Session 6 Reflection

Teachers usually spend very limited time on training students' listening and speaking skills because they thought that speaking and listening had been taken only the minor parts of public exams. To close this gap in our language teaching, teachers can try as many different "modern" ways to train students' speaking skills as we wish.

Fluency Tutor

Teachers can either upload an authentic text to this tool or choose a relevant article from the resources, then tell students to read aloud the assigned text. It is an awesome learning tool that students can learn to read aloud at home. Every text in Fluency Tutor offers demonstrations of reading aloud for students to follow. Students can read at home and teachers can read aloud with them at school. Teachers can adjust the accent, the volume, and the speed of the reading demonstration, for example, teachers can change the speed from "regular" to "faster" if they believe their students are capable of reading aloud very smoothly.

Assessment

Students can record their reading aloud practices. The assignment still cannot be marked by the tool automatically but teachers  can listen to the sound file their students submitted , score and give feedback to everyone. Teachers do not need to make a mark sheet to jot everything down. Students' total reading time, total passages read, and the average scores will be tracked and shown by just one click by the teacher! It can be a very simple but practical assignment. I am going to put some core texts from textbook and dictation areas there and assign them to my students as the whole-year speaking training.

Audacity 

I always use Windows Movie Maker to make videos. However, I found the function of producing multi-track audio recordings in Audacity is comparatively varied. The major difference between the two tools is that Audacity can help record everything you need and mix them with background music. It can highly facilitates teachers' production of digital storytelling. Watching digital storytelling can not only gaining students' attention but  also give more time to students for revision; they can watch the story again and again for many times, in the other words, it provides another self-learning platform for students to study and learn. It can also save teachers' time in real time classrooms, the extensive speaking tasks can be finished at home by just watching the digital storytelling. Thus, teachers and students can focus on more face to face demonstration and interaction in discussions ,and teachers can give instant feedback to correct students' errors in no time. Audacity must be a strong back-up for speaking and listening teaching!