School movies

From this link you can access a collection of video recordings showing the work of students from Intxaurrondo Hegoa School. It includes presentations on different topics, sketches, and dubbed cartoons.

Phonetics

These are several online resources that can be helpful to practise and improve pronunciation.

Ship or Sheep website displays some lists of words that focus on the differentiation of a particular sound by comparing minimal pairs.

Oxford University Press: New File.

• This web page introduces the phonemic symbols of English by associating them to pictures that represent a word that contains a particular sound. Phonems and words can be listened to by dragging the mouse on the pictures.

• Stress monsters is a game aimed at identifying the stressed syllable in different words.

Learn English Kids (British Council) also includes several resources to practise spelling and phonetic awareness.

• Phonemic chart

• Tricky words. This section contains matching activities and tests to practise spelling related to a particular phoneme.

Pictures to practice vocabulary and description

These are a couple of websites that provide panoramas that can be used for games such as 'I see with my little eye', 'Find something that starts with the letter...' or as a trigger for oral and written descriptions.

Panoramas dk

Arounder

A video presentation by students from Elatzeta school

KATEA city from Elatzeta 2.Zikloa on Vimeo.

Link to Elatzeta English blog

Drawing like Picasso

Picassohead website allows to create portraits made up with a variety of features drawn in a 'picassian' style. All features can be altered with regard to size, colour and position. The tool can be used for oral dictation of instructions (e.g. make it larger/smaller, change into blue, drag it to the left...) when using the interactive whiteboard or as a pair activity when sharing a computer.

Voki

Voki is a simple online tool often used in the EFL primary classroom. It is based on the selection of an avatar which will utter any word or sentence (up to 60 seconds long if using the free option; 90 seconds are allowed to Classroom Voki users). It works as follows:

1. Select a character

2. Change the look
3. Add voice via microphone, text to speech or upload a file.
4. Choose a background
5. Click Publish to email or get code

The Voki web site also includes a set of teaching ideas.

Howjsay: a free online pronunciation dictionary

Howjsay provides a list of around 150,000 English words that can be heard in a clear standard pronunciation. Although it includes quite a lot of publicity, the search is easy and quick and the quality of the sound good enough to be used in the classroom.

When the result of a search appears in pink, the word can be heard once and again just by placing the mouse over it. Furthermore, it allows to list up to 15 entries by writing them separated by semicolons: a very useful option for practising aural recognition of close phonemes.

Build Your Wild Self: a tool to create fantastic characters

Build Your Wild Self allows the creation of fantastic characters made up of a variety of parts of animal or human bodies. It can be useful for working on descriptions.

English phonemic chart

Sounds Right is the British Council's first pronunciation chart for learners and teachers of English. Each phonetic symbol is supplemented with examples and audio.

Measuring oral production

The Centre international d'études pédagogiques website includes short clips with language learners' oral productions in several languages which illustrate the different competency levels established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.