Listening and Speaking Skills - Week 3

This week has been very important for me because it is about the development of web skills with respect to listening and speaking skills which are my favorite areas in teaching of English. I like these areas more partly due to the fact that listening and speaking is not included in the curriculum of the students I teach and so these skills are not normally developed in them. Another reason is the challenges non-native speakers always face in acquiring an internationally intelligible accent with proper stress and intonation. This challenge is something which makes English an interesting language especially from the pronunciation point of view.

Maria Grazia Busà’s article ‘New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation’ has significantly added to my previous knowledge of teaching pronunciation. I learnt about how pronunciation has never got enough place in the classroom teaching all over the world and the different reasons behind it. Internet has not only made teaching pronunciation easier but more interesting as well. Though I have used software and programs like speech synthesizers, speech recognition tools and speech simulators, but somehow I could never make them useful for my students. Now I have many such tools in my hands like Praat that I can use in my classroom for the development of my students’ listening and speaking skills.

Creating a delicious page was an achievement and I think every Internet user should have something like Delicious to keep a record of his bookmarked sites.

The article on listening skills and the one on CALL were also very informative and I have saved them on my computer for future reference.

The discovery of audio recording tools like vocaroo, audioboo and sites like  Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab , ESL Video  and many others has simply been great.

This course has been very productive so far. I’m very happy with my grades of first two weeks and I hope to maintain this momentum in the weeks to come.