In the latest Innovative e-learning podcast from JISC Regional Support Centre Northwest, Kevin Hickey interviews ESOL teacher Saima Hanif from Hopwood Hall College who is helping her students improve their speaking and listening skills by encouraging them to use the voice recording function of their mobile phones to make their language learning more relevent to their everyday lives.
Her students use their phones to practise outside of the classroom by recording presentations and conversations they have with each other. By doing so, they can time themselves, pick out their own mistakes and correct themselves. They can also focus on their pronunciation by re-recording themsleves and make comparisons between the two recordings to see how they've improved.
The students were really excited about the fact that they already had voice recording tools on their phones and could get started straight away. According to Saima, they have been able to develop their ideas and improve their comprehension further by making the language relevant to them and applicable to their daily life.
"I always try to encourage my students to try and do as much as they can themselves out of the classroom ... To use those mobile phone recorders, to actually record themselves, time themselves, listen back and then pick out where there were possible errors, so identifying their own mistakes and correcting them, looking at their pronunciation and how they can improve that and then actually re-recording and then making comparisons between the two recordings to see how they've improved".
Saima is keen to develop the use of technology her students already have and Kevin (a gadget fan)suggests she uses a bluetooth dongle for transfering audio files wirelessly from the phones to a PC as well as convert them to mp3 so they can be incorporated into other programs such as Photo Story 3.
To listen to how enthusiastically, Saima talks about her experiments so far, click on the link below.
Download voice_recorders_on_mobile_phones.mp3
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