Improving Oral Interaction Competency

Good morning/afternoon/night everybody! today we are going to make a list of some advices to take into account if we want to enhance our pupil’s communication skills and to stimulate the oral interaction in class.

We have based our work in different articles and some notes that you must study for the coming exams so we hope it to be helpful to shore up the acquired knowledge. First of all, what we have to know about the oral interaction competency is that its objective is to promove a spontaneous and natural use of the english, and there is needed an important condition: The english must be the only language used in class.

Another factor wich is very important is to be very carefull with the preparation of the class, given that we will have to take into account our pupil’s level, and also to aware that we will find some gaps in our pupil’s knowledge and we will be ready for compensate them.

So we will pay attention to prepare the class to elements like: the focus of the task; pupil’s needs; resources (audiovisual support is usually the best); previous knowledge; strategies and methodology...

Talking about resources, wich one would be a good resource to improve the oral interaction competency? Well, students should have access to different kind of resources like banks, cards, posters, computer programs...wich will introduce the vocabulary and expand the record of words that pupils must use. Also these resources shall contains expressions and others useful english expressions.

It’s important for pupils to have access to different resources because through managing and handling them, they will take control of their own learning becomming more autonomous.

What should we teach them first? Pupils don’t need a lot of vocabulary, expressions and general language to interact each others, they just need what they will use. This functional language that they will learn must be related with the daily activity in class, but that does not mean that it have to be a specialized or technical language, they must lacquire the basic knowledge to start to interact with their classmates and with their teachers as well.

To implement this vocabulary we can use some technics (and also we must use the mentioned resources as well) like the association between physical actions and the sounds that does actions means, like pointing the door, waving our hand...

Also we must stablish some routines (greetings,pleasentries...).

But what we is the most important thing to improve the oral interaction competency? Practice. We have to make sure that our pupils have enough opportunities to interact in class and we shouldn’t scold them for speaking in class (always that they were speaking in the right language of course). In our didactic sequences we should include a lot of activities that implies oral interaction, otherwise, pupils will not retain the learning because they can’t practice their new skills.

See you soon!

Xtranormal video making tutorial

Hi there future teachers fellas! We want to show you the tool in wich we supported on to make our exposition in last Aurora’s class. This tool allow us to create a video in a very easy and intuitive way, I will explain you how does it work and for what would be useful to.

First of all you must go to this link:

http://www.xtranormal.com/

We will mark the “create” tab and pick one of the different packs wich includes the characters, locations...

This webpage offers us the choice to create a video with one or two characters, and when we were decided in that aspect and registered in the page (wich is free of course), we will see a window with different sets in wich our characters are going to interact in our story.

You should be seeing this window at this moment:

Once we had picked our set, we will have to pick the actors and their voices (If we are not on the mood to doubling the voices by ourselves) wich is the easy part, and after that we will have to start to introduce the script of the story.

The webpage offers you a very useful tool: the autocamera. If we mark this option, the cameras are going to switch by themselves in order to create a dinamic image by changing the position, wich is going to give to our little film a more proffesional image. But if we preffer to pick by ourselves the camera position in each moment of the conversation we just have to drag the camera icon to each speaking block and then pick the camera location that we wish.

Ok, now it’s time to write what we want our charac ters to say in the speaking blocks. This blocks will be the interface that will allow us to make our charaters do what we want. They are not just where we have to write the things that the actors are going to say, we will have to drag the different icons that appears in the window’s left tag to this blocks, where the icons are going to be selected and transformed in the actions (movements, looks, gestures...) that are going to perform the characters.

It’s important to pay attention to the order of the elements that we add to the speaking blocks because thats the order that will appear in the final video,but to avoid mistakes in the elaboration, the webpage makes available to us the preview tool. This tool will allow us to chek if everything is fine before to continue with the video making process, by showing us a lower quality version of the video until the point that we were at.

Another sounds options that we will like to stand out are those wich allow you to create different kinds of ambients by putting background sounds or music, wich is always an important thing to take care about when you are creating any kind of audiovisual content.

Well, after finishing our story we just have to click on save and finally publish it! Then we will have to wait for a while and give time to the program to convert the video to a higer quality format, and then download it as a mp4 video, ready to be reproduced, modified, customized or whathever it is what you want to do with it...but...which would be a useful way to use the videos created with this tool?

                                          

Well that is depending on your pupils needs and the methods that you were using to implement the contents through this audiovisual tool, but we can tell you how and why we have used this tool in an exposition for Aurora’s class:

As most of you already know (because you were there paying attention) our exposition was structured in questions like what is your didactic sequence about? how can you attendo to diversity? was the didactic sequence helpful for your proffesional development?. So we thought, that including an audiovisual support to our exposition would be a good idea to keep the attention and to add dynamism to the monologue, wich actually wasn’t a real monologue given that Aurora and Brian, our characters, were who ask us those mentioned questions.

But this tool have the limits far away from just expositions, because it could be very helpful like storytelling support, given that you can modify and compose the rythm of the story as while you are introducing this story in an audiovisual support (wich is a great way to reach and keep our pupil’s attention).

So we hope this tutorial to be helpful for you all and if there is any doubt left, feel free to ask in the comments!

See you soon fellas!