Syllabus


 

 

Welcome to the Syllabus for Wonderful Words:  Vocabulary Matters!

 

Moderators: Brenda Binkley, Anne Hernandez,Jennie Farnell

 

 


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Goals of the Session

In the course of the 5 weeks, you will learn collaboratively to:

 

Three chats will be held to discuss content and pre-defined topics, build rapport and create a sense of community that draws on everyone’s experience.  These will be live sessions with recordings available afterwards.  All sessions will be at 14:00 GMT. (See what time that is for you)

 

Much of the content derived from the discussions will be made available through a wiki created during the five weeks, which will be kept online for future reference.

 

Weekly Content:

 

Week 1: 

January 13 - 19, 2014

Getting acquainted. 

Introductions by Brenda Binkley, Anne Hernandez and Jennie Farnell.   

 

By the end of Week 1, you will have:

 

Week 1 Activities

 

Moderators: Brenda/Anne/Jennie

 

Week 2

January 20 - 26, 2014

In Week 2, we’ll  review and discuss selected research on vocabulary acquisition and retention and discuss and the use of web resources to enhance vocabulary instruction.There are also two articles from ETP you might like to read

 

We’ll also introduce you to English Central, which is a paid website (free seats available to us during this session!). Finally, we’ll provide you a list of websites which you can use to create various vocabulary activities with your students. Please take a quick look at the websites and identify one which you’d like to examine further. Next week we’ll be introducing the websites in more depth and asking you, in small groups, to review one of the websites and share your evaluations. For now, please glance through them, find one that looks interesting to you, and sign up for a small group.

 

 

By the end of week 2, you will have: 

 

Week 2 Activities

 

Moderators: Andrea/Brenda

 

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Week 3

January 26 - February 2, 2014

During Week 3, you’ll begin to interweave the research we discussed last week with various web sites you can use to create your own vocabulary tools. Our focus this week will be on tools which are already created; that is, sites that you can use with your students for focused vocabulary practice but where you don’t have to create your own vocabulary activities.


Brenda will be focusing on websites that may be considered more adult, while Jennie will be looking at websites that can be used with younger learners. However, many of the websites can be used with learners of any age, so there will be some cross over.

 

By the end of week 3, you will have: 

 

Week 3 Activities

 

Moderators: Brenda/Jennie

 

Week 4

February 3 - 9, 2014

The focus this week will be on website as tools; that is, websites which you or your students can use to create your own focused vocabulary projects. It will involved identifying your class’ or your students’ vocabulary needs and then designing a project which will focus on those sets of words. Most of the tools we look at can be used either by the teacher solely, to create activities for his/her class, or by your own students, to put responsibility for vocabulary acquisition into their own hands.

 

By the end of Week 4, you will have: 

 

Week 4 Activities

 

Moderators: Brenda/Anne/Jennie

 

 

Week 5

February 10 - 16, 2014

We’ve made it to Week 5 -- congratulations and thanks for sticking with us while you balanced participating in Wonderful Words with the rest of your busy lives. We’ll use this week for reflection and sharing.

 

By the end of week 5, you will have:

 

Week 5 Activities

 

Moderators: Brenda/Anne/Jennie