It is not easy to find the right information from the sea of the information. It is often overwhelming. I tend to believe the information when the authors are famous in the field or issues. Or when the writing has evidences to support the information, it seems reliable.
To teach searching skills to second language learners seems very important. Searching for information requires students to have several strategies. It requires meta cognitive skills as well as linguistic skills. They have to know the right key words and its synonyms in L2. While native speakers can easily think of several words for what they are looking for, second language learners might not be so lucky to find the right words all the time. In this sense, using blogs and engaging students in effective search strategies seem very helpful for them.RSS feeds are relatively new concepts to me. I started to subscribe to the recent Journals issues in the field of the language teaching. I am excited to keep up with the recent works in my field by subscribing to the journals. As I learn more about the RSS feeds and explore it, I will be able to find better sources to using feeds.
2 comments:
You make a good point that all teachers need to be reminded of: that "ESL" or "ELL" or "NNS" students will not easily come up with synonyms in English to use as search keywords for Google or for any other database. Teachers need to remember this and model brainstorming search terms in class--and even doing some class brainstorming.
Thank you for reminding me about the ERIC database. I had forgotten about it, being out of college for so long. But I'm not sure I have easy access to it, if I'm not a student here at the U of MN.
I too am also new to RSS feeds. I've subscribed to blogs so far, but I've not had time yet to subscribe to journals and other things. You'll have to show me how to do that!
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