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Adult Learning Activities

http://www.cdlponline.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=homepage

Overview

Adult Learning Activities is a free website designed for the purpose of improving learners’

reading skills, work more on their vocabulary knowledge and to some extent it gives learners the

chance to check their pronunciation as well.

The purpose of this site is to help adults improve their basic skills like reading, pronunciation,

and spelling using real-life and very authentic stories on topics of interest to adults. This site is

also designed to build and broaden the concept of “Distance Learning” and apply method and

materials under a new proposition, i.e. “Applying Hi-Tech” in the process of adult

teaching/learning.

As majority of the stories are taken from authentic contexts of social life which are mostly

appealing for adults and some are taken from news on various sources, learners are more

enthusiastic about following and reading them; another good point about these stories is that if

this website is going to be used in the classroom context, a very creative teacher can use them for

the topic to run a hot discussion in the class; therefore, not only these stories may work on

learners’ reading skill, but also they might be useful for fostering their success in speaking.

Language Aspects

Reading, vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling and to some extent speaking can be easily covered

and also if a creative teacher asks learners to write a summary of the story they have read,

writing and structure could be included.

Target Learners

Adults language learners – Basic, Pre – intermediate, and somehow Intermediate ones.

Unfortunately there’s no level based classification and as far as I checked the stories under

various topics, none of them are designed for Upper – intermediate upwards learners.

Pros & Cons

I myself found this website so beneficial, it’s free, no registration needed, it’s not banned and/or

filtered and with a kind of normal speed of connection learners can have access to it and read and

sometimes for some stories they have the chance to listen to them too. Another good point or

better to say merits of this website is that, every reading passage is followed by some activities,

such as “Spell a Word” which helps learners learn to spell new words correctly. It also gives

learners the chance of checking your spelling two times and then they can write the word in the

box and check their spelling too. If a word is spelled correctly on the first try, two points for the

learner; otherwise, only one point will be considered. Another good activity is “Matching

Words” which will help learners learn what the words mean. To start, they have to click on one

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of the small blue boxes, called tiles, inside the big box, a word or a definition will be appeared,

then click on another tile, and another word or definition will be shown up. If the word and

definition match, the tiles will go away and leave the word and definition. If they do not match,

the word and definition will be hidden again. Try to remember them so you can match them

later. I found it magnificent. “Pick an Answer” is another activity which directly checks on

learners’ comprehension. It’s also as easy as the previous ones, just by clicking on the right

answer, you’ll get the point. Something more interesting is being able to print your scores after

finishing each task and you can simply share it with the teacher to let him/ her informed about

your progress and much better, you can keep it as a sort of portfolio for yourself to assess your

progress during a time. But an important point should be taken into consideration is that those

scores of you are not saved on the website, so you have to make folder/ file or whatsoever and

keep them inside; otherwise, you may lose them all.

It’s handy enough, actually user – friendly. All the tabs above, which are not a lot to make users

confused, explained all very intricately. It also provide both teacher educators and learners with

some extra sources, some links to know about distance learning, hi-tech and teaching/learning,

etc.

Apart from all above mentioned merits, there are some demerits I want to talk about. The first

one is the fact that none of these stories are categorized based on different levels, so a teacher or

a learner should spend a lot of time to check the stories and see which one might be suitable for

the class and the level of learners. I think it’s one of the biggest drawbacks of the website.

Another one is not being able to listen to all the stories, actually most of the stories have the

option of “audio”, but as you played it, nothing happens. I think it’s a bit misleading! Perhaps

this site hasn’t been updated for ages … Actually it has “full story” version which should give

learners the chance to read the longer and perhaps more difficult version of the same story, but it

just work for some of them.

Language Teaching/ Learning Applicability

This website can be done in the classroom, I think it has amazing topics to get learners involved

in the topic of the day, its ample various topics let teachers and learners pick the topic of their

own interest and for sure it leads them to have a fruitful debate in the class. In case of having hi-

tech in our classroom context, applying it is highly recommended. Teachers can also assign

learners to pick one of the stories and work on it at home, and then they can share their result via

emails or whatsoever.

Teaching Methodology

Sociocultural one is the only thing comes to my mind now, but your comments on that is so and

impatiently welcome.