Mini Project 2

Trying this again...Here it is for REAL this time!

MINI PROJECT 2

Thoughts on Intercultural Communication...

I enjoyed the readings and discussions on the intercultural communication topic. I believe strongly in the inclusion of culture in the teaching of a foreign language and can definately see the value of using intercultural communication in the FL classroom. As stated in some of the articles, it is important to have discussions in order to prepare students for such communication to make sure that everyone is on the "same page" to begin with. I could see how having differing expectations could certainly create tensions and missed communication. I also do think that it is important to make students aware of the existence of cultural stereotypes so that they are not reinforcing cultural stereotypes through the communications. In all, I think that it would be neat to use intercultural communication in the classroom. It is the modern version of pen-pals and I think that this is something that students (particularly at the middle/high school level) could get really excited about!

Video Project Ideas...

I am not completely sure what I would like to focus my video project on yet but I do have a couple of ideas. I know that I will be teaching at the high school level in the coming year so I would definately like to gear my topic to be appropriate at the high school level. I think that something dealing with the theme of travel would be nice but I am not exactly sure how to set that one up. I also like the idea of making commercials. Another neat thing would be to film dialouges. In the high school classroom, students could create dialouges or skits dealing with different situations (at the restaurant, phone conversations, meeting someone for the first time, etc). As you can see, I am not sure where I would like to focus my project yet but any ideas/feedback would be much appreciated!

Mini Project 1

Here is my Mini Project #1

Final project possibilities...

For my final project, I would like to look at the uses of podcasts in the foreign language classroom. I came up with a couple of benefits to using podcasts in the language classroom as a way to start thinking of how they could be beneficial in aiding the teaching of a foreign language. Firstly, they offer a wide variety of topics. Students could have some choice over particular topics that are of interest to them. Also, they are a good way for students to be able to listen to native speakers. Having students listen to podcasts made by native speakers would be good listening practice. Another benefit to using podcasts in the FL classroom is that they can be a very good source of cultural information. It would also be neat to have students create their own podcasts! Those are just a couple of benefits to using podcasts in the FL classroom that I was able to come up with. As far as a particular research question, I could look at a general question like "How can using podcasts aid in foreign language acquistion?". This is a pretty general question that I feel could lend itself well.
Another possible research topic for me could be the benefits of communicating through e-mail vesus instant messenging. I am not really sure if there has been research done comparing the two or not, but that might be interesting to look at.

This week's post

I was pretty excited about being able to add a music video to my blog! I have always read celebrity gossip blogs like Perezhilton, who always has video clips on his blog and was excited to be able to figure out how to put them on mine! I also added a mini-survey which I also thought was cool. I would like to continue to add more features to my blog as we learn how to do more and more. I also think it would be neat to keep and maintain some sort of blog after this class. At first I wasn't sure about the idea of having a blog but after being able to figure out how to do things like post videos and pictures I have really enjoyed it.

Juanes music video - Volverte a Ver