November 6, 2011

Speak Everywhere: An Online Service for Linguists and Language Teachers

From http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-4346.html

The Center for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning at Purdue University is pleased to announce the availability of Speak Everywhere, an online speaking practice/assessment platform.

This service may be of interest to the following groups of people.
- Language Instructors can use the service in their courses to dramatically increase speaking practice opportunities for their students. It can be used to deliver oral tests as well.
- Language Laboratory Directors can use the system to provide an oral practice/assessment platform for language instructors.
- Second Language Acquisition Researchers working on oral language development can use the service to collect oral data: e.g. an interlanguage pragmatics researcher can use a video clip as a cue to elicit an oral response.
- Corpus Linguists can use the service to collect large amounts of oral productions to compile spoken language corpora.
- Language Textbook Authors/Publishers can use the service to create a 'speaking program' (as opposed to an audio program) to accompany their textbooks. Pronunciation and phonetics textbooks should benefit greatly from it.

Overview:
Instructor prepares online oral exercises on SE
Instructor assigns exercises to students
Students access SE via internet and work on the exercises
Instructor listens to students' oral submissions and grades them and gives feedback in audio/text
Exercises can be used as oral tests (to be taken either in a computer lab or at home)
Authoring requires no computer programming. If you can edit images and video clips, the rest is a matter of filling in online forms.

The new service is available at http://speak-everywhere.com

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