I, as a teacher, always use online dictionaries to check the meaning, pronunciation and example sentences of words but I never ask my students to use them. I taught P.1 and P.4 students in the last three years. I always think that they are too young so I have not thought of asking my students to use any online dictionaries or thesaurus. After this lesson, I do think that I was wrong to assume that. They really need some tools to help them learn by themselves when I am not here to offer help.
This year is a very challenging year for me as I am teaching a P.5 class. The students learn quite slowly and they need a lot of help in learning English. I have just taught them how to do a composition this week. They struggled a lot because of their lack of vocabulary. A thesaurus will be a very useful tool for them as they will learn and use a wider variety of words to do their composition. For example, most of them would just use the 'easy' words like 'happy', 'big' and 'want' and they really cannot think of other words to replace them. Next time when they do composition in class, I may show them how to use an online thesaurus and they can try to use it at home.
Searching a corpus may be too difficult for the slow learners but I am interested in asking my students to use 'Textranch' and 'Googlefight'. I do not want to tell my students the difference of some phrases directly as they will not remember my words. If I bring out an interesting question and they search by themselves, they will remember the answer very well.
I can't wait to try these tools in my class!
沒有留言:
張貼留言