Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching: Engaging online language learning activities using the Moodle platform

I just googled "Moodle" and got over 18 million hits. Moodle is one of the fastest growing free, open source VLEs (Virtual Learning Environment) around at the moment. It is also commonly referred to as an LMS (Learning Management System) or a CMS (Course Management System). There are already thousands of registered Moodle sites, as you can see on the Moodle site: http://moodle.org/stats/.

Just in case some of those terms are new to you:

Here are some of the things that make Moodle particularly attractive to all teachers:

There are some myths that Moodle is difficult, unsupported, and will eventually charge users, but these are all calmly deflated at http://docs.moodle.org/en/ Top_10_Moodle_Myths.

Most of this book is a recipe book, a "how-to" book. In it, I'll take activities that you'd find in a typical language-teaching syllabus and show how you can produce these on Moodle. I'll provide step-by-step instructions for you to copy examples and then adapt them according to your own teaching situation. Most of the activities are ordered so that each chapter starts with easier activities. The ease of setup for each activity is indicated by a star system. Now and then you'll be referred to other chapters where an example already exists.

The non-recipe chapters are guides for setting up Moodle (Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle), using Moodle for assessment (Chapter 9, Assessment), making your Moodle site look good (Chapter 11, Formatting and Enhancing Your Moodle Materials), and helping prepare students to use Moodle (Chapter 12, Preparing Your Students to Use Moodle).

I'm making a few assumptions:

In case you're not familiar with these concepts, constructivism is based on the idea that individuals learn new things (construct knowledge) through experience by comparing new things to what they already know. They do this by solving realistic problems, often in collaboration with other people. Moodle was built on this approach, and many of the core activities lend themselves well to this type of learning. Communicative language teaching tries to help learners become competent language users in real contexts. There's more about this later in this chapter.

One of the advantages of a recipe-book approach is that all sorts of people connected to language teaching will find it useful. If you are a teacher, you can dip into it to find a quick solution for an activity you want to create. If you are a course planner, you can review the whole book to build up your own language course. These are some of the people I had in mind when writing:

An important point here is that there's no single way of using Moodle for language teaching. I've come across teachers who use it mainly as a repository of materials and find the indexing facilities of the Database module useful for that. Module, by the way, is Moodle's word for an activity. Other teachers use it to create supplementary quizzes for the work they do in class. They find the gradebook, which provides an overview of all their students' marks, useful. Other teachers make Moodle the base of their course, even though they have face-to-face sessions, because Moodle is a neat way of keeping important course elements in one place and tracking learner use and progress. It's also a good way of preparing for classes and reflecting on them afterwards. Finally, Moodle can be used as a totally online course with no face-to-face meeting at all.

You might find I'm stating the obvious sometimes, but most hints are included because there were minor hiccoughs when teachers trialed the materials. On the other hand, some readers might feel phased by mention of formats they've never heard of, such as XML or WAV. If that's the case, don't worry! These are usually extra bits of information that some teachers will find useful to make their lives easier or improve the Moodle activities. Not understanding them — or not wanting to understand them — won't stop you from creating the activities.

So what's the difference between this book and any other book on Moodle? There's an increasingly large number of books about Moodle on the market. General introductions to Moodle, such as "Moodle Teaching Techniques", William Rice, Packt Publishing and "Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development", William Rice, Packt Publishing, go through key Moodle modules methodically and then offer examples. This book takes the opposite approach: it starts with examples based on what you need for your language teaching and shows which bits of Moodle you need to make them. As such, it isn't a comprehensive guide to Moodle, but it aims to provide relevant information for language teachers. There is no one way to organize a language course. It depends on the level and age of students, the language learning goals, and learning style preferences, amongst other things. But most language courses include a focus on the skills of speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and also offer support for vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. This book has taken those areas as its starting point.

Moodle's popularity has led to the development of hundreds of add-on modules. The list is available at http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009. A useful service a book like this can offer is recommending which add-on modules are worth getting. For example, a VLE for language learning without a speak and record facility would be incomplete. I've chosen a simple sound recorder called NanoGong. Why? Because it is supported for Moodle 1.9; it's very easy to install and works well on a variety of browsers. You can also set up Moodle activities without NanoGong, simply by recording directly onto the computer, but you'd lose the advantage of being able to manage your recordings inside Moodle. There's a useful discussion of available recorders at http://metamedia.typepad.com/metamedia/listen-up-audio-in-moodle.html.

As well as providing an overview of core Moodle modules, Chapter 2, Getting Started with Moodle will take you through all the add-on modules you'll need for this book. The reasons for choosing them are the same in each case:

It is important to remember that add-on modules may not work with future updates of Moodle, but I've chosen ones which look likely to receive continued support. All the examples in this book work with Moodle 1.9.5.

Sometimes I've recommended an alternative to the core modules, simply because they are better for language teaching. For example, Moodle has core Blog and Wiki modules, but they don't work with NanoGong, the recording tool, whereas the Open University versions named OUblog and OUwiki do work.

The book is firmly rooted in a communicative approach to language learning. It therefore tries to make the student the center of the learning experience wherever possible. It looks at ways of encouraging interaction, making materials engaging and effective, and of encouraging reflection and self-improvement on the part of the language learner and the teacher.

A PDF by Jack Richards (http://tinyurl.com/cltarticle) gives a good overview of the status quo of various approaches to communicative language teaching.

In the article "Understanding and Implementing the Clt (Communicative Language Teaching) Paradigm", George M. Jacobs and Thomas S. C. Farrell, RELC Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, 5-30 (2003), the authors highlight some of the key features of CLT. As the following table shows, Moodle accommodates these features well.

Age and level of students

Moodle can work for learners of all ages. The examples in this book show how young learners, adolescents, and adults can use Moodle. Clearly, you will need to adapt the example activities for your particular students. Make sure they have the content and tasks that they are likely to enjoy and find useful.

If you are creating tasks for pre-adolescents, you might find it useful to use this book in conjunction with Moodle 1.9 for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds: Beginner's Guide, Mary Cooch, Packt Publishing, which offers some useful guidelines on things to look out for with this age group.

It is important when working with learners of all ages that you have:

• Learning pathways

• Instructions

• Materials

• Duration of activities

• Cognitive complexity of tasks

As for language level, it's possible to create simple low-level tasks, or quite difficult ones.

You'll need to consider whether the whole site is written in the target language. This is probably only appropriate for higher level learners. It may be more effective for lower level learners if you frame the activities in a language they understand better.

You can include the option for learners to change the language for the headings and help files, though help files are not available in all languages. You may need to check with your Moodle administrator that the appropriate language pack is installed. By clicking on the language selector in the top right-hand corner of the screen, users can change to the language of their choice. Contact your Moodle administrator if the languages you want are not there.

Add-on modules are unlikely to have help files and instructions for all languages. If you find that help files are not available in a language you need, you could write to the authors via the moodle.org website, or write them yourself. One of the great things about this open source software is that you can make your own contributions to it. Your Moodle administrator should be able to help you install your new files.

You can also edit existing help files by going to Site Administration | Language | Language editing.