WEEK 3

 

There are so many things to do this week. Yet, I am trying to do my best to do the assignments and to check some classmates' blogs. It is almost impossible for me to read everthing of course. What I have recognized that some friends are so descriptive and creative on their blog posts. I am, on the other hand, more plain in the language. I mean I usually post our tasks and my study. I like it when people reflect their personality indeed. I wish I were more like them. I don't think that it is because of the time factor. Everybody is busy and has to deal with multi-tasks at a time. It is more about personality...

1- This week's  discussion topic is about CALL and Oral/Aural Skills.

I started reading the assigned articles first.

Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsey Miller

In her article Lindsey Miller states that among the receptive and productive skills, listening has been given the least importance , and thought that it cannot be taught but developed by learners’ own endevours. That is why, not much research has been conducted until recently. She, thus, using authentic materials, suggests pre- (a warm –up activity to activate the learners’ schemata), while-(focusing on specific listening skills), and post listening  (extended discussion) steps to develop listening skills.

It is easy to obtain authentic listening materials from the radio stations (verbal clues), TV channels/ videos (both verbal and non-verbal clues), and the internet/CD-ROM (online help with glossaries and scripts).

Miller and Flowerdew compared academic listening textbooks and authentic lectures in 1997, and they outlined the differences.

New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation by Maria Busa

In this article the importance of CALL applications, by means of which learners learn at heir own pace, and CAPT systems , which provide learners with private, stress-free practice with individualized and instantaneous feedback on pronunciation are mentioned.

As stated in the article, pronuciation has positive impact on  one’s self confidence and social interaction. Yet, it is not so easy to apply prosodic patterns in L2 because of inadequate materials, and teachers’ lack of interest. Still, in spite of the advanced technology, teachers are considered best correctors.

The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong

By means of CALL, it is now more possible to for language learners to use their interactive skills. Two aspects of spoken language competence are mechanical aspect and meaningful aspect (Pennington, 1995). CALL in mechanical aspect is mainly pronunciation drills. Learners now are able to record their voice, and it can be evaluated by the computer. Though it has advantages in terms of repetitive feauture and stress free environment, it is still not know to what extend deviation from the model is acceptable. As for the meaningful aspect, the computer is able to offer anly a micro-world where learners practice the target language, which means they work on computers but talk to them.
Based on Witt and Young (2000) research, a computerr based pronunciation scoring system is possible to give right feedback on a student's phonetic segments.
In short, teachers should pay attention to pros and cons while employing CALL in their classroom settings.

Some Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation by David F. Falton

In his article, he states that pronunciation is given the least importance among the language skills mainly due to teachers' lack of phonetics knowledge. Besides, L1 is a big hurdle in some languages like Arabic and Spanish.
Falton recommends some activities/exercises that he himself has appied in his lessons and found invaluable. As an example, he wrote nine words each starting with 'P' and ending with 'T'. He numbered those words which included long and short vowels. He asked the students to listen to one of those words and found which one they heard. His main purpose was to check whether students got confused short vowels with long ones or not. Then he presented more words and asked them to number those words.
Another excersise was a picture drawing exercise. He gave the instructions, and some students due to their L1 drew something totally different. As a result, the students had fun and laughed at themselves.
I agree with Falton that such activities increase self-awareness. 

I have had the chance to go over the following web pages, which makes me feel like each one of them is a pandora's box waiting for us to be explored.

Randall's Cyber Listening Lab is an amazing listening resource with lots of everday conversations with adult and children's voice. It also provides easy, medium, and difficult levels of audio and audio-visual tasks and quizzes with tapescripts for various topics and purposes.

Listening Real English Video provides graded videos with captions. Students have the chance to listen to a word and record their voice.

http://www.onestopenglish.com  has so many categories such as Business, ESP, ESOL, and the like.  Contolled speaking, miscellaneous worksheets, storrytelling, discussion, pronunciation, and role-play- where authors suggest some activities- are among graded speaking lesson plans. This website also have a thread which includes popular, commented, and e-mailed articles, activities, or lesson plans.

http://esl.about.com  offers graded conversation lesson plans in ESL, EFL and business English.

http://www.esl-galaxy.com/speaking.html has ESL and EFL games, worksheets, videos and lesson plans for young learners. Those communicative activities can be adaptable for young adults and and suitable for speaking and writing.

Robert’s site is an invaluable resource in terms of the variety of links such as segmentals, supra-segmantals,  speeach and accent, videos, recording on- line, software, conferences, journals, organizations, links to researchers, links to research oriented articles geared towards general audiences,  links to general accent articles,  and links to metalinks.

I had already watched and uploaded German Coast Guard and   Pink Panther Hamburger, which are distinctive examples of misuderstanding, into my blog before I came across them here. To be honest, I am so impressed by Accent Amy Walker. The actress is gifted.

Vocaroo  is easy to record  your voice.
 
Sounds of English Links provides sites with listening activities, authentic materials and sites for pronunciation.

Word stress exercises at http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/ is especially useful for  non-native student teachers.

Larry Ferlazzo recommends the best sites to practice speaking English on his blog. Larry's blog on its own is outstanding for the ones who would like to gain practical ideas since he himself has drilled many of them.

2- Project

We are required to read one of the reports from past Webskills classes before doing our project to 'get the big picture'.  We need to post the following details:
 

• name the author, country and quickly review the teaching context
• summarize what the person did in his/her project, and
• discuss what you liked about the project.

In this respect,  I read the project report prepared by Nadina Nicolici from Romania.

I chose this report because  while quickly scrolling up and down and skimming the sample final projects page, I saw that she conducted the project at a technical high school. I thought we sort of share students from a similar profile.

To be honest, I am so impressed by her amazing study. Each stage in the project is well-designed and she closely monitored her students after she collected detailed information about them to see their individual differences.

She was aware of her constraints. For instance, diversity of students' language level was the most important factor. On the other hand, self-motivated students with computer knowledge was a great help that she focused on.

She set the course goals and to avoid a stereotyped lesson plan, she used her knowledge and created a classroom blog and wiki to interact with them outside the class. Thus, She integrated traditional classroom applications with technology, so she did not have to depend on books, chalk and blakboard only.  She chose the book English Portfolio by Oxford University since she aimed to teach both receptive and productive skills. Accordingly, she carefully picked activities that would be helpful for the students to express themselves with ease in their daily life.

The students' reflections were positive since they were all satisfied in spite of the limited time.

I got the feeling that as a teacher she stated to feel more content and self-confident.

Though I found the study challenging,her study has inspired me.

3- Task: Delicious

We need to create our Delicious account to bookmark our favourite websites and reach them anywhere.Though I have tried to explore a social bookmarking Delicious, I guess I need to sort out more time to make use of it. I also learnt that Diigo is another social bookmarking site that I might have a look at.

Well, it is obviously not as hard as I thought. I have already bookmarked some of my favourite sites. My address is https://delicious.com/hacersivil13. 

As many of us have experienced, I kept writing the web addresses that I found important, but it was never ever practical for me since most of the time while jotting down the addresses I made spelling mistakes, sometimes I lost my notebook or simply notes. Though I tried to add up them to my favourites, it was a big loss when my computer crashed. Luckily, I will not lose those valuable sites at all.