Chris couldn’t do the whole research project, but i still wanted her to be involved; so we talked about how to use audio technologies with her very beginner, low literacy ESL learners.
Filling in forms is a crucial survival skill, but the language is reasonably advanced. Chris’ students find it hard to remember written text or even recognise words on the page.. so we decided to prepare an audio CD allowing the text to be both on the page and on the CD player. She would have them do the activity in class, and then repeat it at home later.
So Chris sat down with the portable mp3 gadget (iRiver T30), and recorded three separate texts. Today i had a go at editing the texts into three tracks for a CD. We decided there needs to be a small “Track #” announcement for each track, eg “Filling in Forms, Track One”.
Then we got more ambitious and thought it would be nice to have some music backing the track .. and to signal the beginning of each new track. So i hunted for a while, and found Jamendo .. a really great music site, where you can download full albums that are licensed under creative commons. We settled on some pieces by Maya Filipic.
ome quick editing in Audacity, and three tracks are ready to go.
Later on, Chris told me that her students really enjoyed the activities and found the whole process very useful. Great!
Afterthought:
A whole CD, for just nine minutes of spoken voice.
Would be great if some of the students have bluetooth phones .. so we can beam the audio through the air for their takeaway convenience (and saving us the 80c cost of a CD). But let’s face it, these people wouldn’t find it easy to play audio tracks from a phone. Even playing a CD on a stereo could be challenging.
photo credit: dorotea… (Thanks!)