1. General
description- what is it? (What kind of things do they have on it? What will be
good for? Is it geared toward EFL, ESL/all learners, young learners, adult
learners?)
The teacher resource sharing site I visited was “American
English.” It was the site for both teachers and students to teach and learn
American English language and its culture. It seemed that this website supplied
teaching resources to teachers and learning materials to students. There were
five sections when I went into the site: about us, AE community, resources, English
teaching forum, and trace effects game. I thought it would be especially good
for learning American culture. These days I am particularly interested in
American culture because there are many things I haven’t known before, not
existing in my culture. And I thought it was geared toward EFL students; it is said
that it provided materials and resources worldwide and that all programs are carried
out by Regional English Language Officer at American Embassies. So I believed
it supplied materials which are globally available, so it caused EFL students
to make use of them more easily. Also, although this site made it possible for
the material-searchers to select the level of learners, I thought it suited more
for young learners than adult learners because in this site, there were more
resources that fit for children: for learning a song like Sing Out Loud Children’s
Song; for reading a fairy tale such as The adventure of Tom Sawyer; for learning
basic American culture such as Celebrate! Holidays in the U.S.A. Moreover,
there was a video game named Trace Effects Game, which children would like the
most.
2.
Critical analysis
2-1.
Assessment of the quality of the content (Do you think this website has quality
contents? Is it easy to use?)
I personally believe that this website has resources
of fine quality. For example, I tried searching for American holidays to look
for the material for teaching American culture. I already knew some main
American holidays such as Independence Day, Mothers’ Day, or Halloween.
However, I could find an interesting one that I haven’t ever known before; it
was Flag Day. At this point I thought it would be helpful to teach something
about American culture which has special meaning but is not that widely known
to EFL students.
In my opinion, it was convenient to use
this website. I want to say that the storage system was the best. There are two
main things I want to mention. The first was the subsection titled My Resources
under the section named Resources. When I found the material that I wanted to, this
enabled me to store it into My Resources. Then, the list of my favorite
resources was created. And I could email them to myself so easily look through
the materials again later. The second thing was that the PDF form. Except for
sending the material to my email account, I also could save the reading text as
a PDF file. This function was really nice because when I wanted to read the
material afterward, I was able to simply access it without visiting and searching
the same material again.
2-2.
Are there any ideas that could be used for class uses? (Would it be good for
your teaching contexts? Is it useful?)
I found out that the materials that this
site had were fairly useful for language teaching. In my case, I want to use
the reading text here, especially for teaching American culture. My class will
be the one learning American culture and the target students EFL middle school
students 3rd grade who haven’t experienced the culture yet. As I
read the text about one of American holidays, I thought it would be useful to
teach them. As for the length, the 3-page-text was reasonable for them to
digest within every class (one text per one class). And the text was colorful
and included several pictures which will not make the students bored while
reading the text. The most impressive thing was that there was a piece of music
related to the holiday, which could make the students to have an experience to
learn and sing out the song. I thought it was the best as it could be the key
not to creation of boredom and a lively classroom atmosphere!
But one thing that I thought needed improving
was too much glossary. It would be too overwhelming for the students to
memorize at one time. Maybe for a perfect absorption, I will make up some
questions for vocabulary.
Overall, “American English” bears a lot of
positive features for my language education.
3.
Provide a link of the website you saw.
American English (US State Dept. Sponsored Site) http://americanenglish.state.gov/
