Thursday, April 26, 2012

Old and New Tools for Speaking and Listening



This week I have really enjoyed reading two good articles about teaching speaking and listening. I was particularly attracted to Gong´s description of the communicative competence which she divided in two aspects, the mechanical and the meaningful one. The first deals with phonetics and phonology and the second with speaking/listening purposely. These two sides of language have traditionally been thought by using devices like radios, TV, VCR, CD-ROM as a way to secure authentic spoken material but with the coming of Web 2.0 tools, genuine English speaking has become ubiquitous. The range of possibilities for activities in the multimedia world is still unforeseen as it was in 2002 when she wrote the article. I am in line with her in that I do not expect the computers to carry out authentic conversations with humans in the near future; that would be pretty scary too. Remember Hal 9000? However, I think Gong has laid the foundations to create typology of all the growing oral material on hand today.  As teachers, it would be helpful to have an organized toolkit of speaking/listening multimedia when choosing which web tool to use in order to write lesson plans, activities, objectives and tasks; so inspired by her work, I have devised the following table: 

 
P
R
O
N
U
N
C
I
A
T
I
O
N

O
R
A
 L

A
U
R
A
L
Shows consonant and vowel sound of English
Interactive IPA symbols and videos
Interactive chart with IPA symbols
Minimal pair practice by rote and games
Songs for teaching phonemic awareness
Shows spectrograms of voice



C
O
N
N
E
C
T
E
D

S
P
E
E
C
H
L
I
S
T
E
N
I
N
G

S
P
E
A
K
I
N
G

Leveled English conversations
Radio podcasts from NPR
English Language Listening Lab
One minute length listening practice
Short Stories in English
Create your own L/S lab
Create your speaking avatar
Conversation practice built around an image
Speaking collaboratively
Very good tool for doing dictation




Of course, there are many more links out there but I just wanted to share those I really find useful for the purposes of enhancing oral and aural skills. I am sure that with the help Delicious or Diigo we are going to be able to collect and share many more. Please, if you have some links that fit this classification, I beg you to share them on your comment postings.  The use of bookmarking tools like these makes it possible to grow professionally and keep our personal connections beyond this course, so I hope.  Do you agree?

2 comments:

  1. Hello Julio,

    What a nice classification of the resources you'made. Thanks.
    By the way, have you tried Audacity? This is a program to record voices and sounds and it's really good, I like it. I have tried it with my students to make radio advertisements and we've really spent a good time working on these projects with Audacity. There they can record their voices, back sounds, cut, edit, etc. I recommend it.
    Bye,
    Mónica

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow!!! I loved this table!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! I will add your blog to my Delicious page!!! as a interesting link.

    If you agree I suggest include the VOA (Voice of America) News in the CONNECTED SPEECH classification. This is the link: http://www.voanews.com/english/news/

    Regards,
    Diana

    ReplyDelete