Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching 3rd edition (Teaching Techniques in English as a Second Language)

• Electronic Presentations

            Microsoft’s PowerPoint  is  a   tool    that    allows  presenters  to  use templates   with    a

variety of formats to create slides for presentations. They can be multimedia, using
text, images, sound, animation, and video. The slides are presented by a computer
hooked up to an LCD projector. PowerPoint is being used by increasing numbers of
teachers and students for in-class presentations.

• Electronic Text Corpora

            Electronic  text    corpora are collections of  language    texts,  most    often   written,    but

sometimes spoken texts in transcript form. The texts have been digitized and are
therefore computer-searchable. By entering a word or a phrase into a website, a
concordance, a list with the target item as it is used in limited contexts, is produced.
Knowing the distribution and frequency of linguistic forms can be very helpful to
language learners. Some of the corpora are free to use, and others you must pay for.
Corpora for specific purposes or professions are also available.

            Corpus  analysis,   a   form    of  linguistic  research,   provides    data    on  the real-world  uses

of words and collocations across various genres, registers, and language varieties.
Pedagogically, it can be used to support data-driven learning, that is, language
study where learners analyze language features based on corpus evidence. Certain
corpus linguists have based language teaching materials mostly or entirely on their
corpus findings (Sinclair 2004; McCarthy 1998; Biber et al. 1998). Other
methodologists advise that teaching materials should not be corpus-driven, but
rather corpus-informed.

• Cell Phone-based Applications: Text Messaging and Twitter

            With    the rapid   expansion   of  the use of  cell    or  mobile  phones  throughout  the world,

language learners have found new ways of learning. Users of text messaging and
Twitter have developed their own form of language. Twitter is an instant messaging
system that lets people send brief (no more than 140 characters) text messages to a
set of interested people on any activity or event in which they are participating or
opinion they wish to offer. The language used is typically informal, where the
written language ‘sounds’ more like spoken language. For example, ‘R U OK?’
(Are you OK?) is a commonly used expression.

• Podcasts

            Podcasts    are digital audio   and visual  recordings  that    can be  created and downloaded

(moved from the Internet to an individual computer). You can watch and share such
recordings on YouTube. Most YouTube recordings are available to anyone who has