Call.final Project. Final Version 2

7/28/2019 Call.final Project. Final Version 2

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Universidad Autnoma de Tamaulipas

Faculty name: Unidad Acadmica Multidisciplinaria de Ciencias, Educacin y

Humanidades (UAMCEH)

BA programme: Applied Linguistics

Subject: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

Professors name: Natzyelly Kesne Gonzalez Garca

Students name: Carlos Alberto Sifuentes Rodrguez

Semester: 4th

Name of the project: CALLs Final Project

Date: April 2013


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I. Background

The learners are first graders in a public elementary school. These children are

about five or six years old. This group is integrated by twelve students. In this class,

there are only three girls and nine boys. So far, these students have being taught

English in the last year of kindergarten.

The setting is an elementary public school placed in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas.

This school is named Jos Martinez y Martinez and is located near of the downtown

of the city. This school has classes in the morning and in the afternoon, and the

groups in which a tool will be implemented belong to the afternoon shift.

Since it is a public school, the PNIEB (Programa Naciona de Ingls en Educacin

Bsica) is the institution who is in charge of English classes. It is remarkable to say

that these students have previously study English one year in kindergarten; therefore

they are acquainted with the existence of the English language. This English

program is divided into four cycles: cycle 1, including kindergarten, first and second

grade; cycle two, including third and fourth grade; cycle three, including fifth and

sixth grade; and cycle 4, including secondary school.

According to the PNIEB curriculum, this level belongs to the cycle 1 in which the

purpose is to familiarize students with the English language, so the Common

European Framework of References for Languages does not play a role at this level

because of the simplicity of the programs content.

The PNIEBs syllabus outlines the social practices of the language, which are

objectives that students must reach with the help of teachers. These social practices

belong to one of the three environments that are cited in the PNIEB syllabus: familiar


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and community, literary and ludic, and academic and educational. The following are

some the objectives encompassed in the course:

Understand and respond to greetings, farewell, and courtesy

expressions.

Understand and follow instructions to carry out every day home

activities.

Give and receive information about ones own and others likes,

preferences, and personal data.

Describe and interpret information about people in the community and

their activities.

Understand rhymes and stories in verse.

Compare words in a childrens story.

Understand stories and narratives and associate them with personal

experiences.

Read illustrated sets of instructions in order to assemble an object.

Formulate questions to obtain information about a topic of nature.

Interpret basic information about a geography topic based on a

graphical resource.

Since today students are digital natives, that is to say that they were born in an era in

which technology such as websites and software, is really important for their

cognitive processes, it is needed to use electronic materials. Unfortunately, the

classroom where the English class is taught do not have computers or any other


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technological devices, therefore, the students are involved in a traditional way of

learning.

II. Issue or problem that started your project

The problem addressed in this project is that students have demonstrated some

trouble when they want to remember some lexical items that they have just seen. I

consider that this fact is really important since this vocabulary is the basis of tasks

when, for example, they are exchanging information such as what they like or what

they do not like, which is an objective outlined previously.

III. Initial solution and expected response

As a result, a task based on learning or reviewing vocabulary was designed for

students. This task consisted of the use of two web pages when some games could

be created for language classes. The web pages were the following:

1. www.hangman.no

2. www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/

The first web page is focus on creating hangman games. Hence, I created a

hangman game particularly for being played in class using vocabulary from the unit 4

part A from the book Think in English 1. In the second web page, there was created

a word search containing the same vocabulary as the hangman. The words used in

these games were: boy, girl, mitt, bat, baseball, puzzle, pizza, spaghetti, park, cat,

dog, and bike.

I decided to do it on April 9th. Evidently, since students classroom do not have

computers, I decided to take them to the computer lab of their school.
http://www.hangman.no/http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/http://www.hangman.no/


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Although, the students have being working with word games, for instance: word

search, scramble words, crossword, etc, I believe that this activity will be more

encouraging for them because they are not use to work on computers , particularly

for English classes. I think that the task will get a positive response from students

due to the fact that they will be interacting with the computer with is really appalling

to them.

IV. Response and reflection

Fortunately, during the activity the students show a positive attitude towards it in

general. Most students felt really well while working in the computer lab due to it

was something that they were not used to do, nor even in other subjects. They really

like to use this two websites, particularly, the one in which they could play hangman.

At first, it was not as easy as I thought to give them orders of how they were going to

work because there was no a projector in the lab but at the end they got what I

wanted them to do. However, there were some students that needed help for

carrying out the activity because they did not know how to handle a computer.

I consider this activity as the first step so that students can be more involved in

technology while learning English. However, I think that it can be improved by

looking for other web pages. Perhaps, it could have been better that students could

interact more with the vocabulary items such as associating words and pictures or

even hearing the pronunciation of the vocabulary.

V. Changes made or changes planned

Next time, I would use other resources to complement what students are doing. For

example, I could add a video mentioning all the vocabulary items before the word

games. In addition, I would only use one game instead of two because the amount of


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time of the lesson is short and it is almost impossible to watch a video and play two

games. It is remarkable to say that the video must be created since it is really difficult

to find a video on Internet that can be suitable for the objectives.

I believe that with the use of a video as a review of what they have been learning

would be honestly useful since this will allow students to engage better with the topic

we would cover during the lesson.

VI. Conclusion

In conclusion, I can say that this project help to understand better how we as

teachers must design our lesson endorse by technology because todays children

are more acquainted with it. This will allow us to improve the way children learn

languages. I believe that the lack of technological devices inside the classroom is a

disadvantage; however, we have to find resources that we can use in the schools

computer lab or via internet.

VII. Resources

The web pages used for creating material for the project were:

www.hangman.no

www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/

Appendix

The following figures belong to the web pages that were used during the activity.
http://www.hangman.no/http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/http://www.hangman.no/


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Figure 1.www.hangman.no

Figure 2. List of words in www.hangman.no

Figure 3. Playing hangman
http://www.hangman.no/http://www.hangman.no/http://www.hangman.no/http://www.hangman.no/http://www.hangman.no/


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Figure 4. Playing word scramble in www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/
http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/http://www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/

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Call.final Project. Final Version 2