Russell Stannard mines more internet gems.
Every so often a website comes along that is truly outstanding and which deals with a key issue in language teaching. Amazingly, I have recently come across three such great websites. The first helps students to learn song lyrics in English; the second deals with writing; the third is an interactive newspaper. All these fantastic sites have some remarkable features that will really surprise you. As usual, I have produced a set of training videos to help you navigate your way through them. The links are at the end of the article and it is worth watching the videos to find out about some of the extra features that all these sites offer.
There are plenty of lyrics sites on the web, but I have never seen one like this before. There are lyrics in a whole variety of languages, including English, Spanish and French, together with videos of songs being sung by the original artists. The idea is simply to learn the lyrics of a song by completing them with missing words as you listen. The gapped lyrics appear on the screen as subtitles to the video. Once you have chosen a song, you can choose the level you want to work at. The harder the level, the more words are gapped. The songs are also graded by how difficult the vocabulary is and how difficult it is to hear the words.
As you play each song, the site clearly marks the line you are on, and if you do not complete the missing word, the song will stop and wait for you. If you want to listen to that particular line of the song again, then you just press the backspace key on your computer and it will play the line again. If you can’t work out the answer, then simply press your tab key: the word will automatically be filled in for you and the song will continue. You can also use your computer’s arrow keys to move up and down the song. If you want to hear the whole song and see all the lyrics then click on the ‘Withdraw’ button. You can go right back to the start by clicking on the ‘Restart’ button.
If you sign up (the site is free at the moment), then it keeps a record of your scores (how many words you filled in correctly and the time it took you). It also records all the words you had problems working out, and you can see these by clicking on the ‘Vocabulary’ button.
This site is well constructed and well laid out, and it includes many up-to-date songs. So if you know your music and want to impress your students, it is a great site to use in class. It is also an absolute must to recommend to students to use in their own time – they will really enjoy being able to learn the lyrics of their favourite singers. I tried to do ‘Love the Way You Lie’ by Rihanna and Eminem. Following Eminem is not easy!
This is a much-needed site on writing and it is highly interactive. Click on the ‘Enter here’ button and then choose from the different text types on the right-hand side. A new page will load and you will see a quick presentation that goes through the structure and format of that particular text type. Now click on the ‘Examples’ button below to see some great examples of actual written work produced by students and related to that text type. The great thing is that these examples (normally six for each text type) go from ones produced by really young learners to those written by quite high-level students. This is a lovely feature and very useful as it makes the tool really flexible and useful at a variety of different levels. If you hover your mouse over the tips on the right-hand side, you can see how they relate to the actual examples.
The site works really well on an interactive whiteboard. Click on ‘Blank Organizer’ and get the students to review the structure. If you want to look at another text type, then click on the menu button. There are loads of text types and examples. It is a wonderful website and very well thought through.
This is another superb site that is made in Flash. Just click on any of the newspapers shown on the home page and an interactive page will appear. There is a whole variety of different things you can do. Sometimes you can listen to the news being read out. You will notice that the text changes colour as it is being read to you, and most articles have related activities, some of which are aimed at provoking discussion and can easily be used in class. Some of the listening content is accompanied by animations, too. The exercises related to the articles are all very interactive and include oral as well as text instructions, which is a really nice feature. There is so much variety in the content of each newspaper that it is hard to describe exactly what you will get. I suggest that you go to the site and play around with it; I am sure you will find great material to recommend to your students or use in class. If only all websites were like this!
You can find out about these three sites in more detail by watching these videos at the following site: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/3gems/index.html
Russell Stannard is a Principal Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He won the Times Higher Education Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTons award, all for his website
www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
This article first appeared in issue 72 of English Teaching professional, January 2011.
