Tania's+page

Sorry I have been very slow getting my page up here - I have spent a lot of time refining my ideas until I was happy enough to put something up!

My focus question is " Does digitally recording students' social interaction in Japanese and giving them opportunties for feedback via a wiki significantly improve their interaction skills? (Ellis' Principle 7 (1 and 8) and iCLT Principle 2)

In our languages classes we already use quite a few E-Learning techniques, so I wanted to focus on something a little more specific for this project. My Year 10 students' speaking skills are reasonably OK as we usually have an assistant work with them at least once a week, but I wanted to see if I could improve their ability to have more natural ie. "real" conversations. Obviously this is difficult at this level with their limited language and also limited opportunities for "real" conversations. I also wanted to provide them with opportunities to interact with Japanese people of their own age.

At first I thought I might be being slightly ambitious in wanting to cover all these things at once, but I think I am gradually coming to terms with putting it all together. My basic idea is to record their interactions using a FLIP camera and then post the recordings on a wiki so that they can give each other feedback. I am hoping that later we can also invite some of the students from our Japanese sister school to the wiki and put up some questions for them to respond to as well.

__This is what I have done so far-__ 1. Given the students a survey about how they think they could improve their ability to communicate in Japanese - especially using E-Leanring 2. For our current topic of "talking about daily routines and food and drink" I recorded a baseline conversation (in pairs) using our FLIP camera 3. Given the students more formualic expressions they can use in their conversations

__I still need to -__ 1. Set up a wiki page to post their conversations to 2. Get my students to give each other feedback (to the wiki) and to use this feedback to make improvements 3. Record more converstaions - using more formulaic expressions 4. Continue the cycle with more feedback / more refining/ improving of language/ interactions 5. Invite Japanese Sister School students to the wiki and post similar questions for them to answer

This is as far as I've got so far.... I'll try to upload my files later- failed the first time!

Tania