LyricsTraining - an Exciting Tool for Improving Listening Skills

If you are a music enthusiast, and meanwhile, a language learner, this is definitely a perfect tool for you! I felt so excited when I first found this site! Basically, it is a gap-filling listening exercise based on the lyrics of songs (at the same time you can enjoy the music video, so brilliant). There are two practising forms - write mode and choice mode. For learners at relatively higher levels, you can go for write mode which requires you to spell each word by yourselves, while choice mode provides several choices of each word, which lowers the difficulty to some extent. Individually speaking, I prefer the write mode (we can practise more skills from it) and am really impressed by its talented design, very user-friendly, which can be summed up as the following points.

  1). There are four modes (beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert, see picture A) to practise each song you select, which can fit learners at almost all levels (except the very beginners of course).
  2). It pauses after each line. If you are not clear about the missing words of that line, you can click on the backspace icon on the left, which allows you to listen to the same line as many times as you want; if you are still not able to figure them out (perhaps after listening a few times), you can then press the tab button on the right - the first missing word will then be displayed to you. But you can still try the rest of the gaps for that line (they will not be affected), which is one of the most admiring parts of this tool. (See picture B.)
  3). It tells how many letters each missing word has, and more excitingly, if your answer is wrong (no matter it is a listening mistake or a spelling mistake), you will immediately know it as you can't type a wrong letter in. Isn't that clever?
  4). After finishing one line (before going to the next line), you have the chance to listen to it again, which can strengthen your understanding of it as well as make the move to the next line smoother so that you won't feel rushed. It is also like a bonus when you finish one line successfully the music comes out! The faster the blanks are filled up, the more fluent the song goes. For learners with expert skills, the song can be played without stops, which makes the game more exciting!

Picture A

Picture B

Using songs as listening materials makes the learning process more enjoyable and interesting. It is almost impossible to find someone who doesn't like music at all. And you can choose whatever music you like to practise. Another beauty of having music as a learning resource is that as authentic material it helps learners to be familiar with different accents and the various ways of pronouncing a word, which is useful in real-life communication. In addition to these, this exercise not only trains your listening ability, but also helps you to improve vocabulary & expressions as well as grammar knowledge (by familiarizing you with the same sentence patterns appearing repeatedly). A study on BBC website  further confirms my belief that using songs in the target language is an effective and pleasant way to acquire the language.

Furthermore, this tool provides a large number of songs including children's songs (So it also suits young learners!), and you can find the latest popular songs as well (I've tried a song published only a week ago and found it on this site!). Moreover, learners of other languages (French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese) can also find it useful just by changing the language setting. I am definitely one of its biggest fans! Really love it.

If limitations must be pointed out, I would probably say that the users of this tool may need to have some basic knowledge of computer (at least know how to type) to finish this exercise. Besides, learners may need guidance to choose a suitable song to practise as there are too many choices on the website and their favourite songs may not always be appropriate for their levels.

An Interactive Video tool- Vialogue

Here comes another exciting tool - Vialogue! From its name, it is not difficult to guess that it has something to do with "video" and "dialogue". In fact, as a great platform for launching discussions around a specific video, this tool is brilliant for ELT teachers to design listening exercises.

From my own experience as a language learner, authentic materials are always more appealing to learners than the 'designed' materials in the textbook as a learning resource. They are more interesting and useful. For example, online videos, which include news reports, movie clips, celebrities' speeches, documentaries, advertisements and so on, tend to be up-to-date, close to life and  more likely to help learners to adapt to the normal speed of native speakers'. However, one problem related to using these videos as listening exercises is: when learners are not clear about the important information (which can happen often for learners with relatively weak listening skills), they need to rewind to those points and this action can sometimes be quite troublesome and time-consuming. BUT now with the help of Vialogue, this can be easily achieved and saves time for not only students but the teacher. To design a listening exercise using a video, the teacher can first create a Vialogue like picture A: (tutorial of Vialogue can be found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX8oFxFGGAg )

Pic. A

and then add some questions based on the video content. The question can be a fill in the blanks one (like picture B), a multiple choice one (the template is provided, see picture C), an open ended one, etc. Better still, whenever a question is created, it will be automatically matched to the relevant point of time (alternatively, teachers can put it a bit earlier to increase the difficulty) so that students don't need to do the 'rewind' action manually to catch these points which can be important information of the whole video.

Pic. B

Pic. C

Pic. D

Apart from turning the video into a 'formal' listening exercise, the teacher or any student can put comments on it any time (instead of after finishing the whole watching) and this is time stamped, which allows other people to relate to the original content. Sometimes watching a 'long' video can be boring and is likely to demotivate students at some point. Adding comments or replying to the comments makes the watching process interactive. The comment can be anything related to the video, for example, questions, background knowledge, personal feelings, language points, etc.

Having said all of these, I just can't wait to begin my journey with this super smart tool. If you are also a big fan of using videos in your teaching - have a go with Vialogue!

Bibliography
Vialogues-Make Videotaped Lectures Interactive
http://languageteku.over-blog.com/vialogues-make-videotaped-lecturers-interactive

Some Thoughts on Interactive Whiteboards

As a high-end technological instructional tool, the interactive whiteboard (IWB) can now be found in most of the UK schools. Having experienced it in the ICT in ELT classes this year, I want to write down some of my feelings about this "seemingly" powerful tool which has not yet been popularized in my home country.

Admittedly, IWBs did capture my attention immediately when I first saw the teacher use it to flip through her PowerPoint slides just like performing magic. "It is amazing, absolutely splendid!"- I felt in my heart. Like a huge iPad, it allows users to touch, click or drag the items on the screen with their fingers or an IWB pen. Better still, notes can be handwritten on the board, which can then be transformed into a PDF file or text and be saved and sent to the students. However, there were some moments when handwriting could not be recognized by this advanced board and the teacher had to give up and returned to use the mouse and the keyboard. I remembered once the teacher asked each of us to come up and choose an option for a question; unfortunately, the IWB could not recognize our touch and it turned out to be the teacher clicking on it for us using the mouse!  In terms of the interaction from this aspect, the main interaction I can see is that between the teacher and the whiteboard. I can hardly find any interaction between students.

In terms of the classroom activities or games with this smart board, most of them (I have experienced in the class) share the following features: students come up to the board to click a relevant icon or drag something like a word or a picture to a certain place (where the answer may be) as part of the group work; or each group has a representative to do a similar action for the whole group. When one of the class members go up to the board to finish his part, other members just sit in their seats watching that person doing his bit and then another person finishing another bit. Although I was amazed at how these normal activities can be done in such a gorgeous way by means of the technology, gradually I got a bit bored of it, beginning to consider "what's the point of doing this""is it a waste of time seeing other people 'interacting' with the whiteboard while the rest of us just sitting quietly""has the students' language ability been improved by doing this" and so on. Perhaps for young learners, it will be more beneficial as it can cultivate their hands-on ability as well as for kinaesthetic learners who like to move and touch a lot while learning.

There is no doubt that IWBs can be used in other better ways which may achieve "real" interactions. But that requires the teacher to have a high skill of using it and they may need to spend much more time in the preparation stage compared to using a normal whiteboard (yet the added interactive effects with an IWB are unknown). Having said that, there are still many useful points of an IWB, such as in the way the teacher uses the PowerPoint which can achieve some flash effects as well as in accessing materials more easily, even though they seem to have little to do with interactivity.

As far as in the learning context of my home country (China), from my own experience, quite many Chinese students prefer sitting still listening to the teacher's talk to moving a lot. Also, given the high price of an IWB, it may be difficult for it to become a popular tool in the next few years in the ELT classroom in China, even in its developed areas.