Week 10 Reflection Listening and speaking

          This week's topic is listening and speaking. I have found the following websites that can be used in teaching listening and speaking:
1. http://www.rong-chang.com/listen.htm
This website has provides listening materials from varieties of topics, such as small talk, college life, at the library, etc. It meets the different levels' ESL learners' needs. They can use this website to check their listening comprehension by clicking the proper topics.
2. http://www.ted.com/talks
This website offers listening materials for differenct proficiency level. This is a good website for TOEFL takers to prepare the listening portion of the test since there are a lot of videos and presentations. Learners can pick certain video according to their levels. Also, the videos on the website can be paused, it is convenient if the learners didn't get a certain sentence. Learners can used these videos for dictation purpose as well.
3. http://www.englishstudydirect.com/OSAC/langacls.htm
There are a lot of listening activities on this website. Learners can choose proper listening activity according to the classification of the levels.

Helpful Links for ESL Teachers

Randall’s Cyber Listening Lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/index.htm where students can take quizes to test their listening skils.  The questions are multiple-choice or true/false and are graded on the spot.  

Arlyn Freed’s ESL/EFL listening resources: www.elshome.com/

A useful list of podcasts for learners: http://iteslj.org/  (check http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Listening/Podcasts:Podcasts (making audio files available on-line, usually MP3 formate).

Activities for ESL students: http://a4esl.org/

Dave’s ESL Café on the Web: http://eslcafe.com/search/ a global community classroom open 24 hours a day for ESL/EFL students from around the world.  Information on jobs for ESL teachers, too. 

Archives of actual work by ESL students: http://susangaer.com/studentprojects/

Teachers helping teachers: http://www.pacificnet.net/~mandel/index.html

 Commercially available products for teaching pronunciation

Hummingbird http://www.humbird.com/ Hummingbird teaches exact production of American English phonetics, using color-coded mouth placement symbols, captions, and musical accompanyment. Videos and audiotapes provide rhythmic presentation and exercise of English sounds, words, and phrases.

Phrase by Phrase Pronunciation http://www.sunburstmedia.com/Phrase.html Phrase by Phrase's 16 lessons integrate stress, rhythm, intonation with vowels and consonants in contextualized listening/speaking activities.

Pronunciation Power http://www.englishlearning.com/ An interactive program designed for intermediate to advanced English learners of all ages. It contains more than 20 hours of instruction and is highly recommended.

Pronunciation Workout http://www.sunburstmedia.com/PronWkt.html Pronunciation Workout physically warms up learners for oral communication in any language.

Speech Synthesis http://www.speechtoys.com/spchtoys/spsyn.html Helpful links for speech synthesis and text to speech programs.

Speechlab/Sprachlabor (Deutsch) http://www.media-enterprise.de/engl/speechla/speechla.htm Introductory tutorials providing insight into the acoustic foundations of human speech. Geared toward the teacher looking to enhance the quality of phonetic lectures. Use spectrograms, or "speech samples either existing or recorded via microphone or sound card can be processed and altered". Download the demo or order the CD for 160 DM.

Using Your Hands to Teach Pronunciation http://www.sunburstmedia.com/UsgHands.html This videotape demonstrates hand signals that language teachers can use to help students learn elements of pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress and intonation.

Academic Resources:

The Journal of Phonetics [online] http://hbuk.co.uk/ap/journals/jp/ The Journal of Phonetics publishes papers of an experimental or theoretical nature that deal with phonetic aspects of language and linguistic communication processes.

The Linguist http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/ The Linguist contains online academic papers, job resources, research support and a myriad of other helpful links for the linguist.

Improving Japanese pronunciation of American English [r] using Electronic Visual Feedback (EVF). http://www.u-aizu.ac.jp/~steeve/rsound2.html This abstract by Hisako Murakawa and Stephen Lambacher URL documents the results of applying this technology to Japanese speakers and provides other helpful tips concerning pedagogy in this context.

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is a machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 100,000 words and their transcriptions. This format is particularly useful for speech recognition and synthesis. Because IPA is not the standard here, this site is really for the serious developer.

Language Learning & Technology http://llt.msu.edu/ An online publication looking at how technology impacts the classroom. Articles relating to technology that facilitates the teaching of pronunciation on the Internet.

Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing http://www.clsp.jhu.edu Researchers at the Center for Language and Speech Processing seek to discover how language is produced, perceived, and understood. Program and conference information provided.