Week 3: Acquainted with Sound-based language skills building websites and bookmarking with Delicious

The week 3 of Web Skills course we have discussed and learned how to teach our students listening and speaking skill and pronunciation skills through Computer Aided learning materials. The statement given by Maria Grazia Busa has been authentic when she in her article entitled “New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation” has rightly remarked, “CALL applications both promote language learning objectives and overcome traditional language classroom constrains.” This week has been very helpful for me because I come across various useful websites recommend in our course of week 3 and by my peers.

As I am very enthusiastic to develop my learners’ pronunciation, I have gone through Maria’s article on teaching pronunciation first. Here I come to know how we can employ the new technology to develop our learners’ pronunciation. I also come to know that it has been more effective to teach pronunciation in prosody than teach it in isolated individual words. I have found that our learners can have native people as their teachers if we let them practice pronunciation through CALL materials and websites. Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) system “is to provide learners with private, stress-free practice with individualized and instantaneous feedback on pronunciation” (Maria). I have also learned about the use of speech analysis software which “allows learners to record and visualize their speech output on their computer monitors to obtain real-time information about the acoustic properties of this output” (Maria). Afterwards I visited the websites recommended in our course that are designed for developing pronunciation. I have planned to use some of the recommended websites with my students as soon as possible. Unfortunately I have not been able to manage time to read other two articles i.e. The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong and Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsay Miller. From Nicenet discussion, I have been informed that my peers have found these two articles very helpful.

My fear of preparing my final project has been lessen to some great extent because I have got a practical experience of going through sample project reports prepared by previous participants of Web Skills course. I have acquired the practical idea how to design, prepare and implement our final project by bringing a change related to technology use in our classroom. It really helps me a great deal overcome my fear. In this week, I have come across delicious site and have created my delicious page. It is really wonderful to bookmark our favorite websites. Having a delicious page has a great advantage. Now I can open the list of bookmarked websites from any computer at any place. I can also bookmark ample websites/URLs and can categorize the sites or pages with the given ‘tags’ to search for these very quickly. I have also invited my peers to help me develop my delicious page and provide me useful web links.