Integrating technology into skills lessons

As with vocabulary and grammar lessons, online images can be a great way to engage learners’ interest in a topic or pre-teach vocabulary.

Receptive skills – listening and reading

Class textbooks provided by the school may be lacking in appropriate reading or listening material, be overly UK or US-centric, or just plain out of date. Teachers with internet access now have a staggering range of up-to-the-minute material at their fingertips. They can use the internet as a source of inspiration for classroom ideas, or to find text, audio and video that they can use directly in the classroom.

In addition, some primary classrooms have limited access to real storybooks. However, these are often available online in various formats and although the quality can be variable, with a little patience it is not difficult to find some excellent examples. In some cases, children’s books have been converted into animated films, which can be viewed with or without captions. For example, The Very Hungry Caterpillar:

Although it is important not to overdo it and spoil students’ enjoyment of the story, teachers can pause the video at intervals and ask students questions. There are also plenty of examples of storybooks being read aloud by teachers or professional actors, such as Elmer the Patchwork Elephant:

New teachers may also benefit from the opportunity to observe experienced teachers exploiting storybooks with young learners and learn how to incorporate questioning techniques to engage students and maximize comprehension.

There are also videos showing step-by-step guides for craft projects based on storybooks like these, such as ‘How to draw Elmer’, which is great for tech-savvy but artistically challenged teachers:

To change this from a listening skills task to a reading skills task, teachers could write out a set of simple instructions that students could follow.

As well as stories and instructions, teachers can also find music, poems, chants and songs which are suitable for the age and level of their students. These are often supported by video and come with ideas for using them in the classroom.

Productive skill – speaking

Multilingual classrooms can offer genuine opportunities for communicative language practice, as students who do not share the same first language have to use English to communicate with each other. This is not the case in monolingual classrooms, where all the students have the same L1.

Students in monolingual classes often struggle with motivation during speaking skills activities. Despite teachers’ best efforts to make tasks as engaging and communicative as possible and ensure that students are well-prepared to participate, there is clearly something missing: a real reason to use English. Can technology increase students’ motivation and help them to speak better English?

Voice recording technology is useful, and students often report that having the opportunity to listen to themselves helps them to identify grammatical and pronunciation errors. Websites or applications which focus specifically on pronunciation and provide awareness-raising activities on minimal pairs (such as ‘three’ and ‘tree’) also enable students to work at their own speed and repeat the tasks as many times as they like.

However, in order to improve, most students would benefit greatly from the feedback and guidance they would receive from a teacher. Technology which uses speech recognition software and provides students with feedback is available and it looks likely to become more widespread as the technology advances.

Can technology help students to have a conversation in English? Well, the technology is certainly available, through the use of a range of applications. Schools around the world have started to set up language exchanges between, for example, Chinese students learning English and Australian students learning Chinese. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once students were provided with a real reason to use a second language, their motivation to communicate increased dramatically.

In summary, language teachers have always endeavored to guide their students and facilitate the learning process to the best of their abilities using the resources they have available. Modern technology has taken the availability of these resources to a whole new level.