Outside class, students practice listening and reading by watching movies and reading books (or other things). They practice writing since teachers ask them to write essays, reviews, comments… but what about speaking?
How often do students practice speaking outside class? On average, probably far less than once a month.
So how can we provide opportunities for our students to practice speaking outside class? There are different ways, of course, but here is one kind of task that I have been setting since I started using OneNote: many of the dialogues that I used to let students write down in the past (e.g. at level A1 “Introducing someone” or at level A2 “Dialogue in a shop”), I now ask students to record with OneNote Class Notebook and put the recordings into the Collaboration Space.
Step 1: Recording
Windows:
Mac:
Step 2: Insertion of student recordings in Collaboration Space
Step 3: Follow-up/Feedback
- I ask students to listen to at least 1-2 recordings of their classmates so they get an impression of how their classmates completed the task and practice listening at the same time.
- We listen to some of the recordings together in class e.g. to discuss particularities.
- I listen to all of the recordings at home and provide feedback mostly directly underneath the recording so all students can see the feedback and benefit from it.
A few more facts about my tasks:
- I ask students to avoid lengthy recordings. If the files are too large, they slow down follow-up activities.
- Students are generally free to choose any program they want to do the recordings, as long as they insert the recording into the Collaboration Space afterwards. Most students prefer using OneNote.
