CALL Practice and Tools I: Speaking and Listening

1. What makes it difficult to use technology for certain language skill practice? 2. Discuss all kinds of CALL technology for listening and speaking that you have experienced and learned from reading. 3. 말하기 듣기용 CALL materials과 tools을 한가지씩 소개하세요. 1. The way I understood it, from the readings that were assigned for this week, was that one of the difficulties in using technology for certain language skill practice is that studies have shown CMC has place more focus on communicative and content-based learning and less focus on form-based language. One example for this is a study done by Payne and Whitney (2002) showing that students who received face-to-face instruction show more improvement lexically than learners who were involved in synchronous CMC. 2. The audio and videoconferencing of CALL technology for listening shows the potential of the computer to bring together learners and teachers, even when they are separatedly geopgraphically. Although, there are still limitations with the technologies, they have shown great potential for authentic listening in language classrooms. The audio and videoconferecing technology for speaking has given numerous benefits for oral proficiency. It has given learners the chance to speak with other learners (of different countries as an example) and gave chances to passive learners or learners who have a shy character to speak. 3. Two of the listening and speaking CALL tools have been introduced in the readings and to my surprise, one of them was very much attractive to me. They are the voice blog ( which I find very attractive) and the digital stories. In voice blog, the teacher has introduced a blog for his learners and in here the students are supposed to create a diary by recording voice and uploading it to the site. The blog contains a lot of information about the students but I'll just skip on those ones. In voice blog, students can think of any topic which interests them but this is not just simply a diary. This involves stages such as conceptualizing, brainstorming, articulation,monitoring and evaluating. Voice blogs can make learners plan first on what they are to say when they make their diaries. Through this, learners have the chance to make a research about their topics or check on the dictionaries on choosing their words. They can rehearse also on their notes or scripts before recording their voices and one recorded they can also check their voice, pronunciation, tone, grammar,etc. before uploading it. They may also redo their recordings if they find some errors at a later time. The other CALL material for listening is the digital stories. This material was applied to 6-year old students in an FL environment in Spain. In digital stories, the students develop their listening skills by topics,notions and functions. Students listen to a story and follow instructions by clicking on the screen like choosing an item or object. Lesson Plan: I'd like to use TTS (Text to Speech) tool for teaching speaking and listening in an English class. For instance, the purpose of the activity in the class is to produce an English news reporting activity. Students decide on what topic they are interested in to report about, this may be an international or local issue. Students are required to make further research on their topic to broaden the chosen issue. Once they have completed their written report, they need to encode their material using TTS and from this, students are able to listen to a voice on how their script should be reported. Students record the voice and practice on news reporting by listening and repeating the recorded voice. Reading Materials: Speaking: Voice Blog: An exploratory study of language learning Listening: USING DIGITAL STORIES TO IMPROVE LISTENING COMPREHENSION WITH SPANISH YOUNG LEARNERS OF ENGLISH