The Cooking Space

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog! My name is Ariadna Santiago and I have created a blog related to the world of cooking. I have designed a reading activity since I want my students to improve this skill. The learning objective I want them to achieve is to be able to do a reading in an authentic way. By authentic I mean read a text in the same way they would do it in their L1; not paying attention to word by word but to the whole context of the text. In order to make the reading the most authentic as possible, I designed some activities that might resemble the way in which we read in our life. Another objective I want students to practice is to use authentic techniques such as skimming and scanning when reading.

To start with, the first activity students will have to do is watching a short video. This is a way to awake students’ curiosity. This exercise needs to be done individually. The next activity can be done in small groups, which it is related to the previous video. Students will have to guess what the connection between the video and the poster is; each group should come to a common agreement. Once they have a common idea, they will move on to the following activity which consists on watching the final part of the video presented before. Each group will check if their guesses are correct or not. These exercises are included in the pre-task section. Then, students will move on to the task itself. It consists of an authentic reading about the Spanish Omelette. They will have to read it twice. The teacher should advice them that they should read it carefully, paying attention to what they are reading because they will have to do some exercises related to this reading and they should not have the reading with them. Once they are done with the reading, they will do the post-task exercises. The first one consists of doing a crossword with words that appear in the reading. The objective of this activity is to activate students’ memory. The following activity is a reading comprehension exercise. Students will not only have to look for the correct answer but going beyond; they will also have to scan and skim information in the same way we do in our L1. In other words, they will have to do an authentic activity. Finally, as Ferran Adrià is presented in the reading, students will have to do a final oral presentation of him. An example on how students will have to create it is provided, but instead of being about Ferran Adrià it is about Jamie Oliver. This final project can be done in groups of 4-5 people.

To create the different activities I have used several technological tools. Firstly, I decided to create a blog where I could embed all the activities. For exercise 1 and 2, I used “Dvolver” since I wanted to create an appealing atmosphere before doing the reading. I took advantage of this app since it allows the creation of short videos in which you can add text and music. I thought it was an attractive way to introduce the reading. For activity 2, I used the applicaton "Glogster" in order to make visual the content of the reading. In other words, to make visual what the reading is about.For the task itself I used “Google Doc”. To create the quiz and the reading comprehension activities, I used the Hot Potatoes app. Finally, in order to create a model for the oral presentation, I used a “Prezzi”.

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