Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab(Ch 3)


Goal:
a website with a lot of material of listening training

Presentation:
There are sections for:
General Listening Quizzes (easy/medium/difficult),
Listening Quizzes for Academic Purposes (medium/difficult/very difficult), 20-Minute ESL Vocabulary Lessons (medium),
Language Learning and Life Tips (medium),
Long Conversations with RealVideo (easy/medium/difficult).

These sections, like the names, are designed for the people with different purposes and needs. Each section can provide lots of resources for learners to train the listening ability. Besides, it also has the differences about the degrees from easy to very difficult. The learners can mainly choose what they want to train and what degree that fits their own ability. And, there’s also the quizzes section and post-listening exercises in each listening page. Still, this website provides other related websites for learning.


Appropriateness:
The learners can easily use Windows media or RealPlayer to have an English listening, then, they can do the quizzes and have a check. They can listen to it several times of they want. In the end, it scaffolds the learning with an opening activity called post-listening exercises, that learners can choose to do or not.

Outcomes:
The learners can have a purely listening training, but they can also enlarge the learning with the post-listening exercise part. This part can give learner a direction for what to do to go further with the topic. Therefore, there are a lot of documents and resources for them to do with. I think the outcome is pretty great for learners not to limit the learning with only listening and quizzes.

Evaluation:
After the listening, the quizzes part is for learners to check if they understand the content or not. The system will give learners a score and the correction. Learners can choose to listen to the content again or not. After that, the page offers the post-listening exercises but there’s no feedback so that the learner have to do it actively by their own.
Notes:
I think it’s a great and fantastic website for listening training. It provides lots of topics and degrees to choose from. And the website offers the other websites for listening. It’s quite complete. The listening content won’t be too long and the degree fits the content very much. The quizzes can let learners do with their comprehension and spelling. The post-listening exercise is the section that I admire most, because this is designed especially and individually for that content. It’s not just about the content. It goes further with exercise directions for learners to learn with other language skills. It’s a wonderful job for listening training!