TELL ELI

Students can use it to listen to themselves and at their progress. They may also use the audio to insert in their PowerPoint presentations and even in some emails.

Links mentioned

NPR:
http://www.npr.org

Kaisernetwork:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org
/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?
display=detail&hc=731

Randall’s Cyber Listening Café
http://www.esl-lab.com/

Bigchalk
http://www.bigchalk.com/cgi-bin/
WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/
Homework/ High_School/
Resource/Student_Resources
/Multimedia_39803.html

Lecture by Kroeber
http://www.bigchalk.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WOPortal.woa/wa/
HWCDA/file?fileid=154672&flt=
High_School&pathTitles=/Audio_
Sites/Lectures/Online_
Audio_Recordings
_UC_Berkeley_Lectures_Events
&version=2&tg=Label15

WordFind
http://camtech2000.net/Pages/
WordFind.html

Puzzlemaker
http://www.puzzlemaker.com

Amelia Earhart:
http://www.incwell.com/Biographies/
Earhart.html

Pauline Cushman:
www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article
1016.html

Collaboration & Congratulations
by Annmarie Zoran

"Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding." Louis Gerstner
Technology, computers, multimedia, the Internet - what capable tools! Yet, how useful are these magnificent tools without the resourcefulness and dedication of instructors? Yes, Louis Gernster is correct. Even though technology is a wonderful asset, it can not replace our instructors.
The focus of this and future newsletters is to share new information and ideas regarding technology and language learning. It is with such a collaborative effort that we will be able to develop professionally and assist our students in their learning experience.
It has been my pleasure to work with the ELI instructors this semester and to see their growth and development in CALL. More specifically, I would like to highlight the hard work of our Listening/Speaking and Academic Interaction instructors. During Fall 2002, they have been experimenting with various tools and teaching strategies to most effectively design CALL lessons in order to enhance and assist students' language learning. Let us congratulate Barbara, Jeanine, Ruth, Ray, Mary, and Scott. This newsletter highlights their resourcefulness and development in the field of technology enhanced language learning (TELL). Kudos!

Students Excel in the Lab
by Barbara Smith-Palinkas (Listening and Speaking IIIA)

One of my goals this semester was to create lab activities directly related to the topics and activities in the textbook, Academic Listening Encounters, for my Level IIIA students.
Early in the semester, students studied the chapter, “Influence of Mind Over Body,” which addressed the topic of stress. In the lab, students listened to NPR passages about stress. They also listened to a passage on how to create a survey and then worked in pairs to create a survey on stress, which they administered to USF students and employees on campus. Students were required to present their survey results to their classmates. Using handouts and visuals, and so another lab session involved teaching students how to make a simple pie chart in Excel.
Students had compiled their data before the lab class. In class they were given a five-page handout on how to create a simple pie chart. The handout took students step-by-step through the process, so it was also an opportunity for them to practice following written directions.
A survey before class indicated that only two of the 13 students in the class were familiar with Excel, but during the 50-minute lab activity, everyone was able to make at least one pie chart.
Once they had created the first chart, they were able to create additional ones ontheir own.
Some students had trouble deciding which data “deserved” a chart, not realizing that if 100% of the survey respondents replied “yes” to a question, the pie chart would be a solid color.
The lab activity was successful, and students used transparencies of their charts in their oral presentations. Feedback from the students indicated that they found the activity very useful and learned something they could use again.Many of them, in fact, created Excel charts for a survey they conducted on friendships later on in the semester.
Two tips for teachers thinking of doing a similar activity:
1. Include directions on how to open the Excel program!
2. Devote some time to critical thinking skills—deciding which data deserve to be shown in a chart, for example—before going into the lab.

Adding Sound Recording to your Listening/Speaking Lab
by Raymond Cepko (Listening and Speaking IIB)

My goal for this semester was to make better use of my students' time in the lab by incorporating more of the ELI software that was available and by making better use of the Web. I also wanted to figure out what tools I could use to assess the students' progress.
This was a daunting task for Level II Listening/Speaking because my options for software, Ellis and Websites, seemed limited.
While Ellis provides the students with both limited listening and speaking practice, teachers are not able to easily check the student’s progress.
There is a similar problem with Website, such as Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab. While they are good for general listening practice, they also do not provide the teacher with the opportunity to assess the students’ speaking abilities.
This is because, even when students are directed to discuss some pre and post-listening activity questions with a partner, it is not possible for the instructor to listen to all of the conversations and assess progress.
That is why I was happy to see a memo in the lab describing how to open and save a Sound Recorder (SR) file. This gave me the idea to use SR in tandem with the much-maligned Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab.
Instead of having the students just discuss the questions in pairs, I decided to start having them record their responses, either in pairs or individually, and save them to a file that I created on the x: drive.
The greatest benefit to doing this is that now I have the opportunity to listen to all of the responses at my leisure and grade the students accordingly. In the future, I also plan to use the recordings as a conference tool when I sit down with the students in the lab. This will give me the opportunity to point out or have them notice specific errors that they are making; it will also be helpful in showing them the progress that they are making by listening to subsequent recordings.
My L/S class has now completed two short recording sessions using Sound Recorder, and the response to it has been generally positive. Setting it up requires some teacher preparation, and it may take you several attempts to get the students ready to use SR on their own, but once they start using it, you will find that it is a valuable tool. To make it easier for my students, I have the instructions for using SR posted on the class Nicenet homepage in the document section, as well as with every assignment.
Many of my students are still not very comfortable using all of the software on the computer; therefore, the instructions are designed to walk the students step-by-step through the process of opening SR and saving their initial file. I also found it helpful to use the overhead projector connected to the instructor’s computer to demonstrate the process the first time.

Listening to students
by Jeanine Ivone (Listening and Speaking IIA)

In Level II Listening and Speaking, we spent a large part of our time practicing pronunciation with both ELLIS Senior Mastery and ELLIS Master Pronunciation. The students seemed to appreciate the time to focus on their own particular pronunciation problems, and I believe they benefited from having the time to pay attention to discrete sounds.
Toward the middle of the semester, however, I was encouraged to give more opportunity to the students on authentic listening practice. At first, being wary of the unknown, I was hesitant to venture onto the Internet. I didn't know how to find what I was looking for, and I didn't know how to apply it so that it would be interesting and useful for the students. So, I did what most of us do when we have a problem: I went to Barbara, who assured me that I didn't have to abandon ELLIS completely, but that I could incorporate some other listening activities into our lab time. She suggested contacting Annmarie for some ideas, so I did, and the results were excellent. I ended up with my favorite lab lesson so far.
At the time in Listening II, we were talking about / listening to passages on the AIDS epidemic, so I asked Annmarie if she knew of any AIDS listening sites. She found a slew of sites for me to choose from, and I visited some of them and looked for something that would be interesting and challenging but accessible for the Level II students. I ended up going to kaisernetwork.org, and I found a link that had Colin Powell addressing the United Nations General Assembly on HIV / AIDS. I chose this site for two reasons: 1) Colin Powell generally speaks clearly and slowly, and 2) it was in video form, so the students had a better opportunity to keep up with the speech. I completed the listening with a cloze passage and a brief question-and-answer activity, allowing the students who finished early to use ELLIS to practice pronunciation. Simply put, the students loved it! Several of them commented to me after the class that they enjoyed the activity and that they were proud of themselves for understanding almost everything Powell had said. I was pleasantly surprised.
Because of this very positive experience, my strongest suggestion to any new lab instructors -- or veteran lab instructors who need some variety -- is to go to Annmarie for help. She came up with several options for me to choose from, and she offered helpful notes on some of the sites. She was so reassuring -- and the activity was so well-received -- that I’ve already asked her to teach me how to find my own websites in the future. Annmarie de-mystified the computer experience for me, and I’m sure she will do the same for you!

Points of Power
by Scott Redfern (Academic Interactions IVA)

The Academic Interactions IVB lab dealt mostly with presentations, pronunciation and some listening. In the first two labs students worked with partners on mini-presentations. These types of presentations are also called icebreaker presentations. Students worked in pairs and researched and then outlined a short three-to five-minute presentation on simple topics that were interesting to them. These presentations helped the students to relax within the group. Also, I gave them a short evaluation that indicated some weak points that needed attention before presenting again later in the term.
Students were then introduced to the pronunciation software: Ellis Senior Mastery and Ellis Master Pronunciation during three labs divided over six weeks. Feedback and issues from these exercises were debriefed during regular class time.

Preparations for the longer presentations were started between these pronunciation labs. These longer presentations were about fifteen minutes in length, not including the question and answer period. They reflected the skills studied in the class and the listening excerpts from lectures that were of a similar length. In the first lab, dedicated to the longer presentations students researched and located useful sites for their projects. Annmarie came into the lab the next week and gave a presentation on PowerPoint. Two labs later, after the students had had an opportunity to work on their PowerPoint presentations, she returned as a 'floater' to help students with particular problem areas related to the PowerPoint. Once the students were confident and ready to proceed, we set up the dates for the presentations. Scheduling was a bit of a problem, but because we had a 'smart classroom' in BSN, we were able to do the presentations without feeling pressured for time. As it turned out, presenting in the BSN building was more amiable than the computer lab for the PowerPoint presentations. The acoustics were better, and the students were more comfortably seated for concentrating on the speaker.
I also introduced the students to Randall's Cyber Listening Lab in one of the labs. We did an activity, which was tied into the academic role-plays that we did in class, on paralanguage from the site. After discussing our answers from the paralanguage exercise, the students did one of the longer listening exercises from the same site. On the last lab day, we did a listening exercise using the web site Bigchalk. This site offers a wide variety of lectures. Following a similar format from our book, I prepared an activity based on the lecture Sex in Art by Alfred L. Kroeber.
Overall, the students were very productive in the lab. If more presentations could be done in the 'smart rooms' outside the lab, then more activities from sites like Bigchalk might be possible in the future. Either way, the lab time is instructionally useful.

My best lab lesson so far
by Mary Sousa (Culture II)
The reason I have chosen this lab lesson is twofold: it received the highest rating from my students, and its simplicity shows how a teacher with relatively little experience in CALL can produce an effective lesson.
The lesson begins with the whiteboard: I elicited the names of famous women from the students and wrote down all the names. Fortunately, they mentioned several Americans, because my next question to them was, "Which of these women are from the U.S.?" As they told me, I marked those names with a star, and we chatted for a few minutes about the women, and a few more famous American women were mentioned. Then I said there were some more famous women from the US, that might or might not-be so well known. That led to the lab lesson.
Half of the students got a worksheet about Pauline Cushman, the other half received one on Amelia Earhart. The task was simply to gather information about Pauline Cushman and Amelia Earhart from two respective websites, fill in the worksheets, and then sit with a partner and exchange the information. It challenges the students to search for information in an authentic setting (written for native speakers), assimilate the information, and summarize it orally. The tasks build up in a simple-to-complicated sequence.
Another feature of this lab lesson was the fact that I used websites whose texts were neither too long nor too short. This made effective use of the 50 minute lesson time; not much time spent searching for unknown words, etc., or dragging through overly-long texts. The readings were just long enough to have a ten-minute silent reading period, allowing individuals to concentrate on the material. In the past I have been prone to "pack" too much into one lab period, although of course, this type of lesson can be good, if one lets it become a two-period one. Logistically, of course it's good to use two websites, as I did in this lesson so that the computers don't get bogged down by everyone trying to access the same site.
I spent about one hour searching for biographies of American women on the internet, plus another hour sorting the information and creating the worksheets. Well worth it! The students were pleased to be able to handle difficult texts, and enjoyed learning about some little-known (at least in Pauline’s case) women. The especially enjoyed being free to move around the documents and answer questions in their own time, and in their own way.

Need a fast activity

If you ever need a back up lesson plan for five minutes or just a quick activity to reinforce vocabulary then try out “WordFind”. WordFind is available for free at http://camtech2000.net/Pages/WordFind.html. Click on the download button and then on WordFind. Once you have downloaded WordFind you can create a crossword puzzle in just seconds. Here is one that I created just for you. Note: it took me about five minutes to download and create this activity.

Also, for a variety of crossword puzzles that can be posted online or printed go to http://www.puzzlemaker.com and click on ‘list of puzzle types’

E-mail CALL consultant: gorenczo@helios.acomp.usf.edu

This newsletter is also on the web at www.cas.usf.edu/eliteacher or helios.acomp.usf.edu/~gorenczo/telleli.html

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