Scientists think there is a direct relationship between the opinions of interlocutors and the listening process, which can affect the interpretation of information. It is also believed that listening skills are highly integrated and influence on skill formation and abilities of other speech activities. However, students often neglect listening due to a lack of communication environment and the ability to perceive speech by ear, as they live in a country where English or another foreign language is not the main language. This can be achieved by creating a foreign language communication environment via the Internet and new information and communication technologies. Most often, students used transcripts, which could be quickly used on demand by clicking on the browser tab, and feedback, which showed the correct answers in the tasks to the text. When describing websites, we set ourselves the goal of helping teachers to understand what they need to pay attention to when choosing a resource, because there are so many of them and their number is growing rapidly. Example:
- «ESL Lab» is an Internet site that provides free listening materials. In the section "General Listening Quizzes" you can see that the materials are classified according to the level of difficulty, so they can be used in groups with different levels of knowledge.
- YouTube, which hosts many songs and offers a variety of help options: a video with a simultaneous demonstration of the lyrics, which makes it easier to understand what you hear; the text of the song accompanied by a melody that allows students to voice and play the words of the song, practicing in speech, a list of words with translation and grammatical explanations, music videos.
- “Videonot.es” - This website can be connected to the GoogleDrive application, where the student can download the video and play it in the same way as on YouTube.
- Voki is a tool for creating a "talking" character, with which the teacher can voice the necessary texts and offer students to listen, present projects or give assignments, comments on the work done and its evaluation. Students can create their own "talking characters" for a variety of projects.
- Blabberize - an interactive tool that converts photos uploaded to the Internet into video clips, forcing the depicted characters to talk, moving their facial features to the beat of speech. With its help you can voice texts, present projects or give tasks, comments on the work done.
- Xtranormal allows you to produce cartoons, to prepare dialogues, monologues. It is an interactive tool that gives space for a creative work of teachers and students in staging decisions.
- ESLvideo.com provides songs, listening stories, tests and other resources for students and teachers in learning English as a foreign language. This site is especially popular with students because you can find the lyrics to your favourite songs.
When choosing a resource to use, the teacher should first pay attention to the presence or absence of certain tools on the pages of the website and the degree of their availability, exercises for the development of oral and written speech.
Prepared by Zhanetta Romaniuk
a senior teacher of the English language department