Audio Archive & Speaking Practice

First... listen...

The Audio Archive via Omniglot blog by Simon on 2/10/10

I came across the Audio Archive yesterday while searching for information about the pronunciation of English dialects.

The archive is part of an newsgroup about English and contains recordings by English speakers from around the world of a number of different texts.
Other collections of English dialect recordings including the British Library's Sounds Familiar? and Archival Sound Recordings, the BBC Voices project, Sound Comparisons, the American English Dialect Recordings at the Library of Congress, and the International Dialects of English Archive.

and then speak...

10 goofy ways to practise speaking skills from Rliberni's Blog by rliberni

I’ve been thinking about some quick ways in which you can practise English as you go about your daily life. I realise that not everybody is in a position where they are surrounded by English every day. For others they have very limited time to practise and need ‘quick fixes’ to keep their language skills moving. One area which poses a particular problem here is speaking.

I thought back to my early days of learning French, I was in a similar position with no French around me and without things like internet access that are available today!  I invented little tricks and tasks to do in French to keep the momentum going. I’ll share these with you here and I’ve added a few more that I have observed from other people.

So, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing you can do a little effective practice!

These will work with any language you are learning.

Warning – you might want to do some of these behind closed doors!
All the activities require a little imagination, do them when you are performing routine tasks.

Singing:
I love to sing and do these quite often. Great for in the shower, washing the dishes, cleaning or driving.
         1.  Choose a song you like and make up English lyrics – anything will do, wild and wacky or sad and sentimental.
         2.  Invent a ‘jingle’ to advertise your favourite chocolate bar, car, band etc.. let your imagination go wild!
         3.  Make up a rap about what you are doing.

OK, so how do these help anything, you may be asking. There’s spontaneity, which is something you also need when speaking – you don’t know what’s coming next. You can be totally uninhibited and try anything – true freedom of expression! It will help you drag out vocabulary from your boots, you’ll be surprised at what you know. You’ll also find out what you don’t know – no worries – look these words up in your dictionary later on.

Present a TV show!
          4.  Cooking is GREAT for this! As you prepare your dish/meal imagine you are on TV and show your audience how to make it.
        5.  Choose another task you are doing and imagine you are making a video to show others how to do it.

This is great practice for giving instructions and describing a process. Conjure up a team to help you and soon you’ll have your own TV studio!! Get into the part. You could even invite your friends to join in too!

Recite a poem:
         6. Learn a poem or verse by heart and then practise it while you go about your daily tasks. You can, alternatively, base it on a poem in your own language or even make one up.
When I was learning French at school we used to memorise poems and ‘perform’ them in class – great for pronunciation!!

Conversing with pets!
          7. Converse with your dog or cat! You have a real live partner for your conversation even if you get very quizzical looks! (I always did). It adds a dimension to your creativity and great for pronunciation.

Making speeches.
         8. OK, you need a microphone for this, so grab that washing-up brush, wooden spoon or shower gel bottle and make that speech to your invisible audience!!

Become a tour guide!
          9. Grab your  ’microphone’ again and pretend you are a tour guide and give a guided tour of your city, town or village!

        10. Get Gapfillers word of the day on your mobile phone. An effortless way to improve your vocabulary!

and keep practicing...

Make your language practice a part of your life!! Check out these posts to help you with your English practice.

• 10 ways to increase your vocabulary
• 7 virtues to help you write well in English
• 7  deadly sins to avoid in your writing
• Warning – mistakes cost marks!
• An A to Z of effective language practice
• Some tips for improving listening skills

How do YOU feel about using computers to study English?

This informal classroom survey was directed to ESL learners in US secondary schools. Would online international, adult learners studying in an online class or on their own respond the same?

How Do Students Feel About Using Computers To Help Learn English?

via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 1/6/10

• Results From My Year-Long U.S. History Tech Experiment is where I shared the assessment results and my reflections from teaching two U.S. History classes — one entirely in the computer lab and one in my classroom with my typical curriculum.
• Results From Student Evaluation Of My Class And Me (Part Two)
• Now, getting back to this week — here's a copy of the survey students completed.

KEY RESULTS:
ACTIVITIES STUDENTS LIKED BEST AND THAT THEY FELT HELPED THEM LEARN ENGLISH THE MOST:

A Really Nice Online Writing Exercise

A Really Nice Online Writing Exercise via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 2/7/10

Proofreading: Spelling and Writing is a really nice series of many, many exercises where students have to correct paragraphs. It's divided by levels of difficulty.

I'm adding it to The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis (It's a long story about why that list has that title — you can read the explanation in the post).

Thanks to the Langwitches blog for the tip.

Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

Where do you read the new? What are your thoughts about internet culture and how it is changing the way we learn, read, acquire and process information (to turn it into knowledge)?

 

 

Sent to you by Vanessa via Google Reader:

 

 

Facebook and the Future of Free Thought

via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2/3/10

The consumption of news -- that formerly-respected category of information outside of humorous cat and music videos that impacts hundreds of millions of peoples' lives -- could be substantially improved by new methods of subscription offered online. Unfortunately, that's not happening. Numbers from web traffic analysts Hitwise released tonight indicate that almost nothing has changed in 10 years when it comes to popular consumption of news online. The big portals and search engines, delivering their version of news, remain in control. That's bad for independent thinking and human free will.

If you were hoping that a new world of web technology would empower free-thinking people to subscribe to diverse sources of information and analysis about the world's news, then Facebook, albeit a little awkward as a news-reading platform today, may be your best hope.

Sponsor

On Monday we argued that Facebook's call to users to subscribe to news outlets on the social network could soon make it the world's leading news-reading platform. Hitwise picked up on that story and ran some numbers today. Their conclusion: Facebook already drives 350 times as much traffic to other websites in the "news and media" category (3.5%) as Google Reader does (.01%). Perhaps more importantly, though, Facebook, Google News (1.4%). and Google Reader together account for less than 5% of news sites' total traffic. The #1, 2 and 3 drivers of traffic to news sites? Google, Yahoo and MSN - portals and search engines where the editorial judgement is made by centralized algorithms and powerful front-page editors.

So Facebook is the web's most popular subscription-enabled place to read news; be it from links shared by friends or by becoming a Fan of news organizations like Facebook is now encouraging. That doesn't mean that Facebook is yet a better news-reading service than dedicated RSS readers are. But it has certainly caught on as a way to read news far better than dedicated news-reading software has. In fact, it may offer the only meaningful chance that the technologies of online self-publishing and simple subscription are going to change the world like they ought to.

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkins tonight:

Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn. News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site's traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular).

We detailed on Monday a number of ways in which Facebook was already the best place for millions of people to read and share news, but when looking at these Hitwise stats it's important to realize that it's traffic that's being counted. So full feeds inside Google Reader deliver the whole story, whereas Facebook snippets require that readers click all the way through to the source site. None the less, a multiple of 350 is a multiple of 350.

Google News, the 2nd leading news reader according to Hitwise, made some nice changes this week around starring stories to track over time. That could increase its marketshare. But Do-It-Yourself subscription to diverse selections of news sources may be contrary to the contemporary human condition, as desirable as it may be. As web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman said in an unrelated post this week about the closed nature of the iPad: "The bulk of humanity doesn't want a computing experience it can tinker with; it wants a computing experience that works." The same could probably be said for news about the world, and look where it's gotten us.

I'm not saying Facebook is a better way to read news than through an RSS reader. I'm saying no one uses RSS readers, even after years of their being as obviously life-changing as many of us know they are. Instead, people are beginning to use Facebook to read news. That's good, because platforms that encourage independent subscription instead of just consumption of pre-selected news are very important.

Facebook Could Be Our Only Hope (Online)

The big story is of course that the vast, vast majority (like 95%) of traffic to news sites doesn't come from news readers like Google Reader, Google News or Facebook at all. It comes from search engines and portals. Google, Yahoo and MSN. That's what these numbers appear to indicate. Sure there's a long tail of other sites like Twitter, Digg, HuffingtonPost etc. but it's hard to imagine all those other sources at less than 1% each are adding up to much in aggregate. (We've asked Hitwise and await their response.)

Hitwise reported in September that of traffic leaving Twitter, for example, only 3.4% of it went to News and Media sites.

In other words, consumption of online news may not really have changed much for almost anyone in the last 10 years. You, dear reader who probably came here from Twitter or Google Reader or Facebook (maybe Digg if we're lucky), appear to remain part of a freakishly small minority.

That minority may be disproportionately powerful, driving market trends (maybe) and running circles around information streams online (definitely), but the experience of finding out news about what's going on in the world may not be a structurally different thing for almost anyone else, as it is for us.

This is your news on portals.

That doesn't bode well for the long-tail of publishers, small voices given volume by easy publishing tools online. The subscription tools to make those long-tail voices a regular part of our news life have arrived - but no one is using them. Except Facebook, in growing numbers.

Above: News outlets post to Twitter using RSS, manually or with applications like Networked Blogs.

Facebook is the player to watch. Facebook - the dreaded privacy-violating, Farmville-drenched, closed-data, social networking megalith (which is also fun to use and great in many ways) - could be the web's best hope for transforming the world through the power of online syndication and subscription.

So what are you going to do, Facebook? Are you going to move news about the world to an honored and important place on the site, are you going to reverse your December move pushing Fan-page subscriptions irrevocably public (a hostile environment for subscription) or are you just going to post an occasional post to the company's blog about how you can use Facebook to subscribe to news feeds - through a tedious process?

I'm hoping Facebook will take this opportunity and encourage its giant nation of users to add subscriptions to diverse news sources to their news feeds of updates from friends and family. That could deliver a tangible improvement to the world's information landscape, like the internet was always supposed to do.

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Neat sites

Something free to listen to ~ and another link for watching online movies: Neat sites from Interesting Pile, 12/29/09

• LoudLit.org lets you listen to and download audiobooks of public domain literature (via Free Technology for Teachers)
• Find over 150,000 movies to watch online at Movie Monitor (via Research Buzz)

Word Vine

sounds like great fun + good for building vocabulary ~ enjoy! Sent by Google Reader from Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo on 1/30/10

Word Vine is a fun game where you basically have to create compound words. It's probably most accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners.

Since it's a Miniclip game, though, I don't know how many School District content filters will actually allow it through, which is a problem with a number of other links on my website under Word and Video Games.
I've put asterisks next to the online video games that our District lets go through, but haven't gotten around to doing that for the word games.

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Free Online Intermediate English Textbook

Free Online Intermediate English Textbook via Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... by Larry Ferlazzo,1/24/10. who writes:

Fiction in Action: Whodunit is a new textbook for English Language Learners (it appears to me for Intermediate level) that is freely downloadable. I'm not a big fan of any textbook but, if you have to use one or want to use one, it is certainly worth a look.Here's how the publisher describes it:

Fiction in Action: Whodunit is something not seen before, a textbook designed to act as a bridge to extensive reading. Over 12 units encompassing two original six-chapter stories, the book introduces students to the hows and the pleasures of reading accessible fiction in English. Fiction in Action focuses on extended and connected passages in one genre—in this case, the detective story—familiarizing students with the language, style and literary conventions associated with this form of story. A special feature of the text is tasks that are not merely supportive of but intrinsic to the stories.