Motivation

What is motivation?


Lots of information you will, surprisingly, find in Wikipedia :)

Some simple, general, practical tips you can find HERE.

1. What is your motivation for studying this faculty?
2. What is your motivation for being in this lesson and doing this task?

Present your answers in the comments to this blog entry.

A compilation of ideas about motivation is available HERE.

You can learn the basics about Affective Domain HERE (Wikiversity, including tasks)

How does our brain work?

This image (click for a larger version) represents one of the easily-demonstrated a phenomenon caused by lateralisation - the distribution of various brain functions between the two hemispheres.

Have you ever tried to ask these questions?
1. What is the origin and purpose of lateralisation?
2. Do all mammals have two hemspheres? And what about birds? Reptiles?
3. What happens when a certain brain centre is damaged?

Learn more about lateralisation HERE (simple basics)or HERE (focus on information processing, aiming at learning styles).
Test your hemisphere dominance (a simple, reasonably valid online test).


The functions of our brain - including learning and acquisition processes - can be observed only indirectly, through our actions. Therefore the world is flooded with various theories concerning learning... but some of them seem to be more empirically supported than the others. Krashen's and Terrel's Natural Approach belongs to them.


"Language acquisition does not require extensive use of conscious grammatical rules, and does not require tedious drill." Stephen Krashen
(Sounds nice, doesn't it?)

Basic summary of Krashen’s Hypotheses

A Summary of Stephen Krashen's "Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition" - brief

Krashen and Terrell’s “Natural Approach” summary

Lectures on Krashen’s Theories

Learning by doing

A reasonably reliable overview of the Critical Period Hypothesis you can find (surprisingly) at Wikipedia.


Většina lidí si pamatuje: 10% z toho, co čtou, 20% z toho, co slyší, 30% z toho, co vidí, 50% z toho, co slyší a vidí, 70% z toho, co řeknou, 90% z toho, co dělají.
(Škvorová, J. - Škvor, D.: Proč zlobím? lehká mozková dysfunkce LMD/ADHD, ISBN 80-7254-407-1, str. 200)

citováno například zde nebo zde, ukázka originálu ZDE.


Task:
Work in pairs. Design at least three activities focused on vocabulary acquisition in the critical period (primary level). Write a short description of the activities (including the organisation details) into the comments to this blog entry.
First, choose a topic (you may choose from the list below) and write a list of 10 words you will teach.


Topics:
At school
My room
Our town (age 10-11)
Pets
Clothes
Colours (age 7-8)
Food
Sports

Presentation and explanation

In CAPSA* You will find a pdf version of an English book. Focus on lesson 6; what new vocabulary items are presented there? Which ways of presentation could be used?
List your ideas into the comment to this blog entry. Please SIGN your comments!
You may find some inspiration under these links:

Vocabulary presentation techniques
Vocabulary presentation tricks

*Log to capsa is identical to the log to the computers in room 226.

Communicative language teaching

Online references:
Wiki
Definition and background
Digest

Task 1
Read the referred articles.

Task 2
Identify the positives and negatives of CLT and enter your ideas into the comment to this blog.

Working with Audio

It could be quite useful to be able to record and/or edit your own listening material!
The freeware available is called AUDACITY.

TASK 1
1. Download mp3 audio file from Dropbox
2. Open the mp3 file in Audacity. Explore the possibilities offered by the menu!

You should be able to
- install Audacity and the lame library which enables export to mp3
- open a file in Audacity
- edit the file: cut and paste, fadein/out, change speed, delete, add silence
- create a new file
- combine two files (e.g. speech + background music)

TASK 2
1. Record a personal comment to a topic covered at your website (Hobbies, HotPot... (1 minute max., save in wav file)
2. Edit the recording in Audacity, add background music, cut out noises etc.
3. Export the wav to mp3
4. Upload the mp3 to your website

REMEMBER - before editing, create a backup copy of the original!

Examples of galleries with audio comments created by your colleagues:

http://www.dzblecht.wz.cz/My%20home%20town.html
http://skipit.wz.cz/galerie.html
http://vvalova.wz.cz/gallery.html
http://romankalecky.wz.cz/gallery.html
http://mikeispoorpage.webz.cz/gallery.html
http://www.springday.euweb.cz/fotogalerie.html
http://personalpage.unas.cz/Personalgallery.html

Education is more than learning

I found this article and I must share. If you wish, please add some comments :)

What does "humanity" mean?