Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Kantalk 2.0


One of the internet applications that I really think can help my students is KanTalk. This is a Skype based tool that allows language learners find people to help practice their speaking skills. The idea is that you post your profile and you link up with others. For example, a native French speaker who wants to improve their English can find people in say, the USA who want to learn French.

This is a great example of how web 2.0 can allow learners to gain the speaking skills so necessary for exam success even if they don't live in a country where the language they are learning is spoken widely. Now they included stuff that can help with the tricky area of pronouciation in English.

"we've just added a neat feature that allows user to record a short paragraph on the site. It's a good tool for users to get feedback about their accent and pronunciation (the original ideas is from this professor:
http://accent.gmu.edu/)"

2 comments:

Larry Ferlazzo said...

Thanks for posting about this service. I added this information, crediting you, to a post I just made about using the telephone to help learn English:

http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2007/04/21/using-the-telephone-to-learn-english/

teacher dude said...

Hi,

Thanks for the compliment and I hope you find KanTalk useful. But the real heroes in this are the guys who set it up.