The Basics of learning a language

I have been working on the presentation embedded below for quite a while now and had in fact forgotten about it for a while. I began working on it as a means to try and help make our Year 7 language students more aware of how best to learn a language. For many students it is their first experience in learning a language and once the year starts it is pretty full on; they learn French for the entire Year as well as a Semester each of German and Japanese. Personally, I would like them to complete an Introductory Unit on 'Learning Languages', that shows them the importance of language learning itself and introduces tips and techniques on how best to do it. But ... time is an issue; those assessments are always getting in our way. So, rather than an entire Unit, I began working on this short presentation to use as a quick introduction. I am not convinced that it is complete, so if you have any tips of your own that would be suitable for younger language learners, please add them in the comments section.

Launch your own SlideRocket presentation!

Promoting Languages

Further to the previous post, it's probably about time I embedded the following SlideRocket presentation into my own blog. Thank you to Isabelle Jones for already having done so on her site.

Screencasting & language learning

I've been checking out Capture Fox - a Firefox add-on that I originally came across thanks to the the Ed Tech Crew Podcast. Capture Fox allows you to very easily make a screencast in Mozilla (though only in Windows XP & Vista). Once installed, you're only a couple of clicks away from recording (with voice if you choose) what you are doing in the firefox screen or in the whole window - at this stage you can't reduce the size of the area. The only problem I've found so far is the size of the screencast files, though you can choose to lower the quality and reduce the size.

Anyway, today's brainwave centred around using the add-on to help engage my students in a bit of language learning through some "Virtual ordering at a restaurant". The plan at this stage goes a little like this ...

After installing the add-on in firefox and learning how to use it we will:

1. Go to the McDonalds website in Japan to have a look at the menu - practising some katakana script while we are there.
   
• On second thoughts, I will use 3 or 4 different restaurant / food outlet sites rather than all using the same site. My personal favourite Mister Donuts will no doubt make it onto the list.
  
2. Students will write down what they'd like to order, again ensuring they use the correct script. They will need to order more than 1 of each item to practice using the correct counter (our latest grammar point).
   
3. Finally students will use capture fox to create a screencast of themselves ordering their chosen food and drink (in Japanese of course). We will then share our creations.
   

I may need to refine the plan a little but it's a start. Could screencasts like this one day constitute a speaking assessment, or am I taking things too far with that idea? Short of skyping a restaurant in Japan (hmmm... maybe one day), this seems to be the next best thing. On face value it seems like a reasonable attempt to make Japanese more relevant to the students by showing them how they can use their knowledge to order food from a real menu, but we shall see...

Check out my attempt at the task below: