Project

In the School of Modern Languages of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, students choose two languages their first day. These two languages –among other subjects- will be studied for five years in order to obtain a Bachelor’s Degree in Translation, Interpretation or Research in Languages. Many of them choose English for different reasons. However, many of them do not have previous knowledge about the language, even though it is a mandatory subject in high school.

In the first years, English was separated into four components: reading and writing, listening and speaking, grammar and laboratory; each one with its own learning material and teacher. Hence, as the approach and workload were very different from high school, the experience was usually shocking. In the first year, students struggled to understand the language, and the course with its components, different materials, several teachers… Some of them ended up with a very strong feeling of dislike towards the language. In order to avoid this situation, the English curriculum has been modified. In the last two academic years students do not have the subject separated into four components, and they only have a single book and a workbook, which includes all skills –reading, writing, listening and speaking and also sub-skills such as grammar. Additionally, they work with a novel adapted to their English level, to encourage extensive reading.

This academic year, students focused their attention on a single set of two books (from the Upstream series) and a short novel (called Brave New World). The book and workbook have numerous colors, pictures and images, font types and sizes for the presentation of information. On the contrary, the novel has a plain presentation of information, no pictures, images or colors, and it has only one type and size of font. English seems to be understood better this academic year, according to the impression of some of the teachers I frequently talk. However, the novel has been difficult to read and comprehend for some of them: only a small amount of input is becoming intake. This might be due to the lack of pictures, images, colors and the rather dull presentation of input.

Therefore, based on this information, the research to be carried out focuses on the differences of presentation of input, and my research question would be: Should input be presented in a different way (i.e. with colors, pictures, audio, video, hands-on-works, etc.) in order to increase intake? Can the Web help teachers to present information in a way that translates into a greater amount of intake? These and other questions will be addressed in this study.


Research questions

• How does presentation of input influence intake?

• Does quality of input affect amount of intake?

• Should input be presented in a different way in order to increase intake?

• Can the Web help teachers to present information in a way that results in greater amount of intake?

Here you have my Project's PPT

Presentation on ICT in ELT Project

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