ICT Vignette 2

NC Subject and Topic:
English

Focus pupils and school:
A visiting EAL specialist teacher used web based ESL activities with a small group of EAL pupils who were beginning to be familiar with English to extend their reading comprehension and writing skills.

Context
The pupils worked with the teacher in a short withdrawal session on a weekly basis using the British Council Lean English site. This site has a range of articles to read with access to an online dictionary, double clicking on any word brings up a new window with a very clear and unambiguous meaning suitable for EAL learners, as well as the word in the sentence. Each article is followed by a comprehension exercise, press on the submit button and your answers are marked. The word games use the article key vocabulary in cloze or matching activities. The site also features grammar exercises, games and a variety of other resources.

The Lesson

The teacher chose one of the magazine articles on the British Council site to read, pupils looked at the graphic initially and predicted the key words/answers they expected to find. In pairs, the pupils read the article on screen, checking unfamiliar words using the ‘ click’ dictionary. The pupils then completed the comprehension tasks and printed off their results. After a group discussion of their responses, the pupils wrote a short summary of the text – using the comprehension questions as a guide and adding their own information and sentences.

Subject teachers in the school became quite enthusiastic about the articles, but used them in a different way. Using a data projector or interactive whiteboard, they talked through relevant magazine articles with the whole class, usually as an introduction exercise. They particularly liked the clear graphics, the themed links, the drag and drop word games and the clickable dictionary and felt these helped them develop the language skills of all learners whilst providing a curriculum ‘stimulus’ to topics like ‘Slavery’ or ‘Refugees’ really clearly.

Strategies for teaching and learning EAL and how ICT supported these

• activating prior knowledge: discussion based on predicting content from photo graphic
• rich contextual background for comprehensible input: access to online dictionary to check meaning of words in pairs
• comprehensible output: using comprehension exercise as a scaffold to writing
• relationship between form and function: drag and drop cloze exercises
• learner independence – developing skills in dictionary usage
  
  Contributed by NALDIC