Access to technology, which will be discussed here, could be spread out unevenly and actually be surprisingly irregular. It is inevitable, nevertheless, that this exploratory phase will take some time, since existing circumstances may not be ideal to run all or any of these online resources smoothly.
I have recently started exploring and opening accounts at Voxopop ( ), Voicethread ( ), and English Central ( ) to see how I can use all of these resources with my classes. Chinnery (2005) suggests web pages where students are able to not only listen to spoken English, but to speak, listen to themselves and to classmates. Nowadays, there are many web pages that can help teachers extend their learners’ oral language production time.
It is hoped that teachers who are in similar, limited circumstances find this article informative as to what they can expect out of assigning oral homework in terms of access-to-technology problems and potential learning benefits. It will discuss the learning benefits students perceived and what technological drawbacks they had to deal with.
This article will focus on presenting and discussing how learners at a large public university in central Mexico responded to doing oral homework in mostly off-line circumstances. Although techniques and procedures in class included pair/group work and constant interaction among learners, I still felt that there were many of these adult elementary learners who did not manage to catch up with the rhythm of the course. The overall objective of the project was to extend learner talking time outside the language classroom in groups of an average of 30 university students (Gibson 2004). This article summarizes the challenges and issues from a 3.5-year oral homework project taking place from 2007 to early 2010 with elementary language learners at tertiary level.
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