Week 6: Teaching Speaking Skills Through CALL

Based on the articles:
-The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/ Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong
-Using Original Video and Sound Effects to Teach English by Shahla Yassaei.

Rate: 5

This article was about how computers fulfill the role of tool or resource to facilitate in many ways the teachers' work, while for learners it helps them to prepare and practice in tasks and experiences.

The use of CALL increases the interests of students as that is something that catches their attention and, most importantly, allows them to improve their speaking skills, therefore, have more fluency, and we know that getting fluency is a little bit difficult and the only way to achieve it is through talking a lot.

Something that I would like to remember is that there are two components that spoken language covers, which are Meaningful aspect.  It offers great programs that allow students to talk to computers, they can choose any situation that interest them and then, they can record themselves in order to provide their opinions about it. I think that implementing this program encourage students to speak and think critically.

The other is Mechanical aspect, it offers audios and video clips where show to students the articulation to produce any sound or a word and the study of phonology,These video-clips show the speaker's mouth, so it is easily for students to see the movements during the pronunciation of the word or sounds. Besides, It can convert any text to speech or translate sounds into graphic representations, so students can practice the pronunciation per each word. I consider that it is a good idea for the ones who are shy because it provide them a private environment, so it does not matter how many times they mispronounce a word because the computer can repeat that as many times they need it.

Something that I liked from the article was that we can create our lessons based on media like radio programs, newspaper, television shows, videos, etc. and that is amazing because using these materials for teaching our classes will be meaningful for the students as they will be able to engage with our activities because they are familiar with that. Also, we can include all those resources with different skills ( listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar, etc).