Tape Journals in the Oral Skills Class

Eileen Hughes
La Guardia Community College

This entry on oral skills is from Literacy Update, a publication of the Literacy Assistance Center. It is reprinted with permission. For more information about the Center or Literacy Update, write to them at 15 Dutch Street, 4th floor, New York, NY 10038, or call 212-267-5309.

In an oral skills or pronunciation class, students can be assigned a spoken journal on cassette tape just as they are assigned a written journal in a writing class. The tape journal is as valuable as the written in promoting fluency. It becomes a record of students’ individual explorations in English and provides the medium for a dialogue between the teacher and each student.

Procedure
Ask students to purchase a cassette tape. Tell them they are responsible for completing a fixed number of “entries” during the course. Ask them to speak on a given topic for at least five minutes each week and explain that, after they hand in the journal, the teacher will listen to it and respond on the tape. You can suggest that they not read (from printed material), but instead speak spontaneously, stopping the tape where they need to and continuing again.

When you return the tapes, instruct students to listen to their own voice and then to the teacher’s comments. Next, they should bring the tape back to the end of their last recording and make a new entry, taping over the teacher’s comments (which may be long-winded!).
If possible, give students access to a tape recorder before class begins or during break-time, in case they do not have a recorder at home.
Try to return the tapes with your comments to the students as soon as possible. (It’s a good idea to have the students hand in their tapes on different days. This lightens the teacher’s burden.)

Assignments
The first assignment should allow students to relax and get comfortable with the medium. Suggestions: tell me about yourself…your family.…your country. Further suggestions include: What makes you laugh? Tell me about something you are good at doing…about a good friend…about a dream you had.

Give assignments focused on improving students’ weakest skills. For example, for practice pronouncing past tense endings: Tell me about an experience in the past, either something that happened in your country or something that happened during your first days in New York.
From here, assignments can become individualized; each entry can set the direction that the next one will take.

Feedback
Answer genuinely. Thank the students for sharing their stories, adven- tures, and often remarkable insights.

As with a written journal, it can be argued that teachers’ comments should focus on content and not point out errors, although the latter is sometimes irresistible!

Note: It’s a good idea to make notes as you listen to the students’ tapes. This will improve your memory when responding and will also become a useful record of students’ needs, interests and history.

Self-Assessment
Ask students, once they’ve become comfortable with the medium: Tell me how you feel in the class. What do you like best about the class? Least? How can the class help you more? (Be sure to provide examples: more listening exercises? more homework? less homework? more pronunciation?) Or: Listen to your own voice on the tape. What words are hardest to understand? What are your strongest skills? your weakest skills? (Again, provide examples.)

Elicit from your students (periodically or midway through the course) what they feel is most valuable about this experience and discuss the tapes in class. Remind students upon completion of the course of the value of the tape journal. Encourage them to continue with it, as they would a written journal, even after the class ends.

Uses

• For diagnostic purposes: common and consistent errors can become the focus of future lessons.
  
• For assessment of fluency of speech and contextualized pronunciation.
  
• For building students’ awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses.

Further Uses

• For class evaluation: students often find it easier to make discrete and constructive comments on the tapes than in person.
  
• For building students’ self-confidence: most students respond positively to hearing themselves speaking English.
  

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 4 (April 1993),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.