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Course design

Language teaching online is still an area in its infancy. There are so many ways of creating content, delivering content and teaching that it can be quite overwhelming. Despite having over ten years of experience of languages and language teaching I often feel like I'm starting afresh. The difference is that whereas you can find sources with detailed instructions how to behave in a physical class room, the resources are very scarce for beginning online language teachers.

I did a few Google searches for "online language course design", "internet language syllabus design" and similar concepts, and the results are very meagre. I have found that there are many ideas what platforms to use, such as Moodle, Second Life, Facebook, and so on, but virtually no suggestions how to actually go about it.

Spanish pronunciation of English

In Spanish, a word cannot start with the consonant combinations /sk/, /sp/, or /st/.

Examples:

/sk/

English	school skeleton
Italian	scuola scheletro
Spanish	escuela esqueleto

All of the above words come from the Latin 'schola' and Greek 'skeleton'. As you can see, Spanish is the only language that inserts an 'e'. Observe that the sound combination /sk/ can be spelt in two ways in Spanish: sc + a/o/u or squ + e/i

/sp/

English	Spain
Italian	Spagna
Spanish	España

/st/

English	student
Italian	studente
Spanish	estudiante

This makes Spanish speakers pronounce an 'e' sound in English words, as if they were spelt:

eschool

eskeleton

Espain

estudent

This is not a serious issue, but can sometimes lead to non-Spanish speakers not understanding, so it is worth keeping in mind.