ELL+and+voxopop

Laurie Heintz-ECOMP 6019 Spring 2- 2012 Voxopop- [|http://www.voxopop.com] One of the problems ELL students face is practicing proper pronunciation. Students are often shy about practicing in front of others so they remain silent. The ability to practice in privacy but still allow an instructor to listen and correct can be a great asset to learning a language. Voxopop is a web based audio tool that allows the user to record their speaking voice for others to listen to and respond to. Teachers and students are able to build up threaded audio discussions. This is an excellent tool to use with ELL students because it enables them to listen to the pronunciation and record them selves repeating what they listened to. This would be used primarily for conversation, but students would also be able to listen and write down what they are listening to and practice. This could be used along with shared text to incorporate reading as well as speaking. Students could take turns reading a page or a paragraph from a book and learn from each other. One of the advantages is the fact that a group of students could be involved and create a continuous narrative together that they could go back and listen to as often as they liked. Using this tool will allow students to have authentic communication and will allow the teacher to listen to each student and go back and work individually with a student on pronunciation. Using this tool, a teacher could ask questions to students and they would respond with an answer or a simple true or false. The beauty of this program compared to voice thread or other audio programs is the stream that is created. This allows a student/teacher to go back and forth between users and allows for immediate response. I see this as an excellent addition in a language class, whether it is ELL or any language. Often students are required to write a narrative or a paragraph and read it a loud to the class, this can be intimidating for some students, wouldn’t it be nice if this was available to students to practice, whether with each other or with the teacher before they presented to the class? I think so. Reference: []
 * Using Voxopop with ELL **