Apr 20, 2011

Listening and pronunciation skill bulding


Hello everyone.

Undoubtedly, listening and pronunciation are the two biggest challenges when learning a new language. It is difficult sometimes to pronounce a word because of the different intonations used. In one of our reading for this week, there was a pilot study conducted at a university of Padova where researchers wanted to investigate whether or not speech analysis software aid in a pronunciation teaching class. The results indicated that it improved pronunciation. On the other hand. Listening is also an important skill that is sometimes difficult to develop because of the lack of practice.

There are several websites that I have been using for couple of years, and that seem to be working in my teaching. One of them is the website called 5 minute English, and the URL is:

http://www.5minuteenglish.com/listening.htm.
This website is very useful because I can play a conversation and students can listen to it for couple of minutes. For every listening activity, there is a vocabulary provided as well as the actual conversation being heard by the students. At the end of the activity, there is a sheet where students can check their understanding using questions based on the listening activity. This is a great website because the conversations are short, relative easy to understand, and students can test their understanding by answering some questions.

Other very useful website that I use in my class is http://www.manythings.org/pp/ which has a lot of activities including pronunciation. I play a specific video and the computer tells the student the correct way of pronouncing a word. There are a lot of choices ranging from very simple words to more challenging words to pronounce. For the next class activity, I would love to use the real English website: http://www.real-english.com/reo/1/unit1.html, http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/, I found these WebPages very interesting and helpful for helping my students develop their listening skills. Each video has short conversations with native and non native English speakers. There is also a different level conversation and listening video depending on the understanding level.

I hope some of you try out the websites that I used . Hope to hear from you guys soon.

Santiago
Ecuador

1 comment:

  1. Hi Santiago

    Thank you for sharing these websites with us. And I must say that I do agree with you when you mentioned that sometimes it is hard to pronounce a word because of the different intonations. That is why we need to be exposed over and over again to the language in order to pick up the correct intonation and that is what makes both listening and speaking the most important and most challenging skills while learning and teaching a language.

    Nesrine

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