10/18 Listening & Speaking

                           Listening & Speaking

      Today, the teacher let us access to some websites that can help hone students’ listening and speaking abilities. I think adopting CALL ( especially websites for improving listening and speaking skills) is a good idea because not every school is able to hire foreign teachers. Therefore, websites that provide speeches or short videos made by native speakers can replace the need for foreign teachers. Take TED TALK, for example, it is a convenient website for medium to high-level listeners because it provides lots of lectures from prestigious people from all over the world, so students can practice different accents. What’s more, the videos on this website are classified, so listeners can find the videos they like in a short time.

          We also use Skype to discuss with our classmates about a story. I think this is a good activity to encourage students to practice speaking because they need to exchange information to complete a whole story. However, I think this activity is a little difficult for elementary students. We had better let students write down the key points they heard while listening to the parts of the story.