LINC 4 Participants Have Their Say!!

Today, our LINC 4 classmates had a fruitful discussion on what works for the class and what could be improved. While I mess up on the formatting of this post, they came up with the following suggestions, with my comments following:

1. More interesting field trips. Okay, okay, less of those scary-to-boring organ concerts. Suggested destinations included the farm, museum, and art gallery. Budget's a perennial constraint, but maybe we could have a little ski lesson again, like last season's.
2. More time for pronunciation. Hmm, I'm glad for no objection to our focus on pronunciation. Yes, let's work harder on this. Among the tools I hope to use is David Alan Stern's audiovisual materials from the library.
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5.  More time for dialogue and listening with native speakers. That's a great suggestion! Besides my friends John and Tim Winter, I'll see who else I could get for conversation. In terms of listening, it might be good to revive the old TOEFL listening test or radio listening activity.
6. More time for writing practice. Suggestion was to make it compulsory and not mixed with a lot of other activities on the computer. Sounds good! We'll have to look at the new classroom arrangements at 200 Consumers Rd and see how to put this into practice. In answer to a specific question, yes, we do have a writing textbook we could use.
   
7. More newspaper reading. What a good suggestion! I've been feeling a bit guilty of late about all our Sun newspapers--there's a lot of good stuff in there and so little time to dig in.
   
   
8. More convenient computer usage. We've been promised a row of computers in our new classroom. But how we'll manage the classroom's various facilities will be our next challenge. The good news is that at least we'll have our own PCs and printer, yay! I'm thinking of creating various self-directed learning stations, but we'll have to see the actual classroom arrangements.

So, I would like to thank you all for your suggestions and look forward to making your learning experience the best one possible. The challenges are there--time, budget, discipline, distractions galore--but by the grace of God, let's do our best with what He's given us!