Recently I’ve been prompting learners to use the dictaphone function of their smartphones to help them develop their listening and pronunciation. Here are a range of activities that I have found to be particularly effective.
Listen ear! Ted Talk listening & speaking activity
- Choose any Ted talk from the category 1-6 minutes and watch twice. Take notes of the key points while you are watching.
- Present the main ideas of your talk to your partner, they must take notes.
- Your partner will now give a 60 second presentation of the key points from your presentation and record this using their phones.
- You do the same with their talk.
- You both listen to the voice recordings/video, and the original Ted Talks.
This activity can help learners develop listening skills in any context. I have used it in Cambridge exam preparation classes and EAP classes.
Presentation & Cambridge Exams (speaking paper) practice
- Using the dictaphone of their smartphones learners can record part or all of their presentations or part 2 and/or 3 of the Cambridge Exams speaking paper.
- During playback learners make a list of 2-3 features they liked and disliked about their recording. This could include: pronunciation; intonation; stress; pausing; signposting; voice projection; articulation, hesitation.
- Students re-record themselves working on the features they identified they wanted to improve. Playback can be individual or in pairs for peer feedback.
- If a class IM group has been set up, students can send the recording to the teacher for on the spot feedback and pronunciation support.
Pronunciation is one of the aspects of speaking students from both my EAP and Cambridge Exam classes. My students have found this quick turn around and instant feedback strategy extremely beneficial. Here is some feedback:
- We learn to express our ideas clearly
- Each recording is easier
- The recordings make me feel more confident to speak in front of others
- I realise giving presentations is difficult
- How to control your time and speed of speaking to a time limit
Although Bennet Miller films are not my taste they are acclaimed and there is no denying that he is a good director. I actually prefer is adverts to be fair, especially Little Miss Puffytail which is one of a series of three 30 second toilet paper ads that he has recently produced for Quilted Northern.
I recently used the Little Miss Puffytail video in class, to draw learner awareness to intonation and its relation to attitude when speaking. My students have a habit of talking in long monotone stretches of discourse, without pausing or chunking, so I also wanted them to consider these features.
Here are the stages of the activity:
- Show the first frame of the advert on pause. Students describe the picture using as much specific vocabulary as possible, with the teacher providing any unknown lexis. (This is particularly useful for the Cambridge speaking test part 2 where students are asked to describe 2 pictures).
- Students predict what they think is going to happen in the video, where the video was shot, and for what purpose. They can also talk about the plot and any other characters they think may appear.
- The first playback is silent for students to see if their predictions were correct. They usually detect that it is an advert. I get them to script it out using their imagination!
- The second playback is with sound – subtitles can be turned on if desired. Once it has been viewed, the students brainstorm adjectives for how Miss Puffytail is feeling. I get them to think about why she is feeling this way, and how they were able to detect this . This highlights the point that they were able to discover the feeling from her solemn intonation.
- Open class, attitude, intonation and pausing are discussed, and the teacher boards phrases from the ad with the intonation and pauses marked in red.
- The students do the same to their scripts, but they do it firstly for feeling sad, and secondly for feeling happy and enthusiastic. Teacher monitors to help with doubts.
- Students practise both versions of their scripts together in pairs and record one sad and one enthusiastic version using their mobile phones.
- The students playback the recordings to listen for the differences in intonation in the two attempts – hopefully there are some!
I found this was an interesting and useful activity for the learners to make them aware of the significance of intonation in the delivery of what we say, and to encourage them to vary their intonation when they speak. It created a lot of interaction and emergent language.
The best way to know how you do something without a doubt is to be able to see yourself doing it!
Get your students to record each other for 30 seconds to 1 minute with the video function of their smart phones so they can see and hear for themselves how they come across when they speak English.
Students can spend 5 minutes to write down 6-8 questions that they would like to ask their partner. This can be a free activity or lexis, grammar determined by the teacher.
Students then interview each one at a time while simultaneously recording their partner using their smart phones.
During the play back, students are encouraged to think about their pronunciation and their voice projection. They decide whether they speak clearly or if there is something that could be improved.
Another variation would be for the teacher to give the students a text containing sounds that are difficult for their learners, in order for the learners to see how they are pronouncing the sounds and if they could do it differently.
If the class is large, pairs could be grouped in fours for the playback stage to compare and contrast pronunciation with more peers.
If you try this activity, let me know how it goes in the comments!
Very inspirational story. Got me thinking about how to tackle pronunciation with E-learning