16- Telecollaboration

 

This semester we did a telecollaboration project with students from University of Malaga!

What we did during our meetings

Group 5 of the Valiant project from IUC and UMA had 4 meetings in total. In the first meeting we introduced ourselves and some of us made use of apps like Storybird. For the second week we all took turns to read the paragraphs that discussed the issues we faced while learning English. We had a fruitful conversation where we decided that we all had issues with pronunciation and wanted to create an activity based around this issue. On week three we all presented the apps that we found that we might use for the activity we are planning. We have discussed many apps that could be of help during these meetings and decided to take a closer look into three apps. These were Wetoku, which is an app that allows students to provide feedback. English Accent Coach which is an app where student could learn about the phonetic alphabet and Youglish which is a site where you can enter a word, or a sentence and you get a clip from a video that has that word or sentence. Upon further research we discovered that Wetoku was no defunct and that English Accent Coach might be too advanced for the students. In our last meeting we decided that we would then use Youglish with an app that would allow students to record themselves saying these words or phrases to listen back to it and practice. I found an app called Vidcast which would fit this description.After this we have established each member’s roles in this project.

 

What are the apps that we are using?

Youglish

Youglish is an online tool designed to help its users improve their pronunciation in their target language. You can enter a word or a phrase to the search bar and the site will give you a clip out of 100 million videos on its database with the word of your choosing and start the video at the exact moment the word is being used. You can also pick an accent if you want to learn how to pronounce something in a certain accent or compare between accents.

Vidcast

Vidcast is an online tool like that of Zoom. Instead of having long meetings however, Vidcast allows its users to create short videos that can be sent to many people at once and be watched repeatedly. It also allows the user to edit the video within the app.

How will the material be used and what was our goal?

We have researched most common words and phrases in English that people have issues with alongside some words that were really hard to pronounce. Then we created some phrases that included these words as well as some phrases and hard to pronounce sounds in English. We imagined that the students could record small videos through using Vidcast, then use Youglish to find some examples from the natives, then go back to their video to revise their pronunciation and correct their mistakes until their pronunciation is like the native speaker in the video.