Week 6 The use of CALL in speaking skills.

By Vanesa Paniagua

Articles: Using original video and sound effects to teach English. 

Rate: 3
The employement of CALL in teaching second/foreign language speaking skills.

Rate: 4

Learning a foreign language can be difficult for many people most if they do not have suitable conditions to learn it. Moreover, something interesting that I read was that beginners’ students feel uncomfortable when producing the speaking skill since they are afraid of making mistakes in pronunciation.

Besides, the application of CALL on pronunciation training offers a private environment helping second language learners to make as much repetitions as they want.  This link on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/TeacherMelanie would be an appropriated website to practice pronunciation in students’ home comfort.   

Also the article stated that according to Pennington (1995), the spoken language competence covers two aspects “The mechanical aspect” that is engaged with the production of sounds comprising syllables, words, phrases and longer utterances or decoding phonemes. The other is the “Meaningful aspect”, which is related with grammar rules of pragmatic appropriateness in speech.

Therefore, in order to improve students’ communicative skill, teachers must find suitable softwares to improve the two spoken competences and of this CALL software is SLIM (Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software) which helps students’ performance in perception and production of spoken languages activities. This program is able to detect significant deviation “word/phrase/utterance”, production as well as offering visual aids and written diagnosis of the problem and how to overcome the errors. 

Week 5 The Critical Thinking Development on Students.

By Vanesa Paniagua
Article: Critical Thinking and Techonolgy
Rate: 4


Critical thinking it is fundamental in students learning process and for this reason teachers must help students to develop it. Moreover, the reading for this week shared important information about this topic and how to introduce technology while developing students’ critical thinking.

Besides, the article stated that in order to create in students a critical thinking, teachers must look for a way to make attractive the common topics, since when students are interested in something, they feel more encouraged to express their points of view. Meanwhile, they said that it would be useful less telling and more asking, since the learning process it is more focused on students, to let students develop by themselves their critical thinking capacity.

Furthermore, each student have it is own way to acquire the knowledge and for this reason teachers needs to know students’ personalities and capacity, thus it could apply different kinds of input to create diversity during the lesson.

Nevertheless, the use of technology for teaching does not means it would be easier to understand for students and that it is why teachers need to be careful when introducing technology in the learning process and at the same time handling a goal focused on the students’ development and acquisition the new knowledge in order to improve the critical thinking. 

Week 4. Internet's tools to apply in classrooms.

By Vanesa Paniagua

Article: CALL Me… Maybe: A framework for integrating the Internet into ELT.

Rate: 5

Nowadays, technology makes humans’ life easier and the correct use of it can help to expand our knowledge, that it is why the reading for this week was very interesting since describes many links or websites that teachers and students can apply in their classes when teaching or learning a second language.

Also, a website that was mentioned in the article is the use of YouTube, which contains videos with a variety of topics and they can be used during a lesson in order to develop any skill as listening, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. Another interesting website it is “Free rice” (freerice.com), where students can practice vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling and at the same time that students practice, they are helping to donate rice through the World Food Program.

Moreover, the article stated that even with the lack of Internet in the classrooms, technology can be always used.  Some ideas of this it is to print WebPages on to paper, also we can save the information in the computer or in an external drive, as well as covert the data in to another file type such as PDF and by downloading audio and video materials from podcast in iTunes (apple.com/itunes) or from video-sharing websites.

Therefore, we do not have excuses to not apply Internet’s tools in our daily lessons for teaching a second language.

Week 3. Podcast as a listening tool.

By Vanesa Paniagua

Article: Integrating CALL into the classrooms: the role of podcasting in a ESL listening strategies course.
Rate: 4
Article: Blending technologies in ESL courses: A reflexive enquiry.
Rate: 2

The technology age is already present and it has become very common in different fields and one of those is the education field, which have implemented some software in the learning process of a second language.

Therefore, the technological tools that have been applied are used to develop in students a specific skill in order to acquire or improve a language. Moreover, as a listening strategy in a second language class the use of podcast have become frequently. Podcast are a digital audio or video file made available on the internet.

Furthermore, a podcast can be integrating in a listening lesson for many purposes as, to check pronunciation from a native speaker recorded, to develop listening skill and to practice writing as well, helping students to have a sense of native speakers’ accent. Also, podcast innovates the teaching process, since text books can be substituted, by some podcast that contain transcriptions for students to read while listening to an audio record. For that reason, CALL can be attractive for students since they are more in contact with the technology and teachers should take this advantage to integrate the use of podcast and other software during the lessons and to encourage students to explore and to be part of the new technological tools in order to improve their second language learning.