Online Reading Comprehension Courses in Technology and
with peers and other members of the child's community must facilitate cognitive growth and learning. Moodle's features reflect this learning approach in various design aspects. The teacher is not only a source of knowledge but also a facilitator for he/she connects with students in a personal way, moderates discussions and leads students towards the objectives and goals of the class. Similarly, with the use of Moodle, students interact with the environment and their peers for they have various activities such as choosing the right option, commenting on entries in a database, participating in a forum or working collaboratively in a wiki.
Apart from applying the social constructionist approach, Moodle has many features which can be used to help students understand specific-content texts and develop reading comprehension strategies such as previewing, skimming, scanning, inferring and summarizing (Harmer, 2001)
1. The most useful features are resources and activities. Resources are content, that is, information the teacher wants to bring into the course. These can be prepared files uploaded to the course server (link to a file); pages edited directly in Moodle (edit a webpage); or external web pages made to appear part of this course (link to a website).
2. Activities include controlled tasks (quiz), productive tasks (glossary, online text, wiki) and communicative tasks (chat and forum). Quizzes allow the teacher to design and set quiz tests which consist of multiple choice, true- false, and short answer questions. These questions are kept in a categorised database, and can be re-used. Quizzes can allow multiple attempts. Each attempt is automatically marked, and the teacher can choose whether to give feedback or to show correct answers. Glossaries are used by learners to create and keep a list of definitions, like a dictionary. Online texts allow the teacher to specify a task that requires students to prepare digital content (any format) and submit it by uploading it to the server. Wikis enable students to create and edit texts collectively using a web browser. Chats foster real-time synchronous discussion among participants. This is a useful way to get a different understanding of each other and the topic being discussed. Forums are also used for discussion. Unlike chats, interaction is asynchronic and participants can include attachments. By subscribing to a forum, participants receive copies of each new posting in their email. A teacher can impose subscription
on everyone if they want to (Moodle. com).
Course Design
The main goal of the courses is to provide students with the tools to understand texts in English related to the areas of Technology and Tourism. Texts were selected from a wide range of electronic sources bearing in mind the content areas, the grammatical constituents of the texts and the prospective students´ needs.
The courses are divided into 20 weekly units. Each unit combines Moodle's software features, course configuration and content to develop the following structure:
1. Weekly Structure: The 20-week course layout was based on a weekly structure. The main course page provides an outline of the course, links to useful resources such as bilingual dictionaries and translators and a class forum that participants use to interact with the tutor and peers. The format was intended to act as an "advance organiser" (Ausubel, 1968).
2. Sample Unit: All units start with a description of the lesson in which the terminal objectives are presented. Such overview is followed by a linked text which is exploited in the lesson. Each lesson consists of two main parts: a reading comprehension and a language focus section. For the former, students are usually asked to skim the text and choose from a multiple-choice activity the sentence which best summarizes its main idea. In other cases, using the strategy previewing, students predict the content of the text analyzing its non-linguistic features and write their predictions in an online text. In order to develop scanning, students answer different questions types;
for example, multiple choice, true and false, numbers, short answer and matching. Relevant vocabulary is dealt with activities such as matching key terms to their definition or working collaboratively to build a course glossary of specific terminology. In the language focus section, students are made aware of a recurrent linguistic feature in the text usually through one of the question types mentioned above. To ensure comprehension, students are provided with a short explanation of the form and function of the language item analyzed. Activities such as cloze and matching are used to reinforce the students´ understanding of the new linguistic item. Links to other online
resources are provided so that students can further practice.
3. Integration Units: These units are distributed throughout the course and their main aim is to consolidate learning and foster team work. For example, in the area of tourism, students are divided into groups and each group has to write an advertisement in a wiki about tourist destinations in England. For this purpose, each member of the team reads about a specific tourist destination in England and writes in Spanish a summary of the place assigned. All members participate in editing the advertisement. Chats and forums are also very useful to encourage participation and team work. For instance, in the course of technology, students participate in a forum to decide who is the most famous hacker in history. To be able to participate in the debate, each student must previously read the bibliography of one of the hackers assigned by the tutor and share the information in Spanish with the other participants.
These types of activities foster cooperative learning and peer correction and they have proved very successful.
Students´ response
The piloting project started in May 2008 and so far the results have been quite satisfactory. Most of the students fulfil the tasks in time and the show a positive attitude towards the activities assigned. Moreover, they themselves initiate forums to express doubts about the activities or tasks. This has proved very useful for, despite the nature of the course, students got to know each other very quickly.
The relationship with us, the tutors, has also been very positive. Students have been contacting us all the time either via e-mail or forums. They pose us questions about lexical or grammar items and they consult us about technical problems related to the learning platform. But, surprisingly, they have also contacted us to comment on the activities and tasks themselves and this has been a very useful feedback.
Future directions
For future courses on reading comprehension, we intend to reduce the emphasis on individual work in favour of increased emphasis on stimulating
discussion and project work. This is the main way in which students can get to know the tutor and each other and, therefore, compensate for the lack of face to face interaction that ordinary courses have.
References
Ausubel, D. (1968): Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View. New York: Holt, Rinehard and Winston.
Dougiamas, M. (2008): An exploration of the use of an Open Source software called Moodle to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry, Science and Mathematics Education Centre. Curtin University of Technology. PhD thesis.
Harmer, J. (2001): The Practice of English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman.
Moodle (2004): http://moodle.com/ and http://moodle.org/
Williams, N and Burden, R. (1997): Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach, Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.