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

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