Task design for L2 oral practice in audioblogs

Abstract:

The development of oral skills poses a challenge in language teaching whether this takes place face-to-face, through distance education or in blended learning contexts. Two main problems arise: first of all students don’t have enough opportunity to use their target language orally, and secondly, students oral performance is mostly unrecorded and therefore there is little opportunity for the student to revise it or for the teacher to give detailed feedback and design post-task activities for raising language awareness. New web 2.0 tools have opened new possibilities for the practice of oral skills outside the classroom, or within virtual classrooms. There are now many tools that make it possible for students to make audio or video recordings and share them easily and in an inexpensive manner. However it is important to find a way of managing these recordings efficiently within a classroom situation and to embed these oral activities within pedagogical tasks that will make the most out of their language learning potential. Audioblogs can be a solution for these problems and offer a favourable environment for oral tasks. This paper describes the results of a study looking at different ways teachers in a distance education university make use of LANGblog, an audioblog developed within the framework of the SpeakApps project.

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