Week 3 ... Oral/aural skills websites and Delicious

It is Sunday afternoon and I am done with my third week on my webskills course. Frankly, I never expected I could learn so many things in such a short period of time. This week started by reading two out of three articles that were provided by our tutor. I chose reading By Maria Busa on New Perspectives in Teaching Pronunciation and the other one was written by Juila Jong that was focused on the employment of CALL in teaching Second/Foreign Language speaking skills.  We were also asked to take a look at some lesson plans and suggested websites that are related for English language learning and I put especially attention to two of them. One of them is Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com). I highly recommend this website because it presents different kinds of listening exercises for different levels. On the other hand, we can also find listening quizzes, listening quizzes for academic purposes, videos, teaching tips and links for supplementary material. Additionally, we can also download the tracks and videos clips by installing some plugins to our computers. 

The other website I am recommending is found on the Best Sites to Practice Speaking English(Larry Ferlazzo) and its name is The Art of Storytelling (http://www.artofstorytelling.org) This website may be useful to develop the four macro skills and it can be implemented for any kind of student who can structure sentences in English. The best of all is that you no not have to Log into the website and it is free. The peculiarity of this site is that you can create a story by recording your own voice or typing a script. It is really funny to do so because you are free to choose the genre, background, characters and objects to the story. Besides that, at the end there is an option in which you may select sending your story to several e-mails so people may read or listen to it.

Additionally, I also created my account on “Delicious” (www.delicious.com). This was the first time I saw this website and I find it very interesting because it has many features that are not found in other site. Perhaps the most peculiar characteristic is that users do not need to keep a record of their favorite websites in their web browser. That means that I can easily log into this web space and click on the previously saved link and I can have access to it. Having managed the bookmarks efficiently is a good way to avoid having problems in the future. You can also tag the links you save and at the same time look for information by typing any Key word.

Besides all the readings and activities I had during this week, I could analyze one final project report from a previous Webskills course participant. By reading this project, I have been able to start thinking about my final report as well. To be honest, I have not made up my mind but I am expected to have a better idea in the following weeks.