Listening Lab Project

We here at the TTC face a really big problem in teaching English: PRACTICE!

Students here rarely get a steady amount of practice either talking, listening, reading or writing. They do get a little practice with me or Amy or Rachel a couple times a week, but in order to learn a language... you need a WHOLE LOT more time than that. Immersion is the key for any great language learning.

The TTC have been working on setting up a listening lab for the past 2 1/2 years. Amy and a past teammate Sara recorded many things for practice and gathered songs, stories, and pronunciation exercises to help. But the TTC had nothing to play the CDs for the students so they sat there.

Enter ideas for language practice.

Most students have really nice phones here... nicer than I've ever had in the states. And practically ALL of them play MP3s. I've recently begun loading songs on their memory cards for them to practice English. I started with Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye" which has clear singing, easy words and vocabulary, and repetition.

I have also been researching an idea that multiplies a single computer into 6, 11 or even 30 different workstations. This way, only one nice computer is needed and everyone shares that one computer. See this link for details: Ncomputing Multi-user.

I calculate that to setup a listening lab at the TTC for 11 people (11 workstations coming out of one computer) will be about $2,000 US dollars. Currently, a co-teacher in our English department and I are working to make a proposal. With an actual set of computers, the students can use Rosetta Stone (an awesome language learning program that uses pictures only: Rosetta Stone Software), play recorded English conversations with the script, listen to English songs with lyrics, read Ebooks, access any of the resources that we have put together before, and also connect to thousands of articles or help on grammar and writing (all possible without internet access). Students can also download music and conversations to their cellphones.

The key here is getting as much immersion as possible in a country that largely doesn't speak any English (although that is slowly changing b/c of tourism and the large influence of English as the primary international language).

The possibilities are exciting. Now, we just need to convince Laos to sponsor this. For now, I'm using a little grassroots technology in the students own cellphones... hope it builds from there!