English Speaking Club: Working plan for the 2014-2015 academic year

The work of the English speaking club for the 2014-2015 academic year will be done in two directions: oral discussions (2 hours per week) and translational work (2 hours per week)

The following topics are suggested for oral discussions:

• I am building my future
• Mass media means in Armenia
• The advantages and disadvantages of social nets
• Generation gap
• The harful affects of TV serials 
• What do I read?
• Plagiarism 
• Armenian stereotypes
• Nonstop education

During the academic year the learners are free to suggest topics they are concerned about. The topics for discussion are declared before club meetings so that the learners might be able to prepare for them to express themselves better with sufficient arguments. After the oral discussions the learners are suggested that they write down their points of views: The written points of views are published in the learners' blogs. The best ones are published on the English page of mskh.am.

The reception of the English speaking guests of the Educomplex, those of the Educomplex director and separate schools and voluntary translational and interpretational work, organization of interviews with them is considered very good opportunities for practicing English. 

This year the translational project work will also enrich the English page of the mskh.am which is a considerable contribution in the implementation of the project "Multilingual mskh.am".  

The educational aim of the project: The learners acquire skills in translating different types of texts from Armenian into English.

The practical aim of the project: The English page of the Educomplex website mskh.am is refreshed daily.   

Some preparatory work for the project implementation:

The learners are taught the right ways of using the following online dictionaries:

• "Google" Translator
• ISMA online translator
• ABBYY Lingvo-online dictionaries
• nayiri dictionaries

Work process organization

• Before choosing which texts to translate there will be oral discussions of the most interesting articles which have been published on the first page of mskh.am for the last three days. So there will be learner-learner, learner-teacher dialogues, exchanging of opinions.After these discussions the learners will be given 5-10 minutes so that they can write comments on these chosen articles. In this way the the author-reader feedback will be activated.
• The learners' opinion will be taken into account while choosing articles. Each learner or group of learners will have to justify their choice. The justification is to be done in English.
• Before beginning to translate the learners will be given some primary knowledge which will help them with their work. The primary knowledge can be grammar phenomena, linguistic structures, word combinations, phrases which may be difficult to find in the dictionaries. Then the learners will search for the apropriate English language structure, words and phrases which will help them to make up an English sentence having the same meaning.
• After each article has been published the learners will be given 5-10 minutes to write their opinions on the English page. In this way we will get rid of the biggest shortcoming of the English page, the absence of comments in English.
• The learners will publish their translations in their blogs and in this way they will evaluate their work.