IATEFL Poland: Patrycja Grudzien-Dubiel on online reading and listening skills

Patrycja Grudzien-Dubiel, who is studying for her PHD at the University of Warsaw, is researching  the effectiveness of online reading and listening activities as compared to their traditional equivalents.  This session described her experiences so far, including the results of a smaller pilot study.

Patrycja started by giving some examples of online sources of reading and listening texts. These are:

• Reading: news, short story sites, blogs, film subtitles and twitter
• Listening: podcasts, online radio, YouTube, news and BBC’s learning English site.

She then described some of the activities used in the pilot study, either from published sources, or her own ideas. Here is a selection:

• Reading Race: Students scan the internet to answer a set of general knowledge questions. The first to collect all the answers and type them into their chat window wins. They then contribute some questions of their own to make another race.
• What turns me on: Students find online material relating to their own interest or hobby – articles, videos etc, over the course of a week, and post all of this onto their own blog page. They read each other’s pages and vote for the best.
• 5 clicks away: Students start from the home page of an appealing-looking website. They then navigate away from that page, and on their fifth click, they stop and make a screen-grab of that page. They upload this to their blog page along with a description and summary of the route by which they reached that page.
• News of the week: Students choose a single newly breaking big news item and follow it over the course of the week in different and contrasting online media. They copy and collect the links for all of the pages and put them on their blog page together with a summary of what the thread has been about.

All of these activities were done at home, and in the case of Reading Race, it was done in synchronized fashion in real time. There were 25 secondary school students involved and nearly all liked the activities. However, the great majority stated that they would have preferred to do them in class time rather than at home.

Patrycja also mentioned that she herself had to monitor and assist the students in her own free time – a downside of online learning! The most popular of the activities was ‘Reading Race’, perhaps because it was quick and competitive.  35% of the participants required help with the technology, eg how to upload things. Patrycja was surprised at this from the generation of ‘digital natives’.activities was Reading Race, perhaps because it was quick and competitive.  Interestingly, 35% of participants required help with the technology, for example, how to upload things. Patrycja was surprised at this, coming from the generation of ‘digital natives’.