Our Project Proposal

We are going to design a CALL website to assist our students in learning English as a second language. Since CALL has a lot of benefits such as arousing students’ interest and enhancing communication among learners, we hope the website designed can respond to the current CALL trend and enhance teaching and learning in real context.

All of us are teaching Key Stage 2 students in local primary schools. Three of us even teach in the same primary school. Many of our students are quite willing to learn English, but they lack adequate resources to enable them to further practice the four skills at home or after English lessons. Many of them can master basic skills but need further enhancement. The class web page can be a platform of resources we intend for our students to continue self-studies beside class time. Our focus is training their reading skills since past TSA results indicated students need reinforcement in this aspect. Moreover, reading plays an important role in language learning process. As suggested by EDB, we have to place around 40% of the lessons in reading in the new English curriculum.

It is important for us to choose readings which can align with the Key Stage 2 genre of texts in the new English curriculum. After thorough consideration, we decided to link our page to the Starfall website as it includes a wide range of text types, such as plays, fiction and non-fiction, comics, folk tales, Greek myths and Chinese fables. These readings cannot only broaden our students’ horizon but also arouse their interest to engage in training of reading skills. In addition, the wide range of text types could fulfill different students’ needs as some of them like reading stories while some of them like reading nonfictions.

After reading the passages, students have to complete online quizzes. The questions will not simply ask students the meaning of the passages, they also need to pay attention on the pictures. Thus, while attempting the questions, students need to apply their comprehension skills, as well as their high order thinking skills which could help developing their reading techniques.

In order to make the texts more attractive, all the texts chosen are shown using Flash. Students could decide how many times they will listen to it and how long they will spend on it. There is no time limit and thus, if students have learning difficulties or those who read slowly, they don’t need to push themselves to read faster. Moreover, they could click the icons so that they could listen to the texts while reading it.

Meanwhile, a variety of activities will be provided to students. For instance, they might be asked to complete different tasks, such as filling in the blanks, answering MC questions, matching and cross puzzles. They are also invited to discuss or share what they have learnt in the guestbook. The idea of implementing a guestbook is that it could promote interactions not only between teacher and students, but also students to students.