A Wonderful Website For Practicing Listening



http://www.listen-and-write.com/



What is it?

Listen-and-Write.com is an amazing and free website which provides you with great opportunities to practice and improve your listening skills while you are hearing about the news. One of its surprising features is that it not only designs different levels of listening practice, but also offers different languages to practice, such as English, French, Spanish and German and so on. Generally speaking, Listen-and-Write.com is a practical website which can be adapted into language classes.

Why the tool is good for language learning?

• As mentioned previously, this website contains numerous news for learners to listen. That means, the materials in this website is both adequate and authentic.
• The news included are labeled with different levels, which learners can choose according to their own abilities.
• Not only the texts, but also the videos on YouTube are available for language learners to practice, which considers the visual learners, as well as adds entertainments to some extent.
• Before practicing listening, learners have choices, either listening to the entire text first, or listening to the sentence by sentence.
• In the process of listening, I think the amazing phenomenon is that it can automatically move to the next sentence once the current one is completely written. And the sentence learners are listening to will be repeated until they finish typing the whole sentence.
• Having typed the entire sentence, an instant feedback (eg. 'Good') will be shown on the screen.

How might the tool be used in language teaching?

• I suggest that this tool might be used as a task in the class or as a homework for students to do at home.
• For the in-class task, I would like to suggest pair works. At the beginning of the class, teacher shows students how to use this tool. Then, divide students into pairs, and each pair share one computer. Next, the teacher choose one text and let the students start listening and writing in pairs. After a certain time, the fastest pair who finish the task will be the champion and perhaps, rewards (eg. chocolate, sweets or a story book) could be prepared for them.
• For the homework, teacher could let students practice one text at home independently. Besides, summarize the main idea of the text, and prepare to discuss about it in the next class.

Limitations

• As the tool is only practical and meaningful in the class with computers, for those without computers, this tool may not be applied.
• Difficult to achieve in big classes.
• The task may require students with at least intermediate level of language proficiency, as some vocabularies in the news might not be very familiar to students.
• If the teacher fails in selecting the suitable texts for students, neither the task nor the class will make sense.
• One 'big' problem may be that, for listening some whole texts, learners have to sign up a account.