Questions in the news

The idea of this activity was to research and discuss interesting news stories, but unfortunately (as one of the students pointed out) we didn't actually get around to the discussion stage. In future, it will have to be organised so that we cut to that part sooner. Still, there is a lot of good interaction happening around the computer, with students helping each other to find information and designing quizzes for each other. You can see some of the questions that they came up with at the Yahoo groups page. We had barely enough time to post responses to the questions before the session came to an end. It's nice to have the students' responses online but as I suggested earlier, I think in future I will change the second part of this activity into a discussion, because many of the students want that kind of activity from the club. As I am discovering, it's a question of balancing the online work with the skills development that students are after.

Tell me about your country

Today's activity was a kind of integrated skills activity - you can see it here. Students selected a country they were interested in and researched it on the internet, with the aim of telling everyone else about it later. We got some really good conversation out of this, both around the computer and during the subsequent interactions, when students were comparing 'their' countries. Just for the record, the countries chosen were:

• Thailand
• Japan
• Australia
• Brazil

Later, students posted a message about their country to the whole group, though these varied in sophistication. Some students were content to provide a hyperlink - I hope that the look of complete horror on my face conveyed the complete inadequacy of this response. I've asked students to respond to the postings as well, but we'll see if anyone is keen enough to follow this up...

Travel chat

Sarah was the only person to come to the ELC internet cafe today, which made for a relaxing change (things have been very busy recently). When I showed her the range of activities that have been developed up to this point, she chose to do an online discussion about travel. As I've said before, these can seem a bit artificial but they do give you an opportunity to practise some of the features of spoken language in a less pressurised form. You still have an unfolding discussion, but there is more time for you to think about what you want to say and to make changes as you go. Sarah also seemed to like the idea of being able to keep the discussion transcript afterwards - I hope that she has a good look at it and picks up on some of her mistakes....