Week 3: Oral / Aural Skill Building and Delicious.com

Busy week! I might have too many things on my plate this week that my assignments seemed to be lagging behind. *Sorry Robert* But I've completed them, nevertheless. Though I still have markings to be done. Kids will surely be asking when will they get their papers back - or marks, actually. The ugly side of exam-oriented education system...

So what have I learnt this week? A lot, really. First of all, Delicious. It's a social bookmarking service. Before this I only knew how to bookmark page using the bookmark toolbar on my browser. And I've heard about del.icio.us. Little did I know that this Delicious thing is actually a social bookmarking service. What does it mean actually? It means, I use it to bookmark my favourite pages and I can share what I've bookmarked with my friends - hence the social part. Even better, I can log in to my Delicious from any computers so my bookmarks are always available. Pretty much like Dropbox where all my files are kept in my 'floating hard disk'. How technology makes our life easy! So if you're also on Delicious and wants to share good website pages (mine is mostly on English language teaching), feel free to follow me.

The topic this week is pretty interesting: Oral/Aural Skill Building. First thing first, I looked up on the online dictionary the meaning of 'aural'. Here's one from Oxford Dictionaries.

So this week's topic focuses on speaking and listening skills, with an addition of pronunciation skill. Of course Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) helps a lot in the teaching process of these skills with all sorts of technology from computers, internet, online radio and TV etc. The internet, for example, has tonnes of useful websites to be used in classroom either with students doing independent learning or with teacher teaching in front. I found elllo to be very useful, same goes to ManyThings. Life is so much easier for a modern teacher like me. Students too get the advantage of being exposed to authentic and semi-authentic materials easily, not only from local production but also from international production. This is in line with the school's mission which is to become a n excellent education centre that produces quality students who are globally efficient.

                   

One question I had in mind while reading one of the article The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong is regarding accents. How could students' speaking skills be measured by softwares or all these modern technology while there exists a gap between the producer and the second language users in terms of foreign accent. I mean, not all Malaysians have same accent when speaking English. Some may have Manglish, some may have Kelantanese (Kelantan is a state in Malaysia who has a distinct local dialect) accent, some like me may well have a different accent - not Manglish, not British, not American but an accent of my own. My question was immediately answered upon reading another article New Perspectives on Teaching Pronunciation by Maria Grazia Busà. Thanks to her, I have now another knowledge on language learning - prosody. Basically, prosody is the use of pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm in speech to convey information about the structure and meaning of an utterance. For more information about how all these are linked, I suggest you to read the article which is available on our class website.