Beyond Practice and Drill

Easy, high-tech ways to help your students master the English language.

Computer Pen Pals

Before launching his award-winning Web site, “Dave’s ESL Café,” Dave Sperling, author of The Internet Guide for English Language Teachers, struggled to motivate his ELL students to write.  It was 1995 and the Internet was about to boom when Sperling decided to go digital. Armed with a book of HTML code and a $99 digital camera, he gathered personal essays and digital photos of his class and posted them on the Web with e-mail addresses for his students. “A month later, they were receiving messages from students around the world,” Sperling says. “Soon they were motivated to read, write, and communicate online every day.”

Now known as “key pals,” millions of English-language learners connect with peers via e-mail as a way to practice reading and writing in English.

How can this strategy help your ELLs? Sperling suggests integrating a key pal project with what is being taught in class. “If your lesson is on food from a particular region, ask students to write to their key pals about that type of food,” he advises. “Then they can read messages aloud in class and work on pronunciation.”

While pairing students with key pals has advantages, it may not be the best strategy for those just beginning to study English, cautions Frank Hernandez, ELL Unit Program advisor at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, especially when outgoing messages aren’t reviewed by an instructor. “Writing with mistakes early on without correction can lead to poor writing skills, since those mistakes can become entrenched,” he says.

As a supplement to classroom instruction, Hernandez recommends a host of ELL Web sites designed to help students develop reading, writing, vocabulary, and pronunciation skills with guided practice. Sites range from dictionaries—such as www.pdictionary.com, where images accompany definitions to help students construct meaning to  vocabulary words—to more advanced sites like www.mylanguageexchange.com, where students can practice speaking and listening with voice chat as well as reading and writing with text chat.

A lesson plan that sings!

For Gil Vega, NEA member and English Language Development Site monitor at Eric Birch High School in Fontana, California, the Internet isn’t always an option. “We’re just beginning to get laptops at school, and most of our students don’t have Internet access at home,” Vega says.

But that hasn’t stopped him from putting together engaging multimedia lesson plans using technology such as SMART Boards (www.smarttech.com) and streaming video, which he downloads from an educational digital video library at www.unitedstreaming.com . With an animated, 13-minute segment on the War of 1812 (including a performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Aretha Franklin), Vega kept his class enthralled during a lesson about the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem.

With a lesson designed to develop reading, comprehension, and vocabulary skills, Vega used the multimedia presentation to enhance traditional teaching methods.  “I took key  words from the presentation and asked kids to look them up,” Vega says. “They then had to write essays on what the anthem and pledge meant to them and to society as a whole.”

But even though Vega’s more interactive lessons elicit “oohs” and “aaahhs” from students, he insists that technology is merely a tool. “The main ingredient is the teacher,” Vega says. “Nothing can replace that.”

—Cindy Long