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What skills do students need to develop?
Listening is the ability to process, interpret and extract information from spoken language. It is important for English language learners to comprehend social and academic language. Educators must involve students in purposeful activities to help students to develop active listening skills. I provide questions and prompts prior to listening tasks to help students maintain focus. Initially, I model how to create such questions and prompts. Then, scaffold students to begin developing their own.
Speaking is a productive skill. Students engage in oral communication in a variety of situations for an array of purposes and audiences. As part of oral communication, students are constantly using language in meaningful interaction with others. This occurs during classroom interactions when students have to listen and speak to carry on a conversation.
Newcomers may hesitate to engage in oral language at the earliest stages of language acquisition. Creating an accepting and nonthreatening environment is an important step in encouraging newcomers to attempt to speak the new language. Production of oral language should never be forced or rushed.
Social vs. Academic Language Acquisition
There are different timelines for learning social vs. academic language. Under ideal conditions, it takes the average second-language learner one-two years to acquire Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS). BICS involves the everyday language that occurs between conversational partners. On the other hand, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), or the content rich language of academics, takes five to seven years under ideal conditions to develop to a level that of native speakers.
Websites to support Basic Verbal Communication Skills
Websites to support Basic Verbal Communication Skills
Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone is a well-known online tool for learning languages. There is a fee to access the website or app. Rosetta Stone has exercises designed to help users learn basic words, before forming phrases and longer sentences. It’s a very immersive method. The program is specifically designed for beginner ELLs to practice speaking, reading, writing and listening skills.
Duolingo
Duolingo is similar to Rosetta Stone as it teaches English from many languages – French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and many more languages in the future. The website is free! It is also available as a free app for iOS and Android. One of the best free English language learning apps today and is highly recommended for English beginners. Others can use this same free website to learn a foreign language.
Learning Chocolate ~Vocabulary Learning Platform
This English language vocabulary site has words and images organized into over 100 categories. Example categories include animals, body, birds, holiday, camping, phonic, days of the week, foods, and much more! Each word has audio and many of the review activities are based on hearing the word to complete the required work. An added benefit to the site is that it is easy to switch the target language from English to other languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, German, and Spanish. Note: This site includes advertising.
Student Extension Project
Student Extension Project
After students explore this website independently or in small group, they create their own narrations of images (similar to this website) using another tech tool such as Thinklink.
Fun Tech Tools To Practice Speaking English
Fun Tech Tools To Practice Speaking English
This list highlights website that have students recording their own voices in a number of different ways and post their speaking assignments online.
Voki
A Voki is a talking avatar students can design and easily post on a blog or website. Newcomer English Language learners may feel some anxiety with speaking the new language in front of their peers or teachers. The the online tool Voki could help with overcoming some of the language and confidence barriers. This website offers speaking capabilities by typing in (text-to-speech), phoning in, or recording a message the Voki avatar verbally recites. Voki avatars could be used in classroom presentations or introductions to help ESL students express themselves and gain a sense of confidence in their English-speaking abilities. Voki will help students practice listening skills as well. By typing in words or sentences and having the avatar narrate back, the ESL student can learn by hearing and repeating the language.
Student Created Screencasts
Student Created Screencasts
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. The ability to create easy screencasts with audio is an excellent learning opportunity for English Language Learners. Teachers and students can create and narrate short tutorials, visual presentations, and lesson demonstrations! The lesson ideas are endless!
Apple MacBooks offer a simple and free screenshot solution that is already installed and available on the computer… QuickTime Player! This feature is very easy for students to use. Remind students to turn on the internal microphone is check marked and turned on.
This is a free one-click screen recording web app for Windows or Mac. The Free Plan allows 15-minute recordings, Screen & webcam recording. YouTube HD publishing. Save as video file.
Note: To learn about Chrome extensions, visit the Chrome Extensions & Apps Explained Page.
Screencastify gives users the ability to create screen recorded videos using Chrome browser. Teachers can make tutorials for their class. Students can also use Screencastify to produce digital presentations. With ScreenCastify installed in Chrome users can record anything happening in a tab in the Chrome browser. Voice overs are supported and a pointer is included by default. Completed recordings can be saved to your computer or uploaded directly to YouTube.
Student Example of Screencasting: After learning how to write sentences in English, beginner ELLs create their first voice-over narration using slideshow presentation and QuickTime Player. Then, they share the video with their classmates and parents by posting it on our ESL Class Blog.
iOS Apps to Practice Speaking English
iOS Apps to Practice Speaking English
**Last time I checked all of these apps had a FREE version!
Tell About This
Tell About This
Tell About This inspires students to record audio of their thoughts and stories through interesting photo prompts. Users can create custom prompts using the iPad’s camera. Videos can be easily saved to iPad camera roll. ELLs can practice both receptive (listening) and productive (speaking) skills. Free version offers limited prompts. Worth the low cost!
Chatterpix
Chatterpix
Chatterpix : funny talking videos of photos is one of my students’ favorite apps! This fun app iPhone or iPad can make anything image talk. Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Short animated videos are created and are easy to share. Each voice recording has a limit of 30 seconds so students needed to be concise in what they say. Simply email or saving the video to your iPad camera roll which can then up uploaded to your Google Drive account. I’ve found that some Beginner ELLs prefer using the cartoon like voices instead of hearing their own voicing.
This Interactive whiteboard app allows teachers and students of any age to create video presentations called ‘ShowMe’s that can be shared via the device on online privately or to a community audience. The user can record and create engaging voice over presentations of their chosen topic by using some of the many tools such as adding text, drawings, photos and images.
Apps similar to Show Me:
Explain Everything
Educreations
Screen Chomp
Click Here to See a List of More Great iOS Apps
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