Wikis - the tyranny of the blank page

One thing oft repeated in the LCLC is that the instructor needs to initiate the structure, format, and content of a wiki. It is important for us to get the ball rolling. Without directly teaching students how to use the technology, modeling the kind of content we hope to see, helping them to better understand and exploit the advantages of the medium, or helping them to structure the wiki in an intuitive way - we can expect a lot of blank pages or artificial display content. These blank pages wouldn't be so different from the kinds of blank stares we would get from students if our only instruction to them in listening/speaking were "OK, talk". The media we choose should be ideally suited to the activity itself, and this marriage of activity and medium is one that needs to be evident to the students. The structure we are able to provide makes their production possible. Jazz allows for improvisation around the chords of a pre-existent melody. Most tunes start and end with this melody itself. For real collaboration in which the sum is greater than the parts, we need to hand out the sheet music and run through the changes. The rest should be up to them. For examples of formats that are well suited for wikis in language classrooms, please see our wiki page at http://wikilanguagelogic.wikispaces.com/

Project Proposal

For my project I would like to use either a Wiki builder or perhaps just Google Docs to facilitate a collaborative writing project. This would be designed to familiarize advanced level students with a writing genre (probably news articles). After reading examples of this genre students would work together to build an outline and divide up responsibility for writing the various segments amongst themselves. They would then be assigned one of their peer's a sections to provide editing feedback using a protocol established in class. I would also consider doing a genre of fiction asking them to do an exquisite corpse story. The ease with which students can collaborate, the ability to track changes and comments, and the ease with which students can edit one another's work would make this CALL tool preferable to paper and pencil alternatives. The task would be designed to encourage process writing, help students learn the conventions of the genre including lexical items and collocations, and to practice editing conventions that bring their attention to target forms.

Pronunciation of Compound Nouns

Research:
Open your ears for this week and write down at least five compound nouns and a definition for them. Do you hear the stress falling on the first part of the compound?

Further practice:

Click on the button below and use your cell phone to record these sentences using good stress. Remember to start your recording by saying your name.

The president lives in the white house.
You should erase the blackboard.
My neighbor Barry lives in the white house.
Do you have a pencil sharpener?
I lost my notebook.