CD-Roms are now a useful and widely used tool in language learning. This collection of tips offers advice for teachers on how best to exploit CD-Roms and how to guide students?self-study programs, offering suggestions for pre-lesson assignments and follow-up classroom activities.
Nik Peachey
learn to listen
1. Dictation
Help your students to sharpen their listening skills using audio and audio scripts if available.
Help your students to sharpen their listening skills using audio and audio scripts if available.
Choose a short section of audio.
Play the audio in class and ask the students to listen and write down the key words they hear.
Let them compare the key words with a partner.
Play the audio again and ask the students to write down all the words that they hear. Play the audio in smaller chunks and give the students time to write.
Repeat the listening process until they have written the complete text.
Ask the students to listen to the audio and read the script on the CD-Rom. Tell them to compare their scripts with the original script and find mistakes.
In class discuss the mistakes.
2. Watching, guessing, listening
Use video extracts to explore visual clues and context as a way of understanding language.
Choose a video appropriate to the unit of the course book you are working on. Make sure it involves some interaction between two or more people.
Ask the students to watch the video with the sound turned off and try to guess what is happening and what the video is about.
Play the video again and ask them to see if they can tell how many times each person speaks and in what order.
Then ask them to imagine what the people are saying. Tell the students to make very brief notes.
Now tell students to watch the video with the sound turned on and check to see if they guessed correctly.
Ask the students to discuss in class how their predictions compared with the real events of the video. If they have made notes, ask them to compare them with a partner.
If you have a projector or interactive whiteboard, watch the video together and invite comments from the students. Remember that on a big screen video can make quite an impact.
3. Hearing stressed vowels
Help your students to hear word stress. This activity could also work well with an electronic dictionary.
After one of the vocabulary activities on the CD-Rom, ask the students to underline the stressed vowel in each of the words.
Then ask the students to try to find the phoneme for the vowel.
Check the answers in class.
chance to review
4. Following up in class
Use the CD-Rom marking and feedback functionality to encourage students to discuss answers in class.
Set the students one or more of the interactive exercises on the CD-Rom to do on their own at home or at school.
When the students check their answers, ask them to make a note of any mistakes that they make.
Ask the students to use the reference material on the CD-Rom (eg grammar, vocabulary files) to try and find the right answers.
In the next lesson ask the students to discuss their mistakes and what they learned with a partner.
Monitor the discussions and choose a few examples to discuss together as a group.
words to remember
5. New words from the text
Use the audio and reading texts and note-taking functionality if there is one to identify, understand and learn new vocabulary.
Choose an audio text that you want the students to do further work on. If you want your students to make notes on the text, click the print icon for a printout.
Ask the students to read and underline or listen and note words which they don’t know or are unsure of. It might help to motivate students by making this a competition — who can find the most new words. Write the words on the blackboard.
Tell the students to look up the words and find the definitions. If there are a lot of words, you can divide the words amongst the students.
When they know what the word is, the students can make notes about it. They can write a translation from their first language, or they could write down the date when they first encountered the word.
Put the students into pairs or small groups to peer-teach any new words they have learnt. Ask them to tell each other what notes they have made.
confidence to speak
6. Acting out
Use the video to encourage role play and expressive communication.
Choose an appropriate video clip.
Put students into groups according to the number of people in the video and assign a character to each student.
Tell the students to practice the character’s lines and try to reproduce them in the same way.
