Aural/Oral Skill Development Websites

Reflections on Week 3

This is my personal space to reflect on our Webskills course assignments.  Below is my reflection on what I did and what I learned in the third week of Webskills which mainly focuses on the development of aural/oral skills.

First of all, I created my Delicious page in order to save, sort and  share the useful links with others. The URL of my page is https://delicious.com/malmekhlafi. I found it a very useful page to keep and classify my links. So far I have shared two useful links with my students on Facebook. I will continue the habit of sharing links on my Facebook account.

Then, I looked at the links of the various activities, exercises, lesson plans and software programs that are used for the teaching and learning of aural/oral language skills. I was really impressed by the variety of programs and links that are really useful for my class of Phonetics and Phonology. So far, I have shared 8 useful links that are useful for my course of Phonetics and Phonology  on my Delicious account.

The most useful website that I used was “Speech Analyzer”. I downloaded the program from http://www-01.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm . It is very useful for student teachers or advanced students who study phonetics and phonology. I am training myself to use  it to perform frequency and spectographic analysis of English and Arabic sounds. It is very useful for Acoustic Phonetics. The following is a spectrograph of my own Arabic pronunciation of  “Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Raheem” and my name in Arabic created by the program.

In short, I recommend this program for the teachers who teach pronunciation and/or phonetics and phonology. It allows students to record, visualize and analyze their own speech on their computer screens. They can obtain an accurate visualization of their production at both the segmental and supra-segmental levels. It is the role of the teacher to show them how to read and interpret speech signals and prosodic patterns of loudness, pitch and intonation, etc. Another splendid site is An Introduction to the Sounds of Language: Peter Ladefoged’s vowels and consonants at http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/contents.html. It is very useful for students learning English Pronunciation or Phonetics. It familiarizes the students with the IPA chart. It also compares and contrasts the vowel sounds of American English and that of BBC English and many other activities. I am planning to use these activities with my students.

The third useful site is David Brett’s Phonetics Page whose URL is: http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/ . It is also useful for teaching and learning pronunciation and phonetics. I also found a number of useful sites for teaching aural/oral skill development and phonetics and phonology. I added them to my Delicious page for future reference. I also found some useful sites for phonetic transcription, but unfortunately they do not open.

After that, I read the three articles assigned. I found them really interesting and useful. The first article entitled: New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation is written by Maria Grazia Busa. It reviews recent technology for teaching pronunciation as well as the trends emerging in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL).

The second article is written by Julia Gong. It is entitled: The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills. This article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the use of technology in teaching and learning second language speaking skills. This article convinced me that using computers  in the teaching and learning of Aural/Oral skills is highly motivating and less threatening psychologically. 

The third article  is  titled: Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials. This article is written by Lindsay Miller. It divides the activities of listening into  3 main stages: Pre-Listening Tasks, While Listening Tasks and Post Listening Tasks. The teacher gets the students to prepare their discussion tasks from the following three links: http://www.bbc.co.uk;  http://www.avoa.gov or http://npr.org.

In the rest of the week I will be working on Project Task 2.

At the end  I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to our instructor, Sean McClelland, for the useful resources and websites that he sent us.