Welcome to the tutor's page!
On this page, you will find more information about the website, the activities, as well as a guide which details the objectives and proceedings of each activity, as well as corrections.
It offers learning activities in German, Spanish, French and Italian. The main aim of the website is to help students currently in their second year of undergraduate study prepare for their third year abroad, which they will spend either studying at a university (Erasmus programme) or teaching English in a school (British Council Assistantship)
The activities offered on the website are in line with the B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). They can be adapted to suit classes of various sizes (from 3 to 16 students).
The website offers various blended-learning resources and activities. This means that some activities will be carried out in class, while others will be carried out on a distance-learning basis. The distance-learning activities aim to complement the four weekly contact hours which students follow. It has been designed to be used over a period of eight weeks during the second teaching block.
In-class activities will ideally take place in a language lab or computer room where students have access to the website. The main aim is to introduce students to a learning tool, which has been specifically tailored to students at the University and their needs. The site contains a variety of activities focused on the year abroad, a theme students can easily identify to. The distance-learning activities are set and monitored by the language tutor. The students can contact their tutor via email or via the forum. The aim of these activities is primarily to increase exposure to the language but also to get students to use a variety of online tools (website, quizzes, GoogleDocs, forum and emails), which will help them develop various IT skills and their capacity to work independently.
Various learning activities have been created. These include listening, reading, writing and speaking activities. Vocabulary acquisition and intercultural awareness also have a prominent role. The ways students carry out activities also vary throughout. They will indeed work individually, in pairs or in small groups. Teamwork and collaboration are important. Students are encouraged to work together and communicate in the target language when carrying out tasks, whether in person, via email or via other online communication tools. They are also encouraged to work on online collaboration and editing tools like GoogleDocs.
The final task (section 6) consists in recording a conversational video in the target language and with native speakers, more precisely Erasmus students currently studying at the University of Portsmouth. This task will be assessed summatively, as part of the students’ assessment.
In order to access the section corresponding to the language they want to focus on, users are invited to click on the language in the bar menu. Each language section is organised around six main sections, or steps. Each step can be accessed via the dropdown menu which appears when hovering the mouse over the language button
Two buttons also appear on each page. The first button is purple and is situated at the top of each page, underneath the title of each step. It allows users to go back to their language home page. The second button is situated at the bottom of each page and is blue. It allows users to go to the next page once a step has been completed.
At the top of each page, users can also find a list of the activities of each step. In order to distinguish in-class activities from distance-learning (DL) activities, the titles have been colour-coded. In-class activities have a purple title while distance-learning activities have a blue title.
Information about the objectives and how activities can be carried out is given in the tutor's guide.
The forum is also easily accessible from the bar menu.
Finally, users will also find a “resources” page in the dropdown menus. This page offers users and students links to online linguistic resources (conjugation tables and dictionaries), as well as a tutorial on how to use Google Docs.
- The website
It offers learning activities in German, Spanish, French and Italian. The main aim of the website is to help students currently in their second year of undergraduate study prepare for their third year abroad, which they will spend either studying at a university (Erasmus programme) or teaching English in a school (British Council Assistantship)
The activities offered on the website are in line with the B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). They can be adapted to suit classes of various sizes (from 3 to 16 students).
The website offers various blended-learning resources and activities. This means that some activities will be carried out in class, while others will be carried out on a distance-learning basis. The distance-learning activities aim to complement the four weekly contact hours which students follow. It has been designed to be used over a period of eight weeks during the second teaching block.
In-class activities will ideally take place in a language lab or computer room where students have access to the website. The main aim is to introduce students to a learning tool, which has been specifically tailored to students at the University and their needs. The site contains a variety of activities focused on the year abroad, a theme students can easily identify to. The distance-learning activities are set and monitored by the language tutor. The students can contact their tutor via email or via the forum. The aim of these activities is primarily to increase exposure to the language but also to get students to use a variety of online tools (website, quizzes, GoogleDocs, forum and emails), which will help them develop various IT skills and their capacity to work independently.
Various learning activities have been created. These include listening, reading, writing and speaking activities. Vocabulary acquisition and intercultural awareness also have a prominent role. The ways students carry out activities also vary throughout. They will indeed work individually, in pairs or in small groups. Teamwork and collaboration are important. Students are encouraged to work together and communicate in the target language when carrying out tasks, whether in person, via email or via other online communication tools. They are also encouraged to work on online collaboration and editing tools like GoogleDocs.
The final task (section 6) consists in recording a conversational video in the target language and with native speakers, more precisely Erasmus students currently studying at the University of Portsmouth. This task will be assessed summatively, as part of the students’ assessment.
- How this website works
In order to access the section corresponding to the language they want to focus on, users are invited to click on the language in the bar menu. Each language section is organised around six main sections, or steps. Each step can be accessed via the dropdown menu which appears when hovering the mouse over the language button
Two buttons also appear on each page. The first button is purple and is situated at the top of each page, underneath the title of each step. It allows users to go back to their language home page. The second button is situated at the bottom of each page and is blue. It allows users to go to the next page once a step has been completed.
At the top of each page, users can also find a list of the activities of each step. In order to distinguish in-class activities from distance-learning (DL) activities, the titles have been colour-coded. In-class activities have a purple title while distance-learning activities have a blue title.
Information about the objectives and how activities can be carried out is given in the tutor's guide.
The forum is also easily accessible from the bar menu.
Finally, users will also find a “resources” page in the dropdown menus. This page offers users and students links to online linguistic resources (conjugation tables and dictionaries), as well as a tutorial on how to use Google Docs.
- The tutor's guide