Digital Literacy a.k.a. English Skills for the Internet

First of all, “a.k.a.” means “Also Known As”. So, for example, my father’s name is Geoffrey a.k.a. Geoff. Or my father’s name is Geoff a.k.a. Dad.

Okay, so I was watching a lecture about useful websites for teachers to use in class with young learners. The lecturer, Nik Peachey, talked about “Digital Literacy”, which means the English reading skills we need to use the Internet.

I immediately thought about all of you. Do you feel that you have the skills needed to use the Internet effectively in English? Did you learn these skills in a classroom, or by yourself? How easy is it for you to use the internet in English?

What do I mean by “effectively”? Well, let’s think of a Google search; “teaching” for example. There are 267 million results! How do you decide what is a useful “hit” and what is useless? (A “hit” is like a result.) It should need only a few seconds to skim read the list of results and decide if any might be useful. Can you do this in English?

If you click on a link and go to a page, you need to look at what the subject of the webpage is and decide if it will be useful. Again, this should only take you a few seconds. Can you do this in English?

These are specific skills to skim read a LOT of different summaries and make a quick decision about what is useful to you and what is not. If you spend a lot of time on websites which don’t have the information you want then you are wasting time and you probably lack some good English digital literacy skills.

If you are reading a big article, like on Wikipedia, then it is important to know which links might give you more important information, and which links will give you more useless information.

We spend so many hours on the internet (probably too many). Nevertheless, this is an important part of English reading in today’s world.

What do you think? As always, I look forward to your opinions.

Gordon

P.S. Why am I looking at things for teaching young learners? Well, my new position in Argentina is completely with teenagers. I’m not teaching ANY adults at the moment.

Reading: The Boring Part of Learning English?

Reading in another language is boring and it takes a lot of time!

Well, that is how I felt at secondary school learning French and German. Using a dictionary to find every word I didn’t understand and trying to translate word for word – at the end, I would understand almost nothing. Now that is exactly how I would NOT teach reading and how I do NOT read or learn Spanish.

So that is why I like this little cartoon I found.  Today we read more than in the past. We have text messages and emails, we are on the internet everyday reading the news or a blog or our wall on Facebook. But I think we also read less. Twitter is limited to 140 characters (characters = letters or numbers), and nearly the same for text messages. My posts on Facebook are usually shorter than a ‘tweet’ (the noun and verb for Twitter). A lot of my emails are only one or two paragraphs.

But I think that is perfect for English learning. Short pieces of reading which are not very difficult, just a little difficult, or we could say, ‘challenging’.

Obviously, some people need reading skills more than others. A lot of people learn a language to communicate by speaking and listening. For them, reading and writing are not very important.

So I have several questions this week.

• Was your experience of English reading similar to my experiences French and German class?
• How did you practise English reading in classes and how do you practise it now? 
• Do you think you got enough reading practice at school/university/language school? 
• What were your favourite topics to read and what were the most boring? 
• What were your favourite learning activities connected to reading? 
• What worked and what didn't work? 

Answer all of the questions or answer just one of the questions. As always, I look forward to your opinions.

Gordon

P.S. Here’s another couple of cartoons I liked!

P.P.S.  Just so I am clear - I really like reading now - even in Spanish!

Pronunciation - Phonetics

Pronunciation in English.  Not very easy, is it?  The problem is that English is not a phonetic language because one letter in English can have more than one sound.

Just as an example; think of “through” and “enough”, both of these words have “-ough” endings but if I write them how they sound they look like this “throo” and “enuf”.

Another example is words with “-ed” endings.  Look at “worked”, “wanted” and “played”.  But a lot of learners are surprised (and annoyed) that the pronunciation is actually “workt”, “wontid" and “playd”.

English is a CRAZY language!  But it is the international language and lots of people NEED it.  So how do we learn about these different pronunciations?  Obviously the spelling doesn’t help.

This is why we have the phonetic alphabet.   /θru/, /ɪˈnʌf/, /wɜrkt/, /wɔntɪd/, /pleɪd/

Those are the five words, “through”, “enough”, “worked”, “wanted” and “played”.

Some of you will know this phonetic alphabet and some of you will not.

Some of you will like it and some of you will not.

Believe me, there is a similar problem with teachers.  Some teachers know the phonetic symbols and some don’t.  Some like to teach with them and some don’t.

One of the normal complaints about the phonetic alphabet (from students and teachers) is that it is another language that needs to be learned and understood.  Learning English is enough work without having another alphabet as well.  I have my own opinions about this but I want to know yours.

What are your opinions about this?  How did you learn English pronunciation?  Did you ever learn the phonetic chart?  How good do you think your English pronunciation is?

As always, I look forward to your opinions.  J

Gordon

P.S. If you do want to learn more about the phonetic chart, I recommend this little program.

http://www.macmillanenglish.com/methodology/phonetic-chart.htm

If you follow the page down you will see that it is downloadable and FREE! Always good! Here is the direct link to download the program if you have problems.

http://mediadirect.macmillan.com/media/macmillanenglish/phonetics/fullscreen/phoneticchart_fs.exe

P.P.S. If you are really interested in wanting to improve your pronunciation and you want more help to do it, try this website:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics

It will show you very clearly the shape of the mouth to produce different sounds. You will need to understand the phonetic symbols, but it could really help you.