Video about the Project

I have created a video about my project " The History of Oman" by using movie maker. Movie maker is a very nice software to create a short movie and edit it. I hope that you will enjoy watching my movie.

http://media.iearn.org/v/Activities/onlinecoursepearl/xoviex0001.wmv.html?g2_navId=x99f67024

Listening Difficulties my students face in Grade 10

The Findings of my action research:

After I analyzed the data qualitatively, I came to know that the difficulties my students face varies according to their level. The excellent student face problems in tape recording quality, because sometimes the voice is not clear. His strategy in eliciting general and specific information is to concentrate on the information and try to understand the whole conversation. Another student who represents good students in my class faces difficulties in speed of the tape, because he did not practice listening as much as possible. Therefore, he prefers my reading than the tape. His strategy in eliciting the information from the tape depends on his pre- listening step. He reads the questions very carefully and guesses the answers at first and then focus on the tape. While the average level student faces difficulties in guessing the meaning of new vocabulary from the context and pronunciation. He did not use any kind of strategy to elicit the information from the tape. Finally the weak student, who convinced himself that English Language is so difficult ant there is no way to him to learn it, can not follow up the listening because of his poor English. The reasons behind the difficulties my student in grade ten face in listening tasks are the following:
- Students try to understand every single word in the text.
- Students do not know the meaning of the key words in the context.
- Students do not recognize the word they know because of the way it was pronounced like “red” and “led”.
- Student can not understand the speech without having images. Therefore, they prefer listening to the teacher instead of tape because there is a kind of physical interaction such as body language and facial expression.
- Students can not understand the native speaker because he speaks too fast. Therefore, they prefer teacher’s reading because he usually speaks very slow and clearly.
- Weak students convince themselves that listening to English language is very difficult, which create a mental block. Therefore, it is very important to the teacher to return their confidence back, before building us their skills (Alex, 2008).

The History of Oman

Oman is the most beautiful country in the Arabia. It has a histoy of more than three thousand years. There are many forts and old buildings in Oman. Water irrigation system in Oman "falajes" is very special. My students in Iearn project chose to write about the histoy of Oman. We did a great job so far in collecting pictures and information about all aspect of life in Oman in the past and now.

Abdulmanan Al-Balushi

My name is Abdulmanan Al-Balushi. I am an English Language teacher. I have been teaching English and Arabic language for more than six year. I am right now working with my students in a new project called " The History of Oman". We will complete this project by next week.