I started this week quite late as I enjoyed a 9 day holiday of Tet traveling around, visiting relatives and friends, going to pagodas with best wishes for a Lunar New Year full of happiness.
The workload I need to do in 3 days was huge but I did love this week assignments. CALL is great when integrating technology and internet in teaching and learning languages.
As Gong has quoted in his article "In second/foreign language classrooms, the CALL environment creates situations that stimulate interest, allows dialogue and communication, enhances reactivity, fosters a sense of personal worth, facilitates collaboration among students working together, permits rich learning experiences for all students and strengthens communication skills" (Borras 1993; Pennington 1995, 1996; Cameron 1999; Hardisty et al. 1989; Inoue 1999; Kohn et al. 1997; Powell 1998)
It is no doubt CALL will enhance the effectiveness of language learning in our technology Age.
I also created my own page to save link on http://www.delicious.com/. The first time ever I have my own stack without worrying of losing my bookmarks when my laptop goes wrong. It was amazing to visit my friends' pages. They introduced dozens of interesting and useful websites those I have been looking for long. I tried some especially on teaching pronunciation. "http://www.howjsay.com" introduced by Ky Nguyen is very useful for Vietnamese students as researches showed that one of the biggest problems we have in Vietnam is pronunciation. This could be explainable as Vietnamese pronunciation is something similar to French and Russian language when looking at the words people know how to speak them correctly. And in pronouncing a word, consonant endings and consonant cluster endings are not heard while in English it is very important factor to recognize the words. To pronounce these following words, for instance,:
wife /waif/
while /wail/
wise /waiz/
wine /wain/
white /wait/
wild /waild/
My non English major students tend to make it only as /WAI/ for all the above words. The comment:
- "Your /WAI/ tastes nice" could be very confusing as I often joked my students.
"http://www.howjsay.com" will be more than helpful to my students to self teach their pronunciation.
The hardest job of the week was making comments on the past project report. It was really hard but also very interesting. I could somehow imagine what my final report could be after reading all of the 8 reports. I did enjoy the one of Camelia "Final Project for Teens at the School with Classes I-VIII, Academician Marin Voiculescu, Giurgiu, Romania". I learned a lot from the way of integrating technology and web-skills into language learning, the way of motivating and encouraging the students to collaborate in learning.
I am eager to try some new ideas on the coming week as I am enjoying the last day of a long TET holiday in Vietnam.
Nice weekend to all,
Thank you The,It was a very good example about the differences and problems in pronuncing English and Vietnamese, you really gave me a good laugh.
ReplyDeleteSinikka
Thank you Sinikka,
DeleteI did a research on "Using Humour in teaching Speaking" in which jokes were generated to creat a fear-free classroom. It somehow worked ok.
Hi, The!
ReplyDeleteHere in Portugal, one of the problems I sometimes have with my students is words ending in -ed. Sometimes classes can get quite funny trying to make them say iy the right way.
Luísa
Thank you Luisa,
DeleteWe share the similar situation here as the recognition of Voiced and Voiceless sounds to make it /t/ or /d/ in connected speech is not just as easy as in theory. We have also a big challenge of correcting it from time to time.
Hi The,
ReplyDeleteI agree that one of the biggest weaknesses for Vietnamese learners of English is pronunciation. They may have strengths in grammar, reading, and writing, etc., but when it comes to oral/aural communication, they face a lot of challenges. Perhaps this has to do with the Vietnamese language interference, don't you think?
Thanks to the internet, we now have so many useful tools and resources we can use for free to help our students improve their speaking/pronunciation skills. Hopefully the next generation of ESL users in Vietnam will be more intelligible orally :-)
Thank you Ky Nguyen,
ReplyDeleteYou are right. We have volunteers, native speakers, to help our students with pronunciation to make it Vietnamese-free classes. It works ok but it seems they forget it right after leaving the classroom. Haha, I just suppose the lack of exposure to English is also one of the cause leading to poor pronunciation.
Having worked with Vietnamese speakers quite a bit back in San Jose, California, I know this problem quite well. Dropped endings in general are an issue. I like how you use humor to approach the topic, and am interested in your research on humor.
ReplyDelete-Robert
Thank you Robert,
DeleteAfter 2 years of teaching speaking to English Majors, I proposed to the Faculty to add "Pronunciation" as a compulsory subject of 90 hours in the Lab using "Ship or Sheep" and "Tree or Three" as textbooks and "American Accent Training" as a supplimentary. I think the course was really helpful to our Vietnamese students.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe: I would share my students situation in pronunciation in my classrooms most of them suffer as ESL to practice the regular verb pronunciation
ReplyDelete/-t/,/-d/ and /-ed/.In a big class, is really difficult to practice and reinforce these pronunciations, in small group of class is easier to apply games, use web pages with activities, to practice with each of them. I just opened your suggested web page:http://www.howjsay.com" and I reviewed.It's Great! I'll use with my students and offer them to use by themselves.
Thanks a lot
Orquidia Flores
Thank you very much Orquidia
Delete