Monday 13 July 2009

Nik's Daily English Activities

Nik Peachey runs a nice blog for learners of English to encourage learner autonomy, and it's called Nik's Daily English Activities. It's worth exploring this site as a teacher starting to use online resources and tools. Experiment with his tips yourself to get a feeling for what online learning is before you and your students start exploring media for tasks and projects.

In one entry this past May, he recommended that learners subscribe to a poem a day and record it as a daily pronunciation exercise. Learners can check the pronunciation of words and phrases on another website and then record the poems themselves using software they download to their computer. I think this is a lovely idea for a short daily practice session. Here is the post, with all of the links you need: Poems for pronunciation.

The idea of students recording their own voices goes back to language lab days, doesn't it? But these days students can expand on this activity. Once they feel comfortable recording themselves, they can go on and actually make a podcast themselves for others to listen to outside the language lab and even outside their course group - thanks to Web 2.0.

2 comments:

Nik Peachey said...

Many thanks for the very kind recommendation of my blog. You can find a list of all the activities (over 100) at: http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/2008/08/sitemap.html I'm about to add some new ones and will be continuing to update the site over the summer.

Best

Nik Peachey

Anne Hodgson said...

Thanks very much for stopping by, and thank you so much for those outstanding activities!