Universidad Autnoma de Tamaulipas Faculty name: Unidad Acadmica Multidisciplinaria de Ciencias, Educacin y Humanidades (UAMCEH) BA programme: Applied Linguistics

Subject: Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) Professors name: Natzyelly Kesne Gonzalez Garca Students name: Carlos Alberto Sifuentes Rodrguez Semester: 4th Name of the project: CALLs Final Project Date: April 2013

I. Background The learners are first graders in a public elementary school. These children are about five or six years old. This group is integrated by twelve students. In this class, there are only three girls and nine boys. So far, these students have being taught English in the last year of kindergarten. The setting is an elementary public school placed in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. This school is named Jos Martinez y Martinez and is located near of the downtown of the city. This school has classes in the morning and in the afternoon, and the groups in which a tool will be implemented belong to the afternoon shift. Since it is a public school, the PNIEB (Programa Naciona de Ingls en Educacin Bsica) is the institution who is in charge of English classes. It is remarkable to say that these students have previously study English one year in kindergarten; therefore they are acquainted with the existence of the English language. This English program is divided into four cycles: cycle 1, including kindergarten, first and second grade; cycle two, including third and fourth grade; cycle three, including fifth and sixth grade; and cycle 4, including secondary school. According to the PNIEB curriculum, this level belongs to the cycle 1 in which the purpose is to familiarize students with the English language, so the Common European Framework of References for Languages does not play a role at this level because of the simplicity of the programs content. The PNIEBs syllabus outlines the social practices of the language, which are objectives that students must reach with the help of teachers. These social practices belong to one of the three environments that are cited in the PNIEB syllabus: familiar

and community, literary and ludic, and academic and educational. The following are some the objectives encompassed in the course: Understand and respond to greetings, farewell, and courtesy

expressions. Understand and follow instructions to carry out every day home

activities. Give and receive information about ones own and others likes,

preferences, and personal data. Describe and interpret information about people in the community and

their activities. Understand rhymes and stories in verse. Compare words in a childrens story. Understand stories and narratives and associate them with personal

experiences. Read illustrated sets of instructions in order to assemble an object. Formulate questions to obtain information about a topic of nature. Interpret basic information about a geography topic based on a

graphical resource. Since today students are digital natives, that is to say that they were born in an era in which technology such as websites and software, is really important for their cognitive processes, it is needed to use electronic materials. Unfortunately, the classroom where the English class is taught do not have computers or any other

technological devices, therefore, the students are involved in a traditional way of learning. II. Issue or problem that started your project The problem addressed in this project is that students have demonstrated some trouble when they want to remember some lexical items that they have just seen. I consider that this fact is really important since this vocabulary is the basis of tasks when, for example, they are exchanging information such as what they like or what they do not like, which is an objective outlined previously. III. Initial solution and expected response As a result, a task based on learning or reviewing vocabulary was designed for students. This task consisted of the use of two web pages when some games could be created for language classes. The web pages were the following: 1. 2. www.hangman.no www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/

The first web page is focus on creating hangman games. Hence, I created a hangman game particularly for being played in class using vocabulary from the unit 4 part A from the book Think in English 1. In the second web p age, there was created a word search containing the same vocabulary as the hangman. The words used in these games were: boy, girl, mitt, bat, baseball, puzzle, pizza, spaghetti, park, cat, dog, and bike. I decided to do it on April 9th. Evidently, since students classroom do not have computers, I decided to take them to the computer lab of their school.

Although, the students have being working with word games, for instance: word search, scramble words, crossword, etc, I believe that this activity will be more encouraging for them because they are not use to work on computers , particularly for English classes. I think that the task will get a positive response from students due to the fact that they will be interacting with the computer with is really appalling to them. IV. Response and reflection Fortunately, during the activity the students show a positive attitude towards it in general. Most students felt really well while working in the computer lab due to it was something that they were not used to do, nor even in other subjects. They really like to use this two websites, particularly, the one in which they could play hangman. At first, it was not as easy as I thought to give them orders of how they were going to work because there was no a projector in the lab but at the end they got what I wanted them to do. However, there were some students that needed help for carrying out the activity because they did not know how to handle a computer. I consider this activity as the first step so that students can be more involved in technology while learning English. However, I think that it can be improved by looking for other web pages. Perhaps, it could have been better that students could interact more with the vocabulary items such as associating words and pictures or even hearing the pronunciation of the vocabulary. V. Changes made or changes planned Next time, I would use other resources to complement what students are doing. For example, I could add a video mentioning all the vocabulary items before the word games. In addition, I would only use one game instead of two because the amount of

time of the lesson is short and it is almost impossible to watch a video and play two games. It is remarkable to say that the video must be created since it is really difficult to find a video on Internet that can be suitable for the objectives. I believe that with the use of a video as a review of what they have been learning would be honestly useful since this will allow students to engage better with the topic we would cover during the lesson. VI. Conclusion In conclusion, I can say that this project help to understand better how we as teachers must design our lesson endorse by technology because todays children are more acquainted with it. This will allow us to improve the way children learn languages. I believe that the lack of technological devices inside the classroom is a disadvantage; however, we have to find resources that we can use in the schools computer lab or via internet. VII. Resources

The web pages used for creating material for the project were: www.hangman.no www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/

Appendix The following figures belong to the web pages that were used during the activity.

Figure 1. www.hangman.no

Figure 2. List of words in www.hangman.no

Figure 3. Playing hangman

Figure 4. Playing word scramble in www.proprofs.com/games/word-games/