This week will get started with the process of moderation. The goals for this week are to work on skills at making people communicate to the best of their ability. A lot of the articles from the Introductions thread talk about how to form questions and elicit discussion from students. The main idea is that the more opportunities students have to discuss ideas, the more practice they'll have with using the language. The more you can encourage them to use more complicated structures, the better, so it's good to ask questions that force students to respond with reasons for things (e.g., not just "Do you like President Klaus?", but asking them to give reasons).

The first task is to look at the article From Theory to Practice. We are only interested in the first two sections I and II - up through A Review of Moderating Functions. This should help you think more about what the role of a moderator is. 

Your next task is to try to promote discussion in the discussion forums in Online English. You are all moderators of the discussion forums for our middle groups of students (B1 and B2 levels on the CEFR). They are divided into groups of at most 35 students, and the forums you are interested in are called ONLINE_A/B+number Discussion For Points (see Group Assignments below to find out which group you are responsible for).

You should begin by reading what people have already written (e.g., their introductions) and trying to encourage them to write more about that topic. You do not have to read everything, just pick some messages that you find interesting and try to respond to people who no one has responded to yet (you can try to get them to talk about themselves, a topic everyone should be familiar with). Your posts there can earn you two points.

Your next  task is to start thinking about a topic that you think would be interesting for discussion. You should use the forum Topic Ideas to start thinking about what topics might be good and discussing them with your classmates here. If you post your initial ideas by Friday at noon, you can earn a point. On Saturday, you should post your topic in a discussion forum with introductory questions. The idea of the topic is what that people might like to have a conversation about and where there could be differences of opinion that they could express. The posting of a topic and responding to people who discuss it is worth a point.

There is also a forum this week for reflections. There you should (if you are not planning on writing a paper at the end of the semester) reflect on what you think makes for good topics and questions. Think about the articles from our Introductions thread and how you would apply them in an English Language class. This way you can gain 2 points for an initial post and further two possible points for responses to others.