Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching

By Jeff Stanford

522 pages

Moodle is the world’s most popular and widely used open source learning management system (LMS) in the world today with over 45,000 registered sites, 32 million users, 3 million courses in over 200 countries in 75 languages. In his book, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching, Jeff Stanford introduces Moodle as an easy to use, highly adaptable and very effective platform for teaching second languages.

What is it?

First an foremost, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching is an instruction manual and whether you’re new to Moodle or not, in my opinion, Jeff Stanford has done an excellent job with it. It cuts right to the chase with plenty of examples, scenarios, clear, concise explanations and step by step instructions and illustrations. It’s laid out in practical mini tutorials, organised into the following chapters:

1. What does Moodle offer language teachers?
2. Getting started with Moodle
3. Vocabulary Activities
4. Speaking Activities
5. Grammar Activities
6. Reading Activities
7. Writing Activities
8. Listening Activities
9. Assessment
10. Extended Activities

Methodology

The book faithfully follows the recommendations outlined by Professor Jack C. Richards in his paper, Communicative Language Teaching Today [pdf]. Most of the activities are learner centred and designed to develop learner autonomy. It leans heavily towards collaborative and project based learning, for example, using the Glossary module for learners to create their own class dictionaries and using the Wiki module for similar formal group learning activities. He also describes techniques to encourage self and peer assessment to further increase learner independence and a stronger sense of participation, ownership and belonging. In other words, the techniques described in this manual are highly motivating. To quote Barbara Gross Davis in her book, Tools for Teaching (Jossey Bass 2009);

“Researchers report that, regardless of the subject matter, students working in small groups tend to learn more and demonstrate better retention than students taught in other instructional formats. Students who work in groups also appear more satisfied with their classes, and group work provides a sense of shared purpose that can increase morale and motivation. In addition, group work introduces students to the insights, values, and world views of their peers, and it prepares students for life after school, when many will be working in teams.”

Who is it aimed at?

If you are a DoS, Academic Director, Head of Faculty or a teacher who is interested in learning how to leverage the powerful tools for learning available in the Web 2.0 environment, this book is an excellent starting point. It gets you up and running in no time, whatever your previous experience of using web based learning tools might be. The format is open and modular so that you can adopt Moodle 1.9 as a platform for your elearning requirements in steps and at a pace that is comfortable and practical for your organisation and your learners.

About Jeff Stanford

Jeff Stanford is an Associate tutor in Applied Linguistics for the University of Leicester and a teacher trainer on Cambridge ESOL courses. He also does training consultancy work for organizations such as Anglia Assessment, Fintra, Pearson, and the British Council.

His website: http://moodleflair.com/

Reuters announced on Wednesday 11th March of this year that LiveMocha.com and Pearson Education Publishing (owners of Longman Publishing) have teamed up to provide a English as a Foreign Language e-learning service marketed directly to consumers.

What is LiveMocha.com?

It’s essentially a social networking website, similar to Facebook, for example (it evens includes a Facebook linking plugin) that is specifically geared towards people who want to learn foreign languages, not just English. It currently offers Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian. At present, LiveMocha.com boasts over two million members who can connect with potentially thousands of other members who have similar or complementary language learning needs.

How does it work?

Membership is free and simple to set up although it appears to make its money through plenty of banner advertising which seems to permeate every corner of the site. Once you’ve created your personal profile, LiveMocha.com immediately starts suggesting potential language learning “friends” of different ages and backgrounds from all over the world. So basically, this is a Web 2.0 version of the traditional pen-pal exchanges of our school days. Of course, the web offers far more for communications than the traditional pen, paper and international postal services. One thing I’d strongly recommend here to anyone who’d like to use this service is not to put any “identity sensitive” information, i.e. information that fraudsters could use to steal your identity, such as your date of birth, home town, surname(s) or middle names, etc.

Strengths

From what I can see, the real strengths of this website are in its emphasis on social networking and peer review. Members can write compositions or record and submit speech that they submit for other members to review, grade and give advice. For example, you could write or record and submit a short paragraph about your favourite past-times. Other members are notified about your submission and they can read or listen to it and either write or record their assessment of it. There’s also a basic grading system for giving marks out of five for spelling/pronunciation, quality and grammar.

Since this is a social networking website with an emphasis on conversation and communication, I at least expect to see some way of calling other members through a VoIP service (Voice over Internet Protocol) such as Skype, GoogleTalk, Messenger. What they provide is a chat window with the option to use their proprietary VoIP service. I tried a few times to connect to a variety of other members but without success.

Weaknesses

There doesn’t appear to be any kind of discussion forum or bulletin board which is a shame. Bulletin boards are especially effective at encouraging realistic dialogues between learners as has been amply demonstrated by Dave’s ESL Cafe. It does have chat, however, which appears to work well for one-to-one communication which is probably better than the majority of group chatrooms that frequently descend into a linguistically challenged “free-for-all”.

They also provide a number of language “courses” that appear to be aimed at learners from complete beginners to Pre-Intermediate level. The materials are very basic and some are either frustratingly slow or don’t appear to work at all (I have a pretty fast and reliable Internet connection). The materials appear to be SCORM based and I suspect that they’ve been authored using some kind of automated SCORM IDE. This could explain why they’re so slow. SCORM IDEs tend to produce very large file sizes, typically between 10Mb and 100Mb, for activities that should only be a fraction of that, usually less than 1Mb. To be honest, I don’t think this site is going to win any awards for its e-learning course materials.

Why the LiveMocha.com – Pearson partnership?

I guess that this is where the partnership with Pearson comes in. LiveMocha.com have the framework and an established on-line language learning community that is well advertised and well used but doesn’t have much in the way of course materials, while Pearson have a huge library of language learning course content for learners at every level. It would be great to see LiveMocha.com offering integrated, well designed courses that would incorporate and complement their very successful social networking framework. I await further news on their progress with this project!