Week 3: Delicious.com Social Bookmarking and Aural skill building

Delicious.com is a great website!! How come I never came across it before! It a site to bookmark all your favourite websites and categorising them in different folders. You can even share with others what you have found on a certain topic. Although as everything new, it took sometime to understand the different components of Delicious. But with patience and being adventurous on clicking on other things was great fun! I managed not only to tag the links but also to make different stacks (folders) with different purposes. I would definitely use this for my course, as a place to have the articles and other sites for my class.

Here is my link on delicious:
http://delicious.com/stacks/meliramosvaesken

Regarding Aural/oral skills reading, I had a slight idea that CALL influenced in language teaching. One thing that called my attention was the use of online software used to do prosody ( intonation, stress and rhythm) analysis in research that later on was used in class by several teachers. Some of the software were: CAPT, zipworld and WinPitchLTL (academic article from The pedagogy-technology interface in Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training - A. Neri, C. Cucchiarini, H. Strik, L. Boves).

Read more on CALL (http://lands.let.kun.nl/literature/neri.2002.3.pdf and www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf )

I tried using zipworld, but no success in understanding how it worked. I know they are good for students to compare their intonation with a native speaker. But a question arouse , what is considered a native speaker? There are a variety of definitions on that respect, better discuss that on another post.

Oh and if you want to have a look at these websites for oral skills development in class or extra activity for your students, have a look! I really liked them!!

Podcast directory for different topics : http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php

A bit of everything for British influence, TV, radio, etc.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/

Short and long podcasts with pre, while and post listening activities, look in Randall's lab: http://www.esl-lab.com/