I recently set up a vocabulary message board, where English learners can work together to create a big online vocabulary journal. A colleague of mine and I have been sending students to the site for homework in hopes that getting a bunch of examples of how a word can be used will help learners increase active vocabulary.
However, we didn't anticipate some things that learners have done. I suppose it's no surprise that our students don't intuitively know how to organize an online vocabulary journal, but some of the things they've done are really surprising.
For example, I've got students starting a thread with a post about four different words. I envisioned one word per thread so if you want to study the word status, you don't have to read about a bunch of other words as well.
I've also got students starting new threads all the time. I must have 5 different threads with the word "status". If all those examples were in one place it would be a valuable source of information.
I think in the future this message board will really help people, and everyone is welcome to use it with their classes. We just have to be careful to make sure learners use it in the way that will benefit them the most.
Posted by James Trotta at July 4, 2004 10:00 AMIn the beginning, I took painstaking care in describing for my students the process of organizing their online vocabulary journal; however, like my colleague reported earlier, a lot of our students didn't bother to check to see if their word had already been posted. Ideally, they should have posted one word per thread and replied to other students when posting the same word. I even had people posting words in the introduction section (when they should have been posting in the vocabulary section), so clearly, my initial explanation lacked something. One of my problems from the start was that I assigned two vocabulary words per student. Most of them just fired away--writing both down in one thread without a care in the world about how the site was supposed to be organized. I lightly reprimanded them in class and then chided them again in my replies. I wonder if the replies themselves weren't intrusive (come to think of it). Anyway, I think I will try and get a Power Point demonstration set up for next semester to make things really clear, and perhaps threaten to deduct homework points if they don't post correctly. Too harsh? What do you think?
Posted by: Jason M. Ham at July 11, 2004 2:37 PMI showed students how to post their self introductions, which I thought would be enough. Knowing how to post didn't mean knowing how to write a good post. Perhaps we should show students examples of good and bad posts so they have a model to emulate and another to avoid...
As for using it Naheed, you should register, log in, then post your questions comments. I hope my email helps...
Posted by: James Trotta at July 12, 2004 11:06 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.