Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Without experience or a user's guide, it is difficult to know what to do.
PHILLIP BURROWS & MARK FOSTER – LAST CHANCE – OXFORD BOOKWORMS –
STARTER – 2008
Read-along books used to be with
audio cassettes. My son used them voraciously. Then they turned CD and they are
the current norm on the market. The next generation will be with a MP3 file downloaded
directly from the publisher’s site. That’s for very soon, if not already widely
practiced. At least in the cloud.
This CD version is supposed to be
pedagogical. It thus has five pages of activities before, during and after
reading. That’s good but that is not enough. I did not find the answers to the
activities. It cannot be used by an isolated child. It is done for class use
with a teacher who can correct the answers to the activities.
But what’s more it is not enough to
have the tool. We need to know how to use it. What is the objective? To learn
some English? To learn how to read? To learn how to understand a story? To
learn how to listen without the text under the nose?
What is the role of the teacher or
adult working with the kid? Is it for early learning or normal teenage
learning? Who can be a teacher in that case?
If you have some experience you
may be able to use it as a starting point for a long work on a subject:
volcanoes or camera shooting or reporter. Why not natural phenomena or climate
change? But for plain collective reading in class, or even worse collective
listening to the CD in class with the text in front of the students’ eyes, I
doubt the interest will last long and the efficiency will be very great.
That’s always the same thing. You
can have a perfect tool, but it takes a good tool user to do anything good with
the tool.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:21 PM 
