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ESL forum >
Games, activities and teaching ideas > "Soundboards" for Teaching English
"Soundboards" for Teaching English
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douglas
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"Soundboards" for Teaching English
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Hi all!
I �m not sure if any of you are familiar with "soundboards". They are computer programs with "buttons" you push and different audio quotes come up. They are used alot to make prank phone calls (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger calls a flower shop demanding something).
I have the idea to use soundboards to help some of my students practice understanding and conversing with people on the telephone. The problem is most soundboards I have found aren �t exactly suitable for the classroom (Mickey Rourke telling someone to kiss his %$� for example).
Has anyone ever worked with or seen something like this? I would really like to find one I could use to ask and answer business-type questions and to make business calls (order status, shipping method, cost, etc.). Or is this a whole new concept that I will have to try to build from the ground up?
I �d appreciate hearing anything you have to say about the idea.
Douglas |
14 Aug 2009
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miss K.
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Have never heard of anything like this which means I have not worked with anything like that either:) |
14 Aug 2009
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mariannina
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Hi Douglas, I �ve never heard about "sounboards" but they are interesting. Is it difficult to find nice conversations? I don �t know if it is of any help, but in my computer I have human like voices with English and American-English accents. If you need any conversations put up with those voices just let me know.
Bye.  |
14 Aug 2009
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Kate (kkcat)
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Hello Douglas,
I �ve heard about soundboards before and have met some websites where the content of these soundboards is decent (usually just quotes from popular or not so popular movies or even cartoons, on some reason I remember listening to the soundboard of Homer Simpson lol). But I �ve never had an idea about how to use them in class.
If you are interested to activate them while teaching business english , it makes the whole thing more complicated, because it can be difficult to find suitable soundboards, as I said before they are usually entertaining.
But if we just look at them as a way of practising listening, we can do this: let �s take calls to 911. We may play these for Students and then ask them follow-up Qs to check understanding. Then it can be possible to ask them to act out a similar phone call ( they can act out funny ones or even serious ones, it depends).
Or maybe it can be interesting to just play quotes from movies or cartoons or tv shows and present them as a warm-up or a 5 mins break: listen and see how much you can understand...the first student to represent the whole sentence correctly wins a point. Ss like such little challenges.
What websites with sound boards have you found so far?
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14 Aug 2009
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douglas
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Thanks for the help and advice. I already use videos and audio files for hearing practice. I was hoping to find something where I could directly react to my students answers (without using just MY voice) This website is the best I have found so far for sound boards--there are a lot of good ones that can be used.
I will probably start using some of them for listening practice, but none of them will work for my one group with a specific need for telephone practice (they handle claims and customer calls for a multi-national company).
Maybe someday I will get motivated enough to make one for my specific needs. It is just a LOT of work and time.
Thanks again to all of you
Douglas |
14 Aug 2009
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