AN ARTICLE ABOUT TEACHING SPEAKING WITH TECHNOLOGY

This article is written based on my reading about “Technology and Teaching of Oral Skills” conducted by “Marshan Chan, Mission College and Sunburst Media”. The personal teaching experience of Marshan Chan has led him to incorporate technology into her classroom activity. There are some aspects of English language that he successfully incorporates with technology, for example English grammar, writing, reading vocabulary, listening, speaking, and oral pronunciation. But this article will concern on explaining the use of technology to teach pronunciation skill. Marshan never neglects that the existence some conventional tools is useful for helping the students’ understanding about speaking technique. For example the students still use a mirror in the class to see how their mouths move to produce a voice. It seems simple but it shows that mirror directly helps the students in learning. Besides that explanation, she also conveys that technology also works to upgrade the students’ ability in pronunciation. Here are the technologies that she means.

Audiotape

The use of audiotape is essential in the oral skills class. For receptive skills development, the tape player is the easiest way for students to listen to a variety of speakers on a variety of topics in a variety of genres – dialogs, interviews, lectures, stories, songs, and poems. For productive skills, the audiotape recorder is currently the most accessible piece of voice recording equipment.

Videotape

Videotape is a step up from audiotape. First of all, playing prerecorded tapes provides the audiovisual information that helps students observe, understand, and imitate oral communication, from language expressions and sentence structure to lip shape, facial expressions, gestures and distance between speakers, not to mention other cultural, behavioral, and sociological aspects of language. Videotape provides speakers with a view of themselves that they don't otherwise have, and it gives them a stronger basis for evaluating their performance and setting goals for future learning.

Language Lab

The language lab does many things that benefit oral skills development better than the regular non-tech classroom. For example, in choral repetition drills, students can concentrate on the model (teacher or tape) with far less interference from the voices of classmates. Another function, pairing and grouping students and assigning speaking tasks, greatly increases students' speaking and listening practice.  A third function of the language lab that is superior to a non-tech classroom is tesing.

Voicemail

Students can record a message, review the message, delete and record the message, and finally save it and exit the system. The benefit to students is they get listening and speaking practice and life skills practice.

Software

There are other exciting changes in the digital realm. We – students and teachers – can play CD-ROMs and sound files on web pages. Repetition of sounds, words and sentences has never been easier. With a click of a button, the student can hear the target language again and again and the "speaker" never gets tired of saying the same thing in the same way.

Voiced mail

This is the digital replacement of the audiotape. It's an improvement over audiotape in several ways. The students and the teacher transfer sound file attachments in email, not tapes. It has the advantages of click to play, click to record, and click to stop. As the teacher, she can insert her comments and corrections in between the students' recording, whereas with audiotape, she has to record either simultaneously or at the end of a student's recording.

Sources :

Technology and the Teaching of Oral Skills

Marsha Chan, Mission College and Sunburst Media

marsha@sunburstmedia.com