Магистрант Корпешова С.Ж., к.п.н. Тургинбаева Л.В.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет, Казахстан

Южно-Казахстанский государственный педагогический институт, Казахстан

A FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING VIA MOODLE

With the rapidly increasing popularity of the Internet in recent years, the delivery of learning programs has gradually shifted from local desktop to online-based applications. So, educators face a problem to deploy a course or learning management system which doesn’t require using authoring systems such as Macromedia Director and the like that placing high demands on design, programming skills, and time. One such system that has been gradually gaining worldwide popularity is known as Moodle.

Moodle is a course management system for online learning. The abbreviation Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. The design of Moodle is based on socio-constructivist pedagogy. This means its goal is to provide a set of tools that support an inquiry- and discovery-based approach to online learning. Furthermore, it purports to create an environment that allows for collaborative interaction among students as a standalone or in addition to conventional classroom instruction [1].

One of the advantages of Moodle is that it has been developed as an OpenSource software project. It is entirely supported by a team of programmers and by the user community.

Since the development of communicative skills in language learning requires social interaction between the teacher and the students and among the students themselves, the use of computers has for a long time been regarded only as a support tool with regard to certain skill areas. Rapid advances in technology now make the implementation of synchronous and asynchronous learning tasks, in oral and written modes, feasible from a pragmatic point of view. Furthermore, a growing body of research is gradually emerging that provides concrete suggestions on how to exploit instructional online tools effectively or how to integrate the Internet for different language learning goals [1, 2].

Moodle is a template-based system to which content must be is added. This makes Moodle’s interface very intuitive and allows for easy navigation. The whole page is presented in a “flat view” format [2]. It is laid out in small blocks and organized around sections following a topic or weekly outline. Each section has its own tools such as lessons, quizzes, assignments, and forums which are all linked to a built-in gradebook. All blocks on a page can be individually arranged, and the elements within each section can be easily moved around or be hidden.

Moodle allows for the integration of a wide range of resources. These include any kind of text-based or html-formatted documents, multimedia resources such as graphics, video or audio (e.g., MP3 files), PowerPoint. Lesson tasks within Moodle can be linked to any resources that are uploaded to one's server or that are available on the Internet. Moodle allows for a wide range of assessment strategies. Moodle is also a learning management system (LMS). LMSs differ from exclusive course management systems because they allow to present information to learners in small units, assess what they have learned, and based on the quality of their achievement branch out into additional review of material or move to the next level. Moodle’s design is grounded in a socio-constructivist theory of learning. Learning tasks or projects can be designed so as to allow for cooperation between the instructor and students or among students by using different formats of social interaction. In Moodle, almost all modules are designed to allow teachers or course participants to provide feedback in qualitative or quantitative form.

 

Sample learning tasks created with Moodle tools

The following example of learning tasks demonstrates asynchronous and cooperative learning tasks that can be used in any intermediate language class and how Moodle allows for the implementation of a socio-constructivist approach to language learning.

In this task, students are asked to find commonalities about their family structures.

 

 

1

Theme/context:

Family

2 

Task:

Finding out commonalities

3

Skills:

interpretive (listening) and presentational (speaking)

4

Level/language:

low intermediate

5

Modules:

Assignment module, forum module

 

·        Students are asked to briefly describe their families based on questions such as how many brothers and sisters they have, how old they are, what they do, what their names are. To do this, students record their answers with Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), an open-source recorder, save their answers as MP3 files, and upload them through the assignment module.

·        Working in groups, students listen to each other’s descriptions.

·        Students report their findings to the teacher through the essay module.

 

Литература:

1. Brandl K., Integrating Internet-based reading materials into the foreign language teaching curriculum: From teacher- to student-centered approaches. Language Learning & Technology, 6(3), 2002. - pp.. 87-107. [Дата обращения – 25.01.2017]: http://llt.msu.edu/vol6num3/brandl/

2. Gonzalez-Lloret M., Designing task-based CALL to promote interaction: En Busca de Esmeraldas. Language Learning & Technology, 7(1), 2003. – pp.. 86-104. [Дата обращения – 27.01.2017]:http://llt.msu.edu/vol7num1/gonzalez/