Technology Related Change

Hi Everyone,
Greeting from Bhutan...

"English pronunciation is considered to be one of the most difficult skills to acquire and develop". (Martinez- For et al. 2006; Aliaga Garcia 2007).

In week 5 project step-4, I have mentioned about the technology tool that I would like to use in my future class, at present I am not teaching, in my future class I would be using ASR- Automatic Speech Recognition based system and CALL -Computer Assisted Language Learning.
I feel pronouncing correctly is also a skill. We live in the era, where English language is dominant means of communication.  We are expert in pronouncing in our own language  but we are not very proficient in pronouncing other foreign language such as English. English the lingua franca of the world.
I have decided to teach Grammar, Pronunciation, Intonation and Enunciation to my students as I feel that these areas need to be carefully addressed to in learning language.
Phonetics constitutes the basic of all other aspects of language. The students first of all learn to hear the sound accurately and listen to them closely and carefully, more they hear better they will be able to articulate. For this students should be made to listen to videos on native English speaking constantly to learn on how to articulate words. They should be made to imitate the sound they hear and do necessary correction after they reproduce the sound.
Language is refer to as a tool of communication but poor pronunciation/ mis-pronunciation will never be a good tool of communication. If one is to speak well, he/she need to speak with correct intonation, one need to master the intonation.
Pronunciation plays a vital role in spelling, grammar and the meaning of the sentences, for beginners adequate pronunciation training  should be given usingcontrol of vowel, consonants, phonemes, question intonation, stress and rhythm to utter everyday.
Students don't have suitable environment whereby they can learn English and acquire the second language effectively as the community or the surrounding where they live dosent support them. Therefore guidance is really needed for the students to help them in pronunciation/grammar or basic skills like how to pronounce words that they learn, which includes vowels and consonants.
The students should be taught the major distinction between the following:
# letters and sound
# vowels and consonants
# simple vowels and depth ones
# voiceless and voiced consonants
# word stress and sentence stress
# falling and rising intonation
While using technology ASR and CALL, this will be the areas that I would like to focus in teaching pronunciation to my students, the grammar part I will start from basic like articles then move to more complex topics.
#The week seem to be of interesting and and at the same time more challenging, interesting because we are in the middle of our course and challenging because assignments are more complex and complicated than the previous week. The following are some of the assignments and task that I did during the week, week-VI:
1. Discussion  on Engaging students- I have posted TWO post  on this topic describing my views and perspective on it.
2.Create-created interactive power point , I feel this was the most toughest task I had in the week, as I was having connection problem and at the same time I could not get much from the resources on it. Though I know about power point presentation as we usually do in our school but was not aware about interactive power-point, anyway I did submit/post my assignment but right now I am keeping my fingers crossed as I am not sure, whether my interactive power-point assignment is correct or not. Anyway human learns from mistake.
3.project step- I didn't post in this thread as we were instructed not to do so,  I posted the topic project  step- Technology Change in my blog instead.
4. Blog -weekly blog- This week the weekly blog was quite different from what we did in the past weeks. Instead of writing more on reflection of the week, I wrote my blog on the topic -Technology Change, continuation of week 5 project step -4. I also commented on my fellow colleagues post.

Please comment, waiting for your valuable comments for my improvement.

Thank you all....

Regards

Pema Chodup
Bhutan