Delicious call

What can I say?

Listening/ speaking skills are a serious problem for my students and for students in general, I think.
It was great to find out so much about developing those skills (thanks Robert, those readings were excellent) and to discouver such good ideas to put that into practice. Until last year I didn't do anything special to develop those skills but when I met a class with students that could write well and understand written texts well but were extremely weak at speaking and listening, I decided I had to do something. So, I established that every wednesday we would have at least 15 minutes of pure speaking activities and I "made up" or adapted some activities to make them talk. The hardest part is preventing them from cheating (having a look at their colleagues "secret" cards or speaking Portuguese) but when they follow the rules, the outcome is great. They get more confident and enjoy speaking. Now I guess I'll have to work pronunciation with them. It won't be easy (their first question is always "does that come in the test?") and we are going to have very few lessons as they finnish in the first week in june but maybe I can work with another class, especially 7th form as they are at a lower level, so it will be easier to "mould" them.
As for delicious, I've already written about it on nicenet. It would be an answer to my prayers if I prayed!!! Over the years I tried to find a way to do what delicious does so well: save my favoutire links so that I could use them later. And it does more as we can have a look at other people's bookmarks and get even more links. It was a wonderful find.