VOCABULARY TEACHING

One of the components of language teaching is vocabulary teaching. I think it is the first thing that most of the teachers start with. As technology has covered up all the issues in language teaching it has utilities for vocabulary teaching. There are a lot new web based activities of vocabulary teaching and new technologies on order to help teachers with vocabulary teaching. I will talk about three of them: Gerry’s vocabulary teacher, text to speech and www.wordchamp.com.
First one is Gerry’s vocabulary teacher. Gerry’s vocabulary teacher helps teacher in different ways. It has a lot of vocabulary activities like fill-in-the gaps, cross puzzles, quotations and proverbs etc. The teacher can review the vocabulary of the previous lesson; s/he can measure how much the vocabulary has been comprehended.
The second is wordchamp.com. This website helps teachers create online courses of English. It is like a virtual classroom; you can Access to your teacher and talk to other students taking this course. There are a number of activities for language learners and teachers. It has activities of reading, speaking, writing and listening. You can fin activities for these skills. This website is not free; you have to pay a fee in order to use this website.
The last one is text to speech which is a different technology for language learners. As it is understood from its name the focus of the technology is mostly on speaking and pronunciation. You simply write a word or two word an even an sentence and this website reads it according to the language you are learning. I think it is really useful for language learners as the problem of speaking is widely seen as the learners do not have so many opportunities to develop their speaking and pronunciation skills. One thing that is not good about this technology is that it does not read with emotion but it reads robot-like. However it is not such a big deal as long as you learn the pronunciation.