Week 5 - How to improve Speaking and Listening skills through Internet?

Rate: 4 of 5 🞳🞳🞳🞳

 My initial reaction of this article was surprise to discovered how Internet can help to teachers and students improve their speaking and listening skills. Moreover, the Internet and technology have changed over the last years offering us a lot of tools that teacher can apply in classroom also students  can find a lot of programs and websites in which they can practice a foreign language.  Something I want to remember from this article is that the receptive communication activities of teachers can be with their own activities or have students access websites that include prepared exercises for example Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab https://www.esl-lab.com/  which is a free website and containing a lot of audios and videos in order that students practice their listening and speaking skill. Besides,  the article mentioned that Lafford and Lafford(1997) “provide some useful suggestions for creating level-specific audio and video listening activities”. In other words, he said that classify the activities to students in basic-level, intermediate-level, and advanced-level with gist questions according to each level of the students is a good option that the websites use to classify their activities. Something that I learned from this article was the interactive communication activities on the Internet can be Synchronous that are activities allow two or more users to interact simultaneously from different computer, such as live chat and instant message. Also, can be Asynchronous that are the acivities involve two or more individuals, do not occur in real-time for example answering messages on email. In conclusion the use of technology in the foreign language in the classroom and how teachers teach and students learn, show that technologies become optimal tools for learning and acquiring the second language.