Week 7

UTILIZING CALL TO TEACH SPECIFIC SKILLS.

After reading this week’s articles The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills by Julia Gong, and Using Original Video and Sound Effects to Teach English by Shahla Yassaei I have acquired new knowledge on the way that CALL can be used to teach specific skills in a second or foreign language.

There are many different things that I learned from the material previously mentioned. First, in Gong’s article I was able to learn the theory on how CALL is useful to teach speaking to second or foreign language learners. Something that I read here and that I believe that every teacher should know is that students tend to feel more comfortable practicing speaking using computers than practicing with a real person because they feel less afraid of making mistakes while pronouncing.

On the other hand, in Yassaei’s article I was able to read how to apply in a real class the principles stated in Gong’s. My personal opinion of this article in particular, is that it is very useful because it provides several ideas that can be used to teach specific skills using CALL and specially video and sound effects. What I liked the most from this article is that it shows how simple it can be to apply technological resources to our lessons. Thanks to it, I realized that finding these kinds of materials is really easy, the author even said that TV shows like The Simpsons can become a teaching tool if we use them properly. 

In conclusion, from this week’s material I learned that by using CALL to teach speaking (or any other skill) we can help our students to feel more comfortable, be more engaged in the content being studied, and to be exposed to the way the target language is used in real life.