DUE WEEK 6, February 16 to February 19: BLOG POST 3 -- Evaluation of CALL Software/Websites for Teaching Listening and Speaking.
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About Me
- Eric [AL 8620]
- Eric Friginal specializes in applied corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural communication, distance learning, discipline-specific writing, bilingual education, technology and language teaching, and the analysis of spoken professional discourse. Prior to joining the GSU faculty, he was a lecturer in the Literacy, Technology, and Professional Writing area of the English Department at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and an instructor at the NAU School of Forestry where he taught on-campus and online courses in technical and professional writing, professional editing, and rhetoric and writing in professional communities. He has also taught ESL/EFL classes and conducted training courses in business English in the Philippines, China, and India. His main research program focuses on the exploration of professional, spoken interaction; the acquisition of fluency in ESL; and the study of language, culture, and cross-cultural communication in the context of outsourced call centers in the Philippines and India serving American customers.
As the presenter of the chapter on “speaking”, I would be glad to share my opinions on the CALL software and web-based products on this topic. First of all, I should remind you that “speaking” in this chapter is not dealt as a general term. It is more related with the units that composes speaking. Therefore, the content of the chapter is more focused on pronunciation, stress and intonation, patters, and accents & dialects. If you have taken Sound System course, you are already familiar with the high tendency to create lessons where all these themes are introduced and practiced. Although we have not talked much about CALL software in this lesson, I remember being reminded that teaching pronunciation is not anymore “listen and repeat” chain or studying on tables or charts for reaching a native like pronunciation. This is also the perspective of this chapter. Individuals should be given opportunity to see real conversations, to practice their own pronunciation, be aware of different patterns etc.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the software being introduced in the chapter, I should say that most of them are out of date. However, while trying to find better ones or more up-to-date ones, I have realized that there are various sources that we can reach just by googling. You can find hundreds of web-based sources like videos on articulating the “r” sound, for example. Upon realizing the large amount of web-pages on speaking, I started to think about the reason why this is the case. What I came up with is that with the inclusion of speaking skill in tests like TOEFL and IELTS, more people are trying to work on their speaking skill. What do you think friends?
Another thing I have realized that, within the scope of accent, there is a trend of “accent reduction”. There are hundreds of people who are launching new programs, or offering private tutorials, courses on accent reduction.
So, if you become an English instructor and would like to include a CALL software in your speaking classes, I would suggest you to have a look at “OpenBook Learning Inc.”. I have noticed that it has been widely used and has been accepted to be a part of the curriculum in many schoosl in the US. There is no information about the cost but the web-page can direct you to reach the relevant departments easily.
More web-pages that you can use will be introduced in the class…
ESL Podcast (http://www.eslpod.com), of the Center for Educational Development, Los Angeles,targets a ESL audience. A new podcast is released every two, three or four days, and each new podcast features a good variety of material: interviews, dialogues, explanations, and everything is contextualized and referred to cultural content or some other type of content. Along with each podcast, a study guide is issued containing the tapescript, and additional instructional material. The podcasts can be dowloaded at no cost, but a $10.00 dollar monthly subscription is required for access to the study guides (individual guides are also available for $2.00 each). The podcasts alone are of very good quality, and of good pedagogical value for themselves. Hundreds of previous podcasts are archived and indexed using tags (key words) and each podcast is presented with brief information about its contents, length, and a script of the dialogue (if there is one featured in the podcast). Each podcast contains speech delivered at varying speed rate, with an emphasis on slow-paced speech, since comprehensible input (affecting not only syntactical and lexical complexity, but also pace of delivery) is part of the rationale behind the production of these podcasts.
ReplyDeleteI am reviewing the English Language Listening Lab Online (ELLO.org) included in Chapter 5. For some incomprehensible reason, Chapelle and Jamieson focus on the songs and lyrics page, but I find the rest of the site far more appealing. Perhaps they go right to the songs because, they claim, the songs are current and popular, and thus might be motivating to students. Well, granted I'm not too hip when it comes to today's popular music, but I have never heard of any of these artists or songs, so I'm skeptical of this claim.
ReplyDeleteChappelle and Jamieson also claim that the listening texts are authentic. This claim is further substantiated by Todd, the founder of the site. I think they are using this term quite liberally. According to my understanding of the term, the materials would have to have been developed for a purpose other than language learning to be truly authentic. I doubt that this is the case. The news stories might have been true, but the British announcer doesn't sound like she's reading for the real news. I am quite sure the stories have been specially selected and adapted for this site.
At least the newscaster speaks at a generally normal pace (a little slower than normal perhaps). I cannot say the same for Todd (the founder of the site). He's featured on many of the texts, both as interviewer and interviewee. He speaks way too slowly and makes weird pauses in his speech. In his interviews with non-native speakers, he speaks unnaturally while the non-native speakers appear more natural.
Despite its lack of authenticity, the site has many good qualities. It covers a wide range of topics, making it easy to select appropriate texts for the learners. It's also quite user-friendly, and all the texts are accompanied by a transcript (though they don't always correspond exactly, and there are at least a few typos). Selected words and phrases are highlighted in the written text, and when you click them you can hear them in citation form, followed by a definition and a few more example sentences. And, the site contains lots of British and American English as well as very fluent non-native speaker talk. At first I didn't like the fact that so many non-native speakers were featured, but after further reflection, I think it's a good thing considering there are more NNSs than NSs in the world. On this same note, I like how texts alternate between British and American English. For example, if you are listening to an American English text, and click on a highlighted word in the transcript, the word is repeated for you in British English, followed by a definition and example sentences.
So, in conclusion, I don't like that the site doesn't feature natural connected British or American speech samples, but I like the other features of the site. I think it would be helpful for vocabulary acquisition and certain elements of pronunciation. It would be especially helpful for those learning English as a lingua franca.
The CALL software that I evaluated related to speaking was the phonetic website http://manythings.org. In class, we discussed how English language learners from different backgrounds might desire or need more practice with the pronunciation of certain sounds rather than others. This website could be a helpful one for individualized practice for students. If only one student is struggling with producing /r/ and /l/, then this could be a website a teacher could refer the student to in order to provide more practice with these sounds. It is pretty easy to navigate and find lessons and practice that cater to a student’s needs. However, I personally prefer the University of Iowa’s website (http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics) that Betul mentioned; its pictures provide a clear example of how to enunciate the sounds. To visually see the difference in sound production may improve a student’s ability to pronounce sounds more articulately. In the future, I might introduce this website first and then direct students to manythings.org afterwards for more practice with the sounds and distinguishing minimal pairs.
ReplyDeleteWith the listening websites, like Martin, I found that I enjoyed the BBC’s website. I love the organization of the site. Along with the listening skill, a person using the site could also focus on a grammar or cultural aspect of language. For younger students (or at least young at heart students), the site provided silly games to make learning English and improving listening more interactive and interesting. I plan to use this website in the future; I like its immediate feedback given through a comprehension quiz. I would want to spend time preparing pre-listening activities for the activities and I would also try to organize the listening activities to be connected to the main topic of the class. On the website, I did not notice any specific tips or suggestions given to learners to help them improve their listening skills, but this also can be another addition a teacher could add to enhance the effectiveness of a lesson using this website.
From the variety of CALL software that teaches listening skills, I would like to review Longman English Interactive program. Despite Martin’s valid critique that Pearson Longman’s software is dominating in the textbook, I found that this program may be a very useful tool for the students to practice listening in ESL/EFL setting. The first advantage of this program is that it provides a video-based listening activity. By listening and watching the recording at the same time, students have more clues to understand the language. Also, video-based listening task in many ways resembles authentic situation: very often L2 learners experience difficulty to understand the spoken language during their encounters with the native speakers. The second feature which I liked about the Longman English Interactive program is that it provides students with the culture notes, which is a helpful feature and important for listening comprehension. The program also gives students a chance to practice pre-listening strategy, in the example on the CD, students see a picture of an office, and they are asked to predict what the clip will be about. During the listening part, students can pause the text in order to process the information or they can re-play it again if necessary. This feature gives students control over the listening task. Of course, in a real life listening situation, student don’t have a chance to pause and replay what they just heard, but to have this feature available in a CALL program, is important for practicing listening skills. The Longman English Interactive program also offers students an explanation in case they gave incorrect answer, by replaying the exact video fragment that includes clues for the correct answer. Therefore, students have a chance for self-correction. I think this is an important feature, since often CALL programs just provide the correct answer in case student give incorrect answer. In general, I think that Longman English Interactive program is a good learning program that combines video and listening input and I would recommend it for students who wish to improve their listening skills and strategies.
ReplyDeletewww.esl-lab.com is one website listed in Chapter 5 and that I want to evaluate. I personally see several advantages in this site. The most important advantage is that THIS WEBSITE IS FOR FREE. As additional advantages I can mention that: it is a really user-friendly tool for teacher and students; provides a long list of listening exercises for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels; has pre-, while, and post-listening activities which help a lot in lesson planning design; the transcript for each listening exercise is also available so that students can read and listen at the same time in further activities; a small five-question quiz for each listening exercise which provides immediate feedback for students; and a brief explanation of ‘idioms’ if they are used in the exercise.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the use of idioms in the English language learning, I consider that it is a relevant point for students to be exposed to this kind of expressions since the beginning level. As we can see in several instructional materials, the content is more focused in formal language rather than in colloquial expressions. However, when learners are involved in the real English speaking environment, a lot of colloquial language is heard, but most of the time they do not understand it because a lack of exposure to this topic. For example, an ESL learner may present difficulties in understanding the idioms "kick back" = relax ("After we checked into the hotel, we kicked back at the pool and enjoyed the sun." ), or "crash" = go to bed because you are very tired ("I crashed as soon as I got to my room because I was exhausted from traveling all day.") if these kind of language has not been learned before. There surely might be some arguments whether to include or not this kind of content when teaching a language, but I personally welcome these colloquial expressions because they are always out there. As an ESL learner, I have faced this situation several times in the US, that is, I have misunderstood native speakers sometimes when in their speech they include idiomatic expressions. Then, I’d wish to be exposed to this kind instruction since I started learning the English language. Thus, this website takes into account idiomatic expressions which are also part of the English Language and which, at some point, learners will listen in the real context.
Finally, I will say that www.esl-lab.com is not really knew, it has been around for several years. In the past years, this website provided just the audio-exercises, but currently it has been updated so that a great deal of videos has been uploaded. Now, with this great video-resource feature, this website becomes more meaningful and consistent for ELLs. I personally like it a lot and I plan to use it in the future with my EFL students in my country.
I very much appreciate free content just as much as anyone here and the concept of the podcast is particularly attractive. While Paco already reviewed what is surely the superior podcast on the internet, I've decided to review a less professional, more teacher-blog form of podcast website. Diane's ESL Podcast (http://dianewallis.podomatic.com) is comprised of a series of podcasts based on varying, normal scenarios that second language learners will naturally encounter in daily life. Diane, the teacher plays a role in each podcast and to some extent drives the material/scenario.
ReplyDeleteThe variety of other speakers is helpful as one is privet to different tones, accents, speech patterns, etc which provides a nice bit of variety from podcast to podcast. The audio quality is clear and the content is relevant to the proposed context. Authenticity is another component that is thankfully achieved in this series of podcasts.
Unfortunately, this particular website (which showed up rather high in a google search for "ESL podcasts") hasn't been updated since 2007, so it certainly falls short in the "up to date" qualification department. However, that being said, the teacher blog-podcast format is well represented here and could provide a nice model and examples for pedagogical application.
Planet English
ReplyDeleteThe listening program, Planet English, is presented under the third tip of teaching listening in our textbook. Its advocating of selective listening correspondences with my own belief of this issue. As an English learner, I have lots of experiences of doing listening exercises. The exercises that focus on everything at the same time, including comprehension questions, fill in blanks, locating details, rank among the most difficult types of exercises. Usually, I feel like the combination of question types does not really measure the listening ability, as the listeners have to shift their attention in a very unnatural way. As stated in our book, in real life context, the listeners can sift information according their purpose. Due to this reason, I believe the design of listening questions should follow the normal attention people hold in real life. For example, in the demo of Planet English, after the conversation about Paul is arriving from Bangkok, flight number, gate number and arriving time are required. The three item follow people’s natural attention in daily life when they need to pick up someone from the airport. However, if the question type is to let the learners fill in blanks with the structure of vocabulary the speaker used, this exercise will be very unnatural.
I also like the way that movement are connected to the directions given in the listening material. In this demo, the listener can press different number according the information they want to obtain. Not only does the movement make the listening process not that boring, but also that this situation resembles the real life activity of calling a company or an organization. Another important feature of this software is that it can provide the learners with feedback. In this way the students will be clearer about the problems they have, thus predict the possibility of future improvement.
This program uses Australian English. People with a strong preference for certain variety of English other than Australian English may find this program inappropriate for their language learning. However, for most of the English learners, they are not really sensitive to the issue of varieties of English. The focus on Australian English will not be an issue for them.
I decided to critique the ELLLO (http://www.elllo.org/english/Songs.htm) website. Research states that materials for students to listen to should have the appropriate affective, cognitive and linguistic dimensions. So I will critique the website according to those standards. As far as the affective dimension, I think this website gets an A+. I know when I was learning Spanish I really enjoyed listening to songs in Spanish, and I wanted to try and understand the words. I think that this will be true for many learners and activities with the lyrics could be a great way to build motivation. The next dimension is the cognitive one and I don’t think this website or any song listening activity would be very good. After looking at the songs on the website I noticed that it follows the same general trend that songs are not very easy to understand. I actually had a hard time trying to infer meaning from many of the songs on the website. With this true, the song becomes more about understanding what word is said and much less about what the words mean together. And trying to figure out what words are said goes right into the last dimension, linguistic. Songs do not follow the same suprasegmental or even syntactic level of normal English. With that being said, using songs as a material becomes a poor representative of what English actually is. Overall, I think that the website does a good job of splitting the lyrics up into readable chunks, and that it could help excite the learner. It also may provide some world knowledge and slang terms that would not otherwise be learned. However, I do think that this website should be used as a fun motivational-building activity, and not as an actual tool to teach English.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the idea of using speech recognition software to practice speaking, so I downloaded the free demo of Better Accent Tutor at www.betteraccent.com.
ReplyDeleteThe folks at Better Accent are to be commended for their approach: “we believe there is no such thing as right or wrong pronunciation; not even two native speakers speak alike.” The software focuses on the three key points they consider imperative for being understood: intonation, stress, and rhythm.
Unfortunately, though it costs $129 with shipping and handling, there doesn’t seem to be much to it. The demo provides a native speaker example of an utterance, along with visual representations of the speaker’s intonation, stress and rhythm. Then the student has the opportunity to record their own attempt at the utterance, and compare the visuals.
The main problem I had here was that there doesn’t seem to be any feedback. When comparing the visuals, my own utterance was relatively close to the example, but different in some places, and there was no way to know how much those differences would affect intelligibility. Without any way to know if my differences are acceptable or would cause a communication breakdown, the software becomes more of a toy than an educational tool.
Protea Textware’s Connected Speech software, on the other hand, has a wealth of activities and exercises to go with their speech samples, including spelling and Cloze exercises, visualizations of stress and intonation, and opportunities for students to record and compare their utterances. Students can read along with the speech samples, and click on key words for explanations. In addition, there are a number of different speakers to choose from, and versions of the software are available for British, North American, and Australian accents. However, the speakers have consciously slowed down their utterances, which may make it easier for students to follow what they’re saying, but results in rather stilted speech.
Unfortunately, the demos for Connected Speech are extremely slow to download, and the videos for the American and British English ones crash in the middle, so it’s not easy to see the full extent of what this software does. The website promises over 300 hours of activities, but if the actual program is as slow as the demos, it could easily take you 300 hours just to install it and read the FAQ!
--Joyce
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ReplyDeleteI decided to look at Real English from English online. My review of the site is mixed. While it does satisfy Chapelle and Jamieson’s requirement of including video, most of the video appears to be shot in the late eighties and early nineties. I realize this is a minor quip, but as a Spanish student, I really disliked working with old and outdated video materials. It made the entire lesson feel cheesy to me. Despite the age of the videos, I do believe the site does a good job in exposing students to differing speakers of English. Participants in the video included Brits, Americans, and Brazilians.
ReplyDeleteI find the organization of the videos to be particularly interesting. Each of the videos consists of a reporter conducting an interview with people she meets on the street. Her questions and their responses are meant to target a specific grammatical feature. The videos show the same footage four times. In the first viewing, students simply watch the video. Questions appear at the end of the video. This fulfills Chapelle and Jamieson’s evaluation requirement. In the second showing, the video cuts to pictures that illustrate the speaker’s response. For example, the video showed the speaker and a bride when he said that getting married was the worst decision of his life. I thought this was an extremely clever idea, since the picture can be used to activate a listener’s schema. In addition, it provides an explicit link between the phrasing with a visual picture. The video’s design continues adding layers of scaffolding in the fourth viewing by including English subtitles.
Despite this very innovate design, I have some serious fundamental concerns about this site. The videos are organized around grammatical structures and not by situations. This characteristic coupled with the interview style of the videos makes grounding the language in real life scenarios challenging. In addition, the language at times seems artificial. All of the native English speakers rephrase the reporter’s question structure when answering. For example, the reporter in one of the videos asks, “What was your worst mistake?” The man answers, “My worst mistake was getting married.” While the answer is perfectly acceptable, it is more realistic for the man to have answered “getting married.” Americans often do not answer questions in complete sentences. As a result, I think the videos included on the site should reflect this characteristic.
The focus on form over function also causes some rather strange topic selections. One video focuses on the question of “what are you wearing?” While this might be appropriate for foreign speakers of English who happen to be celebrities, this is not a question one would find in day to day communication.
Another flaw with this site is that it does not offer any bottom up activities. In addition, the speakers speak very clearly, and there are no examples of linking and other phonological elements that occur in actual speaking.
While I believe this site could provide EFL students who have little access to English speakers and ESL students who do not venture out of their L1 communities valuable exposure, the artificiality of this site prevents me from issuing a glowing recommendation.
Since I presented the listening section, I’ll blog about Betul’s CALL speaking resources presentation. I thought that the most interesting part of the discussion related to the issue of teaching speaking of English if you are a multi-lingual teacher and English is not your L1. Even some of our classmates echoed the sentiment of the masses in believing that they would prefer a “native speaker” of English as the instructor. This preference on the part of students, influences the economics of the situation to the detriment of potentially excellent multi-lingual teachers.
ReplyDeleteMaybe CALL can help this situation by providing a rich source of “native speaker” text to satisfy students who wouldn’t be happy without such exposure in the classroom. This division of labor would allow the ESL teacher to delegate the task of sounding like a speaker from Brooklyn to speakers from Brooklyn.
I liked the look of Openbook ESL, and believe that it’s good to teach the sounds of English as an early activity so that the production of the individual sounds can be relied on when advancing to the very important issues of connected speech and prosidy. It doesn’t bother me that they aren’t using the IPA. Addressing the same issue individual sounds is the wonderful site from the university of Iowa. I think their content is great, but the interface is unnecessarily technical and intimidating.
For the Listening Chapter, there were many points I liked and disliked about the Real English website. First of all, I liked the fact that the site uses authentic conversations and shows video of the speakers as they converse. However, the text was rather large for the video, leaving the speakers only barely visible. Additionally, the font was in cursive and could be somewhat difficult for learners to read. It would probably be best to use a standard font—such as Times New Roman—and place this at the bottom of the video, similar to typical subtitles. Finally, the video was a bit difficult to forward, sometimes not skipping forward at all.
ReplyDeleteFor the Speaking Chapter, I thought the American Accent Program was particularly useful. After taking Sound System, I noticed that this was a great way to allow students to focus on the nuances of intonation in the English Language. The program uses simple graphics to demonstrate intonation: just using red to indicate the emphasized information. However, in Sound System, there was a program that can be used to map voice patterns in a sentence. I wonder if the American Accent Program intonation indication might be more useful if the graphics included an intonation map. An example of a similar intonation map would be BetterAccent Tutor. However, the map in BetterAccent Tutor is a bit difficult to follow; the graphics look a bit disorganized. A better program would be one that provides simple sentence graphics and allows the learners—if needed—to look at the sentence in greater depth, including an intonation map.
The website I am evaluating is VOA news. The website is more comprehensive than the link in the book suggests, for it has basically two sessions that can be divided up for pedagogical purposes. The first would be the actual website which features news as a standard news website would, which could be used by advanced learners. It has video, audio and transcripts which can be used as listening materials. The website does one of the most difficult steps in designing materials which is to make it up-to-date and interesting for students. Some specifics of what to address concerning topics to be taught as well as the activities dynamics are not guided which requires the teacher to preplan the constructs to be addressed.
ReplyDeleteThe Special English home session of the website is dedicated to students who find regular news broadcasting too difficult to be understood. This session’s files are narrated slightly slower than a regular newscast which facilitates listening to segmentals. The link video/audio has a very well laid-out table that allows students/teachers to select items based on their availability in the preferred format. One downside of the website is that the slower speech appears to misrepresent suprasegmental patterns of speech, mostly rhythm. Research shows that these are carriers of meaning perhaps even in a more effective manner than segmentals. Thus, the teacher might have to alert the students about it and use it accordingly
This is a great website overall. Definitely a resource I plan to use later on in my career.
I am also interested in the voice of america website. Regular radio shows, such as NPR, are difficult for students to listen to because of the amount of information that's given in one stream. If I remember my grammar class correctly, the news genre is very noun phrase heavy and relies a lot on passive voice, making it difficult for the learner to process. Although the voice reading the news stories on VOA is very slow, it could acclimate students step by step into this genre. In addition, it would be a great tool for independent study because the website provides transcripts. So often teachers encourage students to listen to the radio and watch tv, but without a way to check their comprehension, do students improve their English skills by engaging in these passive activities? Wouldn't most of them be at least a little overwhelmed while they're listening to the radio, since there's nothing to confirm that they've understood?
ReplyDeleteNPR's website could be a great resource for the more advanced learner who has perhaps exhausted the voa website. Not all of the news stories have a transcript available, but a lot of the older shows do. It might also be an interesting challenge for students to listen to the stories using only the blurbs provided by the links. NPR is a great resource for reading as well as listening. They use a lot of academic vocabulary, but the stories are brief so it's still easy to understand. To sum up, both websites are tools for autonomous learners.