person who can help on that, why that teacher knowing that can permit that too; the only ones who are going to be damage are the kids and that is only because they wanted to be blind, and do not see the reality because how they can not notice if the kids are constantly under evaluation. I really don't know why these people don't do something about it, they know the theories about language acquisition?, do they know that the students must know their first language in order to learn a second one?; those are question that I had at the end of my shadowing.


Some sites where they can learn more about language acquisition:

First what is Language acquisition...

http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html

Then a little bit of Krashen...

http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

and finally a whole menu of second language acquisition...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/index.htm







(sorry for the delay, I thought it was already published)