[Icvv] Introduction and request for a partner class!!

["Julia Medina"]

Hello ICVV:

 

Greetings from Shanghai, China!  My name is Julia Medina and I am currently teaching EFL at one of the cities largest universities.  I teach freshman and sophomore level classes.  My students are not English majors, the course they have enrolled in is required of them for necessary foreign language credit.  Their level of knowledge varies from student to student.  While they may have some knowledge of grammatical structure very few of my students have had opportunities to communicate using their English skills.  Due to the size of each of my classes and the fact that I am new to the International Classroom Virtual Visit Project, I think it would be best if only my two sophomore students participated in the project this year.  Each class is fairly large and I think they will all be very excited about this opportunity. 

 

I have included the project in my syllabus and each student will be required to participate as it will make a significant impact on his or her grade.  The students here spend much of their free time online and sending text messages to each other.  It is very inexpensive to use mobile phone internet access here (Depending on the phone, they may or may not be able to download entire web pages.  SMS messaging costs about 1 US penny per message regardless of where in the world it is sent to.) University students in China are very interested in learning about the experiences and lives of other university students around the world.  If possible, I would like to be matched with other university/college ESL students in the states.  I believe this will provide them with significant motivation to participate as much as possible.  If there are no university ESL classes available in the US  I am also open to partnering with college or university classes in other countries.  If that is an impossibility any ESL/EFL students in their age range would be fine.

 

Will it be possible to have each of my 2 second year classes matched up with another class?  I have a large number of students in each class and if I had 2 separate virtual visit classrooms I think they would be more likely to each find a counterpart to correspond with and it will be much easier on our partner class to respond to the messages sent.  Each class meets on different days and times and I think it would be best if the 2 classes had different discussion topics to promote individual work and keep plagiarism to a minimum.

 

I am looking forward to participating in this year's project.  I am so excited to be able to provide my students with this experience. 

 

Thanks again for the invitation!

 

Very Sincerely,

Julia Medina

 

 

 

_______________________________________________
Icvv mailing list: Icvv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/icvv
LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
http://literacytent.org