ESOL

Skilled to goLearning everyday consumer skills – a teachers’ toolkitDeveloped by the Office of Fair Trading and LLU+ at London South Bank University, Skilled to go helps to develop transferable consumer skills, knowledge and confidence. It uses everyday consumer situations, such as choosing a mobile phone, as contexts for learning numeracy and literacy.

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard. If you are using such abbreviations as lol and brb (”be right back”), you must have developed a sensitivity to the communicative needs of your textees.

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An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children’s ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms.

Tags: text

hi

reflective practice is perhaps best understood as an approach which promotes autonomous learning that aims to develop students’ understanding and critical thinking skills. Techniques such as self and peer assessment, problem-based learning, personal development planning and group work can all be used to support a reflective approach

thinkfree notes 2

Installing is the only issue when considering it for class/studnt use (especially considering the low IT and literacy levels of the students)

1) sign up

2)machine  needs to install java

3) gives you a warning about not installed properly (need to tick the box and click  continue  using)

4) First time it takes a while to set up (a few minutes) and you have to wait while it does it (and read messages) 

5) if you don’t save it it closes and displays an error message (not in English) with just an OK button so you lose your work and don’t get a chance to cancel if you mistakenly pressed close (which could be a big issue with ESOL learners) This is MAIN cause for concern? Students need to check about the asterisk next to the file name to check if the document has been saved.

It can be a bit laggy when writing and opening files takes a while (always important with impatient learners).