Week 03 – 1: Skill-building websites for oral/aural skills and saving bookmarks with Delicious

This week, I would like to summarize what I learned.

Readings

1. Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials by Lindsay Miller
1) Lindsay Miller said that we spend more than forty percent of our daily communication time on listening and it means listening is the language skill most often used in everyday life. She also emphasized the importance of authentic materials in teaching listening and ‘authentic text’ is the same as a real world context.
2) Three main parts of listening exercises are as follows:
Pre-listening, While-listening, Post-listening activities
3) She suggested authentic materials using the format of pre-, while-, post-listening activities such as radio, TV, video, Internet, and CD-ROM.

Oral/Aural skill-building websites

1) Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab - http://www.esl-lab.com/
2) www.ManyThings.org - http://www.manythings.org
3) University of Iowa - http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#
4) Speech Analyzer - http://www.sil.org/computing/sa/index.htm
5) 10 alternatives to Delicious (including the highly recommended Diigo)http://searchengineland.com/10-alternatives-to-delicious-com-bookmarking-59058
6) Pronunciation Tips from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/

Using Delicious.com to store useful links

Until recently, my main web browser was Internet Explorer. Microsoft has over 90% of OS market share in Korea so most Korean websites are Windows-based. That’s why I couldn’t help using Explorer. However, I found new websites for information through Google and other search engines I got from this e-learning course and these new ones needed another browser, Chrome. Since then, I have been importing my ‘favorites’ of Explorer to the ‘bookmark’ of Chrome but it is cumbersome.
Delicious.com gave me a clear solution. I created my own page on Delicious.com and shared them with others. I could see the ‘saves’ of each link I added and I was surprised that many people already saved those links. To use Delicious.com is an interesting and very helpful experience.
Here is my “Delicious” page.
http://delicious.com/stacks/spaceleto

Sources:
- Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials (Word .doc file)http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc