Project Proposal (Bill Harris and Sabah Khan)

Bill and Sabah's ESL Teaching Tips: Project Proposal

The intended audience of the instructional activities is a four-skills English for Academic Purposes class. The intended level is intermediate.

The purpose of the instructional activities is to review and reinforce comparative and superlative structure formation through practice and production of these structures.

We plan to incorporate two CALL tools into our lesson. As one of the practice activities, we would be using a self-monitored multiple-choice activity, such as the following website:
http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/compsup2.html. We also plan to incorporate YouTube into the lesson as part of a production activity, in which each of the students will be recorded while giving a presentation comparing/contrasting two local restaurants. There will be a minimum requirement of comparative and superlative structures that will have to be used in each presentation. Once the recorded video clips have been uploaded to YouTube, the videos could be used for teacher-to-student and student-to-student feedback in the form of comments posted under each video. The site will be set to 'private' so that the videos will only be accessible to students in that class.

We believe that the CALL tools that we have selected will enhance language acquisition for the targeted students. The online practice activity will give students the opportunity to self-monitor their understanding of comparatives and superlatives, promoting independent learning and consciousness raising of their own mastery of their ability to form the structures. The YouTube activity will give students (and the instructor) the opportunity to provide feedback about the students' use of the structures as well as any additional errors that they might encounter, all in an asynchronous manner.


The lesson will follow the following sequence (for two 2-hour class sessions):
DAY 1
1. Warm-up activity
2. Schema activation
3. Paired practice activity
4. Online practice activity (As described above)
5. Debriefing session
6. Explanation of presentation with model (Check, Please! clip on YouTube)
7. Preparation for recorded presentations
8. Record presentations

DAY 2
1. Warm-up activity
2. View presentations as a class
3. Students' and instructors' comments to be posted individually on computers as presentations are viewed as a class
4. Debriefing/feedback session


Links to sites that we will be using:
Comparative/Superlative Online Multiple-Choice Exercise
http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/compsup2.html
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com