World Plaza

Well, we held the first World Plaza event last week. I heard the idea mentioned in brief on a website for an SALC in Asia, and decided to flesh it out a bit and make it into a reality here in our SALC.

I organized it for the first time with my students in drama class, since I had a captive audience there who would need to participate for a grade. We made our first travel destination "The United States", which we thought made sense for a variety of reasons, not the least of which that it is their host country.

The students created skits based on certain areas of the U.S. For example, the students who chose Orlando wrote a skit in which Mickey and Minnie from California's Disneyland came to visit Florida. The students who chose Hawaii had a honeymooning couple being taken on a tour of the island by a guide. Overall, they were very creative and gave great performances as well as lots of information on their destination of choice.

Before the event, to publicize, I passed out airline tickets with the date and time of the event. We also had passports available for all students who attended - those who watched received one stamp and those who presented received three. A full passport will get them prized (gift cards and the like).

After the event, quite a few students said that they would like to present about their home country with their friends, so I am hoping this is an idea that moves forward of its own accord. If not, I will plan another event with my drama class next session and carry it forward that way. It may take awhile to get this to become an integral part of the SALC and the ELI, but I think it could definitely happen.

Open House a Success - More Teachers Wanted!

The open house on Friday was a success. Many faculty and staff from all over University of Delaware came to see our new facilities.

I had also sent out an email to ELI faculty members to see if they would be interested in coming into the SALC to check out the language learning software to see what it does so that they could better be able to send their students in for help on a specific software in the lab.

We had several teachers come in to preview the software, but not nearly as many as I had hoped. In an ideal world, wouldn't everyone just be dying to know what resources we have available?

We're finally set up!

It has been a long few months operating out of boxes ever since our move to the new building. It is thrilling to actually have all of our books on shelves where they are supposed to be! I am excited for the students to actually have access to all of the great materials that have been hiding in cardboard over the last few months.

Hooray for bookshelves!

In another note, my students will begin working this week on the pilot Word Plaza presentation. We will be showing students interesting points about the United States. Hopefully this will inspire students to make their own presentations about their home countries or to travel to some of the locations in the U.S. that we outline for them.

Upcoming Events and Workshops

I'm hoping that a series of upcoming events and workshops will go some way in helping the lab be seen as a place for learning English and less like a place for printing.

Coming up in the next few weeks, we have a series of workshops on study skills, a Karaoke club, a book club, and a game club scheduled. I will be interested to see the results of these workshops and clubs.

The book club has already met twice and I anticipate that this week will be well attended. We are reading a short, leveled reader together and supplementing with some short stories as the novel is by Oscar Wilde. Luckily he has a wealth of shorter reading material for some of our students.

The first study skills workshop was well attended, but we were not exactly ready for it. This second one should prove to be better organized, as we are asking students to bring their own notes for reflection and input.

Initial Survey Results

Well, I created the survey and ran the initial go-through with 25 responses. Essentially as I suspected, students are primarily coming to the lab to print, email, and go on Facebook.

Now I face the challenge of figuring out how to make the lab a place where learning English is the focus. This session, we are aiming to get more students in orientation and I have created an orientation video and placed it on the website. I am hoping that disseminating the information about what is available in a wider forum will reduce some of these issues.

Now....what else can I do to ensure that students are using the SALC the way it was meant to be used, and not just as a computer lab?? Something to consider.

Learner Surveys?

In keeping with the idea of self access and learning how to learn, I believe the first step toward making this a reality in the ELI SALC will be to create a student survey. I need to understand several things:

1) How are students currently using the lab?
2) What software and equipment are they already aware of and using?
3) What programs and/or software would they like to have available in the lab?
4) How do they learn and are they aware of differences in learning styles?
5) Open questions about how the lab could be improved

I would like to make this survey primarily available online and linked from the SALC homepage, but I'm afraid students will breeze right by it as they tend to open the internet and go straight to Facebook or email. I'm considering making it available in both paper and electronic form.

What is Self Access Learning?

When I first began working at the Alison SALC in early January of 2010, I wasn't even sure what SALC stood for. I thought it meant Student Access Learning Center - after all, students were coming there to use the lab, right?

After a few corrections, I managed to remember that the S in SALC stands for Self. That means students are supposed to use the tools in the lab to learn on their own. But how does a student learn on their own if they aren't sure what they need to study or where their weak points are? Don't they need a teacher to tell them what to do? Shouldn't there be grades or attendance involved? What's the motivation?

These are hard questions to answer, but ones that I hope to explore and address through the use of this blog. We'll look at programs that are available in the lab, talk to students who have used the programs, and see what a learner needs in order to be able to really assess what they need to learn.