1- Teaching Speaking and on Line Learning

one of the main problems in learning speaking in Egypt is that students do not have the opportunity to practise speaking except in the English class. as they usually use Arabic in everyday situations; so it is believed that the web can be employed in providing students with true opportunities to practise speaking. this can be done in several ways. I will disuss here one possible way for doing this. Using the chatting utilities such as Yahoo or Skype for example is a case in point. Teachers can ask their students to join a classroom chat room and talk extensively about their likes and dislikes for instance. Moreover, students can be given the opportunity to listen to real dialogues and conversations to provide them with a ‘ comprehensible input’ to get to acquire the language as a whole not in distorted meaningless parts. By this I mean instaed of teaching grammar, vocabulary,etc in isolation students are exposed to meaningful utterances. Integrating videos available on the internet with on- line classes is very enjoyable and useful to both teachers and students. This is to get students to keep in touch with native dialects. In the following video, a conversation is conducted between a secretary and a customer to teach students how to speak using office langauge. This video can be used as a material for teaching speaking and as teacher training activity besides being a listening task.Here is the video. Enjoy it.

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