Planning the Final Project

This week I caught a glimpse of the final project by skimming through the PDFs from last courses. One of them caught my attention and it was from a participant in Nepal. I could see in advance the steps I need to take in order to write the final report. Last week (2) we discussed about the background of the students and their needs to perceive a possible problem. In this regard, I felt like having a map in hand.  The first step I took was the designing of a survey to gather primary information from my students. I decided to use an easy web tool for doing that online; I used Google Docs Form  I highly recommend it. There are other programs out there like SurveyMonkey to do the same but google gives you more options like seeing the answers in a graphical manner. Please, take a look at my survey here and I would appreciate it very much if you can comment from your perspective. Did I make the right questions? What should be added in the survey? What is your opinion?

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	BBC Phonemic Chart	Shows consonant and vowel sound of English
		U. of Iowa Phonetics	Interactive IPA symbols and videos
		Antimoon	Interactive chart with IPA symbols
		American Pronunciation Practice	Minimal pair practice by rote and games
		Songs for teaching	Songs for teaching phonemic awareness
		Praat	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	Randall´s ESL Lab	Leveled English conversations
		NPR Podcast Directory	Radio podcasts from NPR
		ELLO	English Language Listening Lab
		Listen a Minute	One minute length listening practice
		365 short Stories	Short Stories in English
		ANVILL	Create your own L/S lab
		Voki	Create your speaking avatar
		VoiceThread	Conversation practice built around an image
		Voxopox	Speaking collaboratively
		Listen and Write	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?