There are usually some parents who come and see me in the beginning of the school year and request their child to be placed in advanced Mandarin class. Why? Because their child has been learning Mandarin for several years. I did oral assessments with them to begin with and many of them can’t even answer me simple questions regarding personal information. Students usually told me that they have learned how to read and write, but they can’t really speak!
It is not uncommon that many students who have learned a second language at school can’t utter a word or have no confidence interacting with native speakers in spontaneous situations. If the objective is for students to develop core competencies in all aspects of language skills, shall we ask ourselves, as teachers, have we done enough to help our students to develop oral language skills?
To this end, effective language teachers create opportunities for students to make the best use of the second language both inside and outside of the classrooms. The language learning process is similar to when babies or toddlers acquire their first languages. First, we provide comprehensible input, and then we interact with them in contexts and finally, they are able to produce the language for authentic communication. The same language acquisition process should be applied in our foreign language classrooms, including producing comprehensible output.
With the advent of technology, teachers and students are provided with ample opportunities for oral language practice without spending a cent. I would like to share a couple of web 2.0 tools that my students use to develop their oral language proficiency.
- Voicethread: audio and video discussions, picture talks, responses to open-ended questions, making sentences based on given phrases, listening to other people to complete a survey
- Voki: introduce self (Students can also embed this in their learning portfolio.), give one minute talk about a topic, storytelling
- Posterous: reading aloud projects, responses to reading passages, sharing opinions about a topics
- Screencast-O-Matic: practice presenting Power Point presentations, making video projects collaboratively, practice delivering a speech
- Lingua Swap: practice the language they are learning at school with a native speaker of their own age (They don’t have Mandarin language support yet, but if you are teaching Spanish, French or German, it’s worth of checking it out.)
If your students have iDevices, such as iPad, iPod or iPhone, they can also down free programs, such as Puppet Pals, Talking Tom Cat, Audioboo for interesting digital speaking projects.
If you are interested in finding out more how to use web 2.0 tools to help developing students oral language skills, you can find more information here: http://www.slideshare.net/CatherineRitz/digital-speaking
Alison Yang
IB Mandarin Teacher
KIS International School
- Originally posted by Ange Molony
- Posted at 3:20 pm on Mon, Nov 21, 2011
Like a few thousand other maths teachers around the world my jaw dropped with awe and wonder (and some nerdy excitement) when I first came across Khan Academy and it’s ever expanding list of maths videos. I watched video after video and one by one I embedded them into my online learning portal for my students to enjoy. But, they didn’t. They found the videos too long or too boring or too confusing. I surveyed them and the common complaint was that too often it took 8 minutes before he really started getting to the parts they needed to learn or they needed help with. (Even my attention span would find that hard to work with!) The Khan vids have a general target but my students don’t, they want to know exactly how to multiply a 2x3 matrix with a 3x2 matrix but they don’t need to be reminded about the matrix basics. So, I shelved Khan’s website but I took his idea and I set out to make my own.
Armed with a Bamboo tablet and some screencasting software (I love Screenr) I started to record. My videos are targeted at my students and use language that they are familiar with and terms that we have already covered in class. They don’t run longer than 5 minutes and they are supported with questions from their text books that they can turn to for practice. The kids seem to enjoy them, maybe they are just being nice. But I’ll continue to add to the collection so that my videos can join the resource list on my moodle pages, right next to Khan’s. It's not the only teaching they get from me and watching videos isn't the only homework they do. But it is adding some variety to my classes and the response has been positive.
Perhaps I should look at introducing my students to the idea of making their own videos like Brian sugggests here. If anyone is to know what maths problems need the most explaining it’ll be the students themselves.
