SpeakApps – Practicing Oral Skills Online
Half-day workshop, 20 August, 14-17 hrs
Presenters:
Jeroen van Engen, University of Groningen
Colm Ó Ciardubháin, Dublin City University
Adriana Prizel-Kania, Jagiellonian University Krakow
Jackie Robbin, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Description:
The SpeakApps platform (http://www.speakapps.eu), funded under the European Lifelong Learning Programme, provides innovative open educational resources for practicing oral skills online. The SpeakApps platform was inspired by a common set of challenges that the language learning community faces on an everyday basis, including:
. Formal second or foreign language acquisition settings do not provide enough room for everyone to practise the language.
. The ephemeral nature of speaking which makes it difficult for students to obtain feedback on their performance, preventing them from properly revising and improving their oral skills.
The Videochat, Tandem and Langblog tools facilitate the design of online oral production and interaction tasks, which are made available to the language learning and teaching community through the Open Educational Resources (OER) database. The SpeakApps Moodle platform offers a ready-to-use learning environment, so that teachers can start using the tools immediately.
The SpeakApps tasks and tools are available in English, Catalan, Irish, Polish, Swedish, Dutch. In 2014 Croatian, German, Romani, French and Spanish will be included. The tools may however be used with any language.
During this half-day workshop, participants will first relate the problem of offering speaking skills in the classroom or online to their own situation. This will include linking the teaching of oral practice to reference-based frameworks, such as the CEFR. Next, the SpeakApps tools will be demonstrated on the basis of tasks selected from the OER-database. After discussing the potential application of such tasks and tools in their own context, participants will then be given hands-on practice in using the SpeakApps tools and designing pedagogically meaningful tasks for their students.
To get the most out of this workshop, participants are advised to bring their own devices to the workshop (laptops, tablet pc’s).
Registration:
You may register for this workshop during conference registration. If you have already registered for the conference and would like to add or change your workshop registration, please send an email to info@eurocall2014.nl.
Please note that the number of places for the workshops is limited. If you cannot register for a workshop anymore, please indicate your preference in the comment field at registration. We will then put you on a waiting list.