Abstract
This contribution aims to reflect on the role of the oral activities and tools used to practice oral skills in foreign language educational contexts. After focusing on the traditional ways of teaching and learning a foreign language online, and after reflecting on how audio skills have been taught in the past, we will present some oral activities conducted in an Italian for Beginners course issued by Dalarna University. In such course, oral activities have been developed consistently, so that they have moved from oral, interactional, synchronous activities to asynchronous, recorded oral monologues. In the current semester, students are also testing the use of an audio social network, SoundCloud, to focus their attention on their oral performances and to get more content-related comments by the teacher. In the future, such activities would likely become even more interactional, collaborative and, if possible, social, in order to practice students’ oral skills when learning online the Italian language.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As Verbling or Italki.
- 3.
In this sense, it is quite peculiar to note that in manuals like, for example, Torsani’s (2009, 134), a lot of activities and exercises to be conducted online for a foreign language education are listed, but the oral production activities seem to be completely lacking.
- 4.
Even more significative than other oral activities, as suggested by Scott Payne and Whitney: “[t]he necessity of using language, not pragmatics, for communication in a synchronous online environment may push learners to experiment with the language” (Scott Payne and Whitney 2002, 24).
- 5.
Before 2017, Dalarna University adopted the virtual platform Fronter that was designed with a recording tool by default. The new platform Learn does not offer the same option.
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Giglio, A. (2019). Practicing the Oral Production Skills in E-Learning Contexts: Is It Still an Achilles’ Heel?. In: Carrió-Pastor, M.L. (eds) Teaching Language and Teaching Literature in Virtual Environments. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1358-5_2
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