Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab
Introduction
I decided to first look into Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com). The website
specializes in listening exercises, which is quite a task, considering how most
websites will overlook this aspect.
Content
Of the four areas of communication (speaking,
reading, writing, listening), listening is the one aspect that has received the
least amount of attention so far. Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab has four
different tables to navigate between different listening quizzes. The first
table is titled “general listening quizzes” and includes three levels of
difficulty: easy, medium, and difficult. Listening quiz categories include
items such as taking a train, hotel reservations, and enjoying the zoo.
Navigation
When I
click on the ‘enjoying the zoo’ category, I am taken to another page, which
consists of pre-listening, listening, and post-listening activities. The pre-
and post-listening activities center on the actual listening activity, but do
not require that the student do any actually listening: These two activities
serve as a way to get the student involved and to focus their attention. The
actual listening activity can be heard by clicking on an icon that says ‘play
audio’. It is very simple to navigate within this site. The listening activity
is two minutes and twenty seconds long, since this activity was under the
difficult category. Also in this site, in the three other boxes on its
homepage, there are listening quizzes for academic purposes, long conversations
with Realvideo, and short listening exercises.
Summary
I liked the ease of navigation through the site. Where the site lacks is in providing the viewer with listening activities. Without listening activities grouped into the areas the viewer is studying, it will be difficult to communicate effectively with native speakers. Because of this, I took away one plate from a perfect score.
Rating
I give this site 4 spinning plates out of 5.
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