TES ICT Blog: How to use Skype to help with language lessons

08 November 2006 at 14.45

How to use Skype to help with language lessons

MFL teacher Joe Dale is inspired by the latest innovative language projects that use internet telephony to connect pupils with native speakers around the world When they're learning a foreign language, it's essential that pupils have the opportunity to communicate with native speakers. This is typically achieved through educational trips abroad, hiring a foreign language assistant (FLA) or  videoconferencing with a partner school. Using internet telephony or VoIP offers another solution and allows language learners to speak with each other in real time anywhere in the world. At the recent SSAT Annual Languages Conference in Liverpool, Jennie King, Head of Languages at Monkseaton Community High School in Whitley Bay and Rachel Hawkes, SSAT languages lead practitioner and AST at Comberton Village College in Cambridgeshire gave an overview of an exciting project they have been involved with this year. Speak 2 ME is a commercial service which allows pupils to practise a foreign language with native speakers via traditional landlines, mobile telephones or the internet. Pupils can call a Speaking Instruction Professional (SIP) at a Speak 2 ME language Centre and talk on a one-to-one basis from their own classroom. Pupils are not charged for their calls, although a participating school would have to pay approximately £10 per pupil per hour for the service. Phone calls can be monitored and recorded by the teacher to allow for 'continuous quality assessment'. To demonstrate the immediacy and potential of Speak 2 ME, Jennie set up a conference call with one of her pupils in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and a native speaker in Madrid during the session so that delegates could hear their conversation in Spanish in Liverpool in real time. Monkseaton launched the project in February 2006 and after the initial seven week trial it ran a diagnostic test which revealed a 37% overall improvement in the following areas: Fluency Pronunciation Comprehension Grammar and vocabulary Repeat sequential events Storytelling expository Descriptive details Improvisational and creative speech Critical thinking The project has now expanded to include more schools from the Northeast and Cambridgeshire and results have continued to improve. The following two articles give further background to the Speak 2 ME project. Mobiles welcomed in lessons appears in the Summer edition of the Comberton Village College magazine and explains how 10 Spanish GCSE students attended six half-hour Speak 2 ME sessions and used their mobile phones to communicate with native speaker SIPs. Students' Spanish studies take on unique learning calls gives more detail on how the project was set up at Monkseaton and what it achieved in its initial phase. To download Jennie and Rachel's presentation from the SSAT conference, click here Speak 2 Me certainly seems very impressive. However, arguably similar results can be achieved by talking with a partner school over the internet via Skype for free. Jennie decided to use Speak 2 ME because she feels it provides high impact, good quality learning and can cope with a high volume of speakers at the same time. Skype works on a different level altogether. It can still create the ‘wow’ factor of bringing a native speaker into a languages lesson, but without the equivalent administrative support or structure of its commercial alternative. Vicky Davis, a computer science teacher and educational blogger from Westwood Schools in Camilla, Georgia has created a video tutorial called Using Skype in the Classroom which offers some guidelines and explains how to configure Skype so that it's safe to use with pupils. The tutorial is easy to follow and provides a good starting point. A few days ago I took part in a Skypecast set up by David Noble, a teacher from Hillside School in Fife, Scotland who produces an excellent series of podcasts called Education Podcast Reflections on his blog Booruch. He came up with the brilliant idea of collaborating on a Google Doc (you'll have to open a Google account to view it) with members of the Skypecast who were talking to each other and filling in a table about lesson ideas on internet safety. I thought the combination of Skype and Google Doc or any sort of collaborative site/wiki could have huge potential for language learning. Pupils could work on the same document anywhere in the world by typing in real time and talking to each other in the foreign language. Moreover, being able to record both sides of a conversation using Pretty May for PC and Audio Hijack Pro for Mac would mean that pupils could listen back to their discussions and even publish them on the web as podcasts. You can listen to David's podcast about the Skypecast here In her blog post, Cool tools in my cool classroom, Vicky Davis suggests using the collaborative site Gliffy for creating a floor plan of a house by speaking only in Spanish. Small groups of pupils from the same classroom or different classrooms around the world could register on the site and then work on the same floor plan together negotiating the positions of rooms, furniture, colours etc. Pair work and group work may never be the same again! Products like Speak 2 ME and Skype offer new and different possibilities. They take advantage of the power of the internet to bring native speakers straight into our classrooms. As language teachers we should explore these new technologies and see how they can fit into our present teaching repertoire. To find out more information about Speak 2 ME, contact Global Director Kurt Green and for more ideas on how to use mobile phones in the languages classroom, have a look at these posts from my blog joedale.typepad.com