In the staff room when the discussion turned to interesting sites for listening practice, a colleague, Louise, recommended LyricsTraining.com. My students in Academic English loved trying it, and I’m sure it is a great website for all levels to get students listening for words and spelling them. It uses Youtube videos which adds to the interest factor too.
How does it work? Simply put, students can choose which genre of song they wish to listen to – country, folk, reggae and so on. They then have a choice of artist and song. They can also choose which of four levels they want to practice at – beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert – this refers to how many gaps they want to see on the two lines at the same time. They don’t listen to the full song all at once, but simultaneously they get to read and listen to two lines where there are some words missing. They can replay that segment immediately if they want to hear it again or they can attempt to spell the words in the gaps. However, they can’t spend too much time thinking about a word, or they will be timed out. They know when they have successfully completed a vocabulary item as the music begins immediately.
Choosing the music:
Lines with gaps:
There is a button to click to replay the audio line on the bottom left and the arrow at the bottom right will put in the correct answer and start the audio for the next clip.
The only real pedagogical drawback is that you can’t choose which words are gapped. A great idea for eLearning done right!
