How time flies! It is already Week 3. This week, I experienced something I have always dreaded: a failure in the Internet connection, and it happened at the beginning of the week. Luckily, the problem was solved in time and I was able to carry out the tasks assigned for the week in due time.
As always, the reading materials and discussions related to the best websites for building oral/aural skills were very intense and enriching. We were thus introduced with a variety of excellent sites and we even had the privilege and pleasure to hear Sam and Sujith’s voices. Isn’t that great? This was indeed made possible by technology! To top it all, we were asked to create a Delicious page, which to me is a real life-saver as I have always had a hard time remembering the sites I needed, and if I happened to bookmark them, I often forget on which computer I had done so. Delicious is indeed a very practical bookmarking tool we can retrieve from any computer we are using, once we have saved our page.
At first, I added three sites to my Delicious page; they are:
http://www.ello.org/,
Elllo stands for 'English Listening Lesson Library Online'. It offers a collection of downloadable audio in mp3 format. It can be accessed by English students and teachers freely through the net.There are practical activities which can help develop the students' listening skills: audio materials, video materials, news,... Students can use the materials on their own but teachers can also instruct them.http://eslgold.net/speaking/talking_topics.html
This site offers a variety of talking topics together with hands-on speaking activities, suitable for students of all level of competence.It lists the functions the students can practice (e.g: Describing things), some conversation tasks and articles to talk about. The teachers can also pull materials from this site. Besides, it has an online speaking program (Speak-English-Today.com) which allows students to connect with other students and teachers from all over the world.
http://www.eslflow.com/pronunciationlessonplans.html
This site offers a variety of activities helping teachers deal with pronunciation in an attractive way. It comes with worksheets students can use while practicing.
Later, enriched with the discussions I had with my classmates, I added http://learningenglish.voanews.com/podcast/0.html, which provides audio files about a variety of topics, for high beginner to low-intermediate level and which offers authentic material but these are said to be one third slower than regular VOA English.I also decided to add http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2008/03/17/the-best-sites-to-practice-spe..., a site compiling free and user-friendly sites which are accessible to English language learners. Students will find here useful sites where they can record their voices and post their recordings online.
I, for my part, will be very glad to share this with my students and my fellow teachers. I know some who will be relieved!
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