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Introduction

Speak Everywhere (SE), developed in the Center for Technology-Enhanced Language Learning in the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University, is an online oral practice/instruction/assessment platform for foreign language teaching. It dramatically increases your students' oral practice opportunities by making it possible to give speaking homework.

Overview:

  1. Instructor prepares online oral exercises on SE
  2. Instructor assigns exercises to students
  3. Students access SE via internet and work on the exercises
  4. Instructor listens to students' oral submissions and grades them and gives feedback in audio/text 
  • Exercises can be used as oral tests (to be taken either in a computer lab or at home)
  • Authoring requires no computer programming. If you can edit images and video clips, the rest is a matter of filling in online forms.

student mode screen

 

 

Major features and benefits:

 

  • For instructors and content designers
    • Use user-friendly templates in the author mode to quickly prepare oral exercises for students
    • Prompts can be videos, audio, images, photos, and/or text (The default is video.)
    • Many exercise formats are available, such as repeat after the instructor, Q&A, structure drills, flashcards, role-play, describe an image/photo/video, etc.
    • Exercises can also be used as oral tests either to take in a computer lab or at home
    • Assign/unassign exercises at will
    • Assigning basic oral exercises as homework frees up more time in class for communicative activities
    • Listen to each student's oral response to each exercise item
    • Give feedback in text and/or audio
  • For students
    • Practice speaking a lot more than before
    • Practice in the privacy of their home or anywhere else as long as internet is available
    • Practice individually at their own pace on their own schedule
    • Listen to their own production and the model side-by-side for self-assessment

 

For a more detailed description, read this article:

Fukada, A. "An Online Oral Practice/Assessment Platform: Speak Everywhere," The IALLT Journal, 43:1 (2013) 64-77.