Saturday, September 29, 2007

Speaking Activities

This month's focus is on sites that promote speaking activities. You can find hundreds of links that relate to this topic on my English For Beginners page under Audio Conversations and on my English Themes for Beginners/Early Intermediate page under Conversations.

However, since the best way to encourage speaking in English is by having students.....speak, I'd really like to highlight the hundreds of links I have on my Examples of Student Work page. There, you can find countless activities where students have to actively participate in speaking instead of passively listening. The best of this category include:

* Ones where students sing karaoke and record their masterpieces. Two of these site are Sims On Stage (formerly known as Singshot) and KSolo.

* Links where students record messages that virtual alter-egos of themselves speak, such as Voki.

* And, of course, there's Voicethread, which allows students to create narrated slideshows.

Larry Ferlazzo