Tag - writing skills

Digital Storytelling

27th December 2008
Collaborative Learning, Digital Storytelling, Educational Technology, Groupwork, Instructional Design, language learning e-tivities, Learning Language Teaching, Web 2.0 Buzz Words, Web 2.0 Tools
2 min read

A digital story is a personal experience represented in narrative format. The script is amplified by including video, music, still-frame imagery, and the author’s voice. A digital story typically lasts for two to three minutes. Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools p. 43

It must take ages to create such a story, but the idea is interesting anyways. I imagine the teacher has to provide a lot of scaffolding to make sure that it is about learning English rather than having fun with technology. The learner should also have a story to tell in the first place. If you have nothing to say, your story will be a flop.  Songs and stories have one important thing in common – they have to have a real message to be a success.

Here is a wonderful example of a digital story

Lexis, Writing & Contrastive Rhetoric

24th January 2008
Learning Language Teaching
1 min read

‘ never thought I would be able to write 35 pages about writing:=)  The more I think about the reasons why people make mistakes when they write in a foreign language, the more convinced I get that it is lexis rather than grammar that does the trick.  More than that, it is not about learning lexical items in isolation, you have to learn multi-word chunks, which could either be sequences of words or sequences of word groups that often occur in close proximity to or are adjacent to each other. Interestingly, while the former do have a name (collocations), the latter do not. Shall I invent a term?! How about proximate and adjacent collocation sets?