Marcel Van Amelsvoort
(Kanagawa Prefectural College of Foreign Studies)
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Hello and welcome back. This month's topic is speaking. At first thought,
using the web to teach speaking sounds like a case of the wrong tool for
the job. Most speaking textbooks rely heavily on dialogues and other
written or audio examples of spoken language. And we all know that
Speaking class should give students a chance to be exposed to the
discourse, grammar and vocabulary of the spoken language; it should give
them some guidance in making the sounds of the language; and above all,
it should give students opportunities to speak, to try to make their own
meaning, and to gain fluency. So what can the web do? Well, the web can
be a rich resource for materials for speaking. It can help give students
content to talk about. This content can then be used to allow for
practice with the vocabulary, grammar and discourse that we are teaching.
It can also be a source of pronunciation practice for students, and
materials to help teachers with pronunciation training in class.

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