Although audio CDs have been around for quite some time, it wasn't always used in the World Language classroom. The cassette tape was used for building listening comprehension skills. In my building, CDs replaced the cassette tape in 2003 because it was time to adopt new textbooks. Not only are the CDs a more modern use of technology, but the sound quality is much clearer. The students were able to practice their listening comprehension, and improve their own pronunciation as well. The website Omniglot, best explains how foreign language learning takes place in various courses, "together with cassettes or CDs with recordings of most of the dialogues and some of the exercises. Most of these courses are suitable for beginners. Intermediate-level courses are also available for the more popular languages, such as French, German, Russian, Spanish and Italian." (What's the best way to study?, 1998-2010) As a result, students are able to communication with native speakers.
With the cassette tape, you lost a lot of instruction time while searching for the correct section to play for your students in class. The CD's allow you to go straight to the track and play what is needed right away! The students appreciate the use of the CDs, and whenever I ran into a problem with locating a track or fast forwarding, I could always rely on my students to come to the rescue!
The problems with the CD's are that there are several of them that come with the textbook; they come in a huge binder. One must be well organized and keep up with them, if you're not, then forget it! Also, teachers would be required to share them, which would become another problem. What if you both needed a particular CD at the same time? The other problem is when a CD is scratched; it takes forever to get it replaced, if you can't fix it yourself.
The listening CD would be better if it were smaller and able to hold more content to reduce the amount of CDs that accompany the text. If the CD's could be created without the possibility of scratching that would be really ingenious! I think that these may be ways to improve an already good technology! In the meanwhile, the World Language Department is now moving towards MP3 players.
References:
Holt McDougal -French. (2010). Retrieved June 16, 2010, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: http://holtmcdougal.hmhco.com/hm/series.htm?level2Code=MSIB10015&level3Code=4_FR
Holt McDougal World Language Catalog 2010. (2010). Retrieved June 17, 2010, from Houton Mifflin Harcourt: http://vihmh.impelsys.com/hmhcatalog/index.php?catalog=2/5/0
What's the best way to study? (1998-2010). Retrieved June 17, 2010, from Omniglot: Writing Systems & Language Learning of the World: http://www.omniglot.com/language/how.htm
CDs, like the floppy, are becoming a thing of the past. With DVDs and flash drives that hold hundreds or thousands of times the amount of data a CD can, it is no wonder people are moving away from them.
ReplyDeleteAnother technology that is available is the downloading of audio and video files to smartphones, tablets, and netbooks via the internet. A collection of classes or the entire course can be downloaded and stored using pod casts. Free pod cast of lectures from such noted universities as MIT, UCLA, Yale, and Stanford are available at FreeVideoLectures.
Their web site is.
http://freevideolectures.com/
Ginger Harper
Regina, does Holt-McDougal offer any online resources for the teachers to use? We just adopted a new reading series which offers incredible resources for the teachers by Scott-Foresman. It would be nice for a language course to have access to something like Rosetta Stone for support. You are right about the problems with CDs. Holt may let you make back-up CDs. It seems that we were able to do that with our science and math programs. Check it out.
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