In the first part of this article, I have given a general introduction to the experiment I carried out with the students of Pharmacy at CHARUSAT.
This week, I am focusing on the vocabulary learning process I adopted with the help of BBC Learning English website and the learning outcome at the end of the semester.
For any sort of learning, a base should be created and the base for language learning lies in WORDS. So I started making my students visit and refer the ‘Words in the News’ column on BBC Learning English website. At the beginning of all the lab sessions they were supposed to open Words in the News page on BBC Learning site.
The ‘Words in the News’ column features latest news stories from around the world where new words or the key words are focused to make the learning quick.
The following is an example of how the BBC Learning English team puts the news and highlights the word from a specific news item.
Much of Singapore’s growth has been fuelled by investment and tourism from overseas.
It has positioned itself as a high-end manufacturer. It makes complex nanotechnology, pharmaceuticals and biotech productslike flu vaccines.
Exports of electronics alone were up 49% in June.
And visitors from wealthy neighbours China and Indonesia haveflocked to its two new casino resorts, which opened in April.But Singapore’s main trading partner remains the European Union. And, despite austerity measures imposed by EU governments, exports to the bloc surged 75% in June.
That prompted Singapore’s government to raise its annual growth forecast to a record high of between 13 and 15% for the year.
Pauline Mason, BBC News, Singapore
This is the text of news item which has the base of audio in the form of audio news story.
We had integrated these kind of news stories in our everyday curriculum, where the students used to listen and read the news stories and then follow the following steps:
1. Forming questions based on news stories.
2. Forming sentences using the newly learnt words from the news story.
3. Creating students’ own version of the same news, keeping the newly learnt words in.
The students found it quite interesting and challenging to be gaining general knowledge, learning new words and practicing a language.
Having involved the students in the above mentioned process for almost 4 months, the results were as below:
The students who were able to write 15-20 words per minute at the beginning of the session were able to produce 35+ words per minute at the end of the training.
They became more fluent at oral expressions as compared to the beginning of the session.
And the last but the most important impact was – they started putting efforts on their own to learn new words by referring the BBC news site, on their own.
That’s it I could share in this piece.
Next week, I will bring in one more aspect of using the BBC Learning English website contents.
It is really a wonderful way of learning new words. I will try it with my students.