2009年3月17日火曜日

Ideas for a website on Developing Professional English Speaking Skills

ICU needs a website to support students' development of spoken English proficiency. When a student wonders "What should do I do next to improve my speaking further?" "Where can I practice more?" or "How do I overcome my difficulty with pronunciation, fluency, stage fright or other skills?", they should be able to easily access useful information that guides them to tips, resources, and practice exercises.

This has been on my mind a while and it is about time that I do something about it. So here goes the brainstorming:

-Moodle, blog, ning, or other platform-need to explore
-The site should not be ICU specific, but available to people around the world, and hopefully more people will contribute ideas interactively
-Main content will be:

1) a basic overview of what it means to develop professional level English speaking skills as a non-native speaker in terms of comprehensibility (accent, intonation, phrases), cross-cultural sensitivity (humor, non-verbals), communication strategies (circumlocution/paraphrasing, giving examples, asking for help etc. etc.), communication style (direct/indirect, brief/elaborate...need to research and review these for myself)

Format = Q&A style linking from a graphic or box

2) audio/video examples of good speaking (including some related to ICU's speaking class - why not?)

3) sample practice methods by speaking difficulty (Could use a forum type tool to get ideas from all over the world- How can I improve my fluency? = shadowing, conversation partners, attend conversation cafes on campus etc., oral journal, random Skype-Me conversations, voice chat= describe/demonstrate these practice methods as comprehensibly as possible

4) Links to a variety of speaking/listening resources
http://www.italki.com/ has some good content, nice community to join for a language exchange or finding a language tutor. The future of language learning?
http://www.italki.com/resources/1/learn_english_in_english.htm
http://www.audioenglish.net/
http://mm.eigotown.com/c/aclOaabI49q57Vaj
http://www.yackpack.net/
is a nice list of resources, but as with many links lists, it is too much information for students to wade through. We need to give a select few with specific suggestions on how to start using it.

Where will the ASP course info go? We can't put it up in public, can we? Needs to be password protected if we want to upload textbook audio files.

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