Geoff’s EFL Blog

(1) Student activity: transcribing and analysing a podcast

On Thursday, 9 – 10 am, my main class, GO5 pre-intermediate general English course, had their one hour of the week in the computer lab. with me. I got them to listen to themselves on a previous podcast, transcribe what they heard in Word, and correct their mistakes. I went round helping them. That went quite well, though one Saudi Arabian student whose literacy skills are still virtually non-existent (despite intensive coaching), did not achieve the task. I have made a generic worksheet, which I will post in the Yahoo Groups Files area. I had suggested this as an activity, and am happy to report that it does work pretty well, focussing the students on their own performance.

(2) Message to Brooklyn

We normally record our podcast on a Friday morning, in my second lesson with GO5 class. But this week, Friday is half-term holiday (just one day in 12 weeks – couldn’t they have given us a bit more?!), so we recorded our podcast on Thursday, yesterday morning. I had wanted to record a video message, to respond in kind to Richard’s class’s video message, but a number of people weren’t keen, so it didn’t happen. Even getting the women to allow their photo to be taken was like pulling teeth! One very reluctant woman student only agreed when she realised it would be a group photo.

I had had the idea that rather than doing personal introductions, which we’d kind of already done in episode 2, we should move onto a new topic, and I thought talking about our homes in our home countries could be interesting. I brought in a box of Cuisenaire rods (small coloured pieces of wood of different length), so that we could we could construct little copies of our favourite room at home or similar, and talk about those. (I thought this might encourage reluctant students to appear on video, as essentially they would just be providing a voice-over description, rather than appearing on camera in person.) But this idea was not met with enthusiasm, and so the topic kind of descended into a more general personal introduction.

I kicked off myself, to make the whole thing democratic, putting myself on the same level as the students. Bo Yang was second. He had the idea we were going to talk about our hometowns, so that’s why he talked about Beijing. Then Suliman talked. He’s been teasing Martha about her little sister – that he’s in love with her, and so on – a private joke. It lightened the tone of the show, so that was very welcome! Hye Mi referred to The Bridge, a nightclub in Oxford city centre, which many of the students go to on Wednesday night, (which unfortunately has a negative impact on attendance on the following morning.)

One student, a Saudi Arabian male, wouldn’t participate, despite much urging from his fellow Saudis. He wouldn’t say why, but said he would next time.

Actually, I should have published the show as a special episode, apologising to our regular listeners, as the show was addressed not to our normal in-school audience, but to students in another school.

Wow!

Got a message from Richard Green (JRGreen, Int’l Speech Communication http://nitantiao.podomatic.com/), that his class had posted a Valentine’s Day message at his podomatic site, for us podcasters at the Bardwell Road Centre. There is an audio podcast, and also a video version, in RealPlayer format, which I watched. Here’s the link:
Happy Valentine’s Day Everyone from Brooklyn, N.Y.
http://nitantiao.podOmatic.com/entry/2006-02-14T20_22_08-08_00

I have to say I was thrilled to be addressed by people in an ESL class 3000 miles away, in Brooklyn, NY. You could see the classroom setting, with the kind of chairs with a little desk on one arm, which I’m very familiar with. You could see each student as they spoke, and it was interesting to see that this was clearly an ESL class (immigrants?) of relatively mature learners, whereas my class is a younger class of EFL students, most who will be returning to their countries after a matter of months or so, though a few have hopes of staying on in higher education in the UK. Also included was a musical performance by a man from Togo in West Africa, singing a French song unaccompanied – pretty cool too. (I thought how much freer and more comfortable he looked, standing up, than the others, in their chairs. One of the Mac Geek Gab podcast presenters says he has to walk around while he’s podcasting, can’t sit.)

Of course, I want to respond in kind, in a kind of asynchonous Webcast, and I hope I can show the video, or at least play the audio, to my class tomorrow, in our “computer lesson” hour. Bo Yang is our next designated guest presenter, and he has planned to get his classmates to speak on the subject of “How to learn English”, which is a good subject, and ought to be of interest to an audience of both language students and teachers. But now I’m thinking it would be nice to respond to the Brooklyn students’ podcast, and I’m hoping that my class will want to respond – that they will be inspired to respond – and leave the language learning tips for another time.

Posted the Valentine’s Day episode earlier tonight.

http://bardwellroad.podOmatic.com/entry/2006-02-10T11_49_07-08_00

1. Language mistakes

The issue of linguistic mistakes in unscripted student-produced podcasts nags at me. I’ve never been much of a believer in the effectiveness of correction of oral mistakes. But in a podcast, there they are, and as I work on the audio content, I start to notice them a lot, and wonder about what I should be doing about them. So far, I haven’t really focussed on that aspect. Perhaps one solution would be to get the students to analyse a bit of their own recorded speech subsequently, e.g. by asking them to make a transcript of part of their own speech, and to identify mistakes in it.

2. Embarrassing content

Another issue is that of content that may be embarrassing to one of the speakers. Last podcast (episode 5) one of the students sort of admitted doing something against his religion. One of the visitors or subscribers commented that if news of this travelled to the student’s country, it could be extremely awkward. In this episode, one student reveals that at the advanced age of 18, he’s never had a girlfriend, and hopes to get one in 2 or 3 years. Another student of the same age reveals he’s never kissed anyone. Could these admissions lead to embarrassment? Should I have published them? Well, neither student prohibited publication, and I’ve gone ahead.

3. “Photoshopping” students’ speech to make them sound more articulate, etc, vs. authenticity of speech

I’ve found that in some cases, especially with students who are not very articulate, or whose level of fluency in English is weaker, or whose utterances are garbled or incomprehensible or irrelevant, that I’ve been micro-editing their speech, in order to make them seem more articulate. I’ve actually beeen editing out long pauses, false starts and repetitions, ums and ahs, even whole sections if they were garbled, in order to make the students seem more articulate, fluent, etc. Although I think this is probably common practice in the mass media, I’m actually creating false utterances, simalcrums of the event, not authentic speech acts.

On the one hand, I’m thinking, I’m misleading the audience. These speakers are digital creations, not real people. On the other hand, I’m thinking – big deal, so what, it’s just a show, of course you’re going to “photoshop” participants, to make it accessible and attractive to the audience.

Angela Vilarino will be the host for the next podcast.
Valentine’s Day is coming up next Tuesday, and the plan we’ve concocted is for her to get people talking about Valentine’s Day, or the equivalent, in their country, and also about related topics of relations between (young) men and women.
She showed me a scripted introduction she’d written to the show, and a set of questions. (Funny how the students all seem to have gone for this approach – perhaps they are quizzing previous hosts.)
I recommended to her the technique of having a set of question cards, from which the interviewee can select a few that they are happy to talk about. (Time-saving from the producers’ point of view, and from the interviewee’s point of view, I believe it gives them a degree of control over the interview.)

Here are the questions Angela presented to her classmates, for them to choose from. (She included a few suggestions I made, and some but not all suggested language corrections.)

ANGELA’S QUESTIONS
Are you in love?
Can you tell us about St. Valentines in your country?
How do you celebrate St Valentine’s in your country?
What kind of presents do you get?
What kind of presents do you given?
What do you think about St Valentine’s Day?
What do you like to give you your girlfriend or boyfriend?
What are you going to give your girlfriend or boyfriend?
Do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?
Do you celebrate St. Valentine’s Day?
Can boys and girls go out together or alone with out parents in your country?
How can boyfriend and girlfriend meet the first time?
Where can boyfriends and girlfriend meet?
How can boyfriends and girlfriends meet in your country?
Who was your first boyfriend or girlfriend?
How old were you when you had your first girlfriend or boyfriend?
Do you remember your first kiss?

So, Melanie’s podcast TBRCP0004 – GO5 class talk about Oxford nightlife is out. It was recorded and uploaded on Friday.

http://bardwellroad.podomatic.com/entry/2006-01-27T13_46_13-08_00

She chose to ask her classmates about their experience / opinion of Oxford nightlife. [A little background: It was Melanie's birthday on Thursday, and she went to the Bridge nightclub in Oxford city centre the previous night, as did most of her classmates, and many students in the other classes. Our students are mostly college age, and many enjoy clubbing. The Bridge nightclub has a special evening on Wednesday night, and so Wednesday night is "Bridge night" for a significant number of our students - absenteeism on Thursday morning is a recognised problem.]

I had a task students could get on with, and unlike previous recording sessions, which were done inside the classroom in front of the whole class, we set up my laptop and microphone in a different room, and students came in for an interview one at a time.

We continued after the end of the class: Melanie recorded the “outro” and chose a piece of music (from Apple’s Garageband selection), and I started editing the podcast, showing her how easy it was to delete unwanted bits of noise, silences, fluffed first takes and so on, to make the production seem more professional, and to make the interviewees sound more fluent and articulate than they really were, and also how I was going to use the music to punctuate the different sections of the podcast. [I finished off the editing later on, but it wasn't until evening, at home, that I found time to encode the audio as an mp3 file, upload it, and produce the show notes. I had to adjust audio levels a bit for different speakers, as they varied quite widely, due to differences in loudness of speech, and distance from the microphone.]

Melanie did pretty well interviewing people, trying to draw out quiet types – Boyang, for example. Some of the interviews were pretty funny, e.g. when she got a new student from Azerbaijan, Zaur, to admit to spending £100 on a bottle of champagne at the Bridge the night before, and when she got a Saudi Arabian to admit he’d been drinking alcohol! So I was pretty happy with the show.

Again, there was reluctance among the students to be interviewed. Abdulmalik managed to slip away without an interview.

I’d been talking to Penny Larrs, who teaches the GO5 class for their so-called third hour, about the possibility of involving her main class, a higher level class, in a podcast. She talked to GO5 about it in her lesson with them on Friday morning, after they recorded Melanie’s podcast with me, and apparently they are interested. (Cynics would say they were looking forward to not being the ones having to do most of the talking??!) So it looks like a joint effort podcast next week, though questions of form and content are up in the air.

Anne Fox (fellow EVO 2006 ELT podcasting participant) sent a voicemail message to the students at bardwellroad.podomatic.com. It was a response to their choice of cuisine (McDonalds and Chinese, not British) in a previous podcast. She posed it in the form of a puzzle, to try to guess what kind of food she, a Brit abroad, missed most. As I am the administrator of the podomatic account, and the students don’t really have access to the voicemail, I posted her message as a podcast, which all students at St Clare’s will have access to.

It’s educational for me, as her post demonstrates for me the kind of listening challenges that can be put to students. Thank you Anne Fox!

Following on from discussions in the EVO2006 ELT podcasting course, and from the example and guidance of postings by Graham, Ann, and Ruth, amongst others, I have realised that I have been a bit hasty in pushing my students into producing a series of podcasts, without first getting them up to speed as consumers of podcasts.

So today, I made time to:
- check how many have laptops (about two thirds)
- check how many have MP3 players (more than half)
- check how many have subscribed to other podcasts (none)
- how many have used Apple’s iTunes music player and podcast subcriber software (about half)

I showed them showing them how to go to the podcast section of the iTunes Music Store and we checked how you could browse by topic and so on, and we listened to some audio samples snippets and watched a bit of video content.

Then we went to our Podomatic podcast page, and reviewed how to subscribe to iTunes from there, and listened to a bit of the latest podcast. I thanked everyone, and we all applauded each other.

Then we went through the comments that had been left, and I tried to emphasise how I wanted them to be able to produce stuff that was fun to make, and interesting for the audience. I said it had been a bit hard for Jose last time, as he’d had to do it alone, and people had been a bit resistant when it came to recording.

I suggested that if we all planned it together and were able to agree about what we wanted to do, then hopefully everyone would be happier about doing it when it came time to record, and the next guest DJ, Melanie, wouldn’t have such a hard time.

I suggested maybe producing what would be essentially a reply to the comments we’d received, and asked for comments and other suggestions. We talked in circles for a bit.

Melanie’s birthday is in two days, so we agreed to go out to a nearby cafe for a small celebration, and some content was suggested related to that. (Melanie refused to record a solo song, karaoke-fashion!)

There was greater interest and less fear, I think, among the students, so hopefully there might be less resistance to making the next show.

Things are very much up in the air, but we have talked about maybe:
1. surveying people’s experiences of food in Britain (my suggestion)
2. recording us all singing happy birthday to Melanie (Suliman, a new member of the class)
3. recording secret birthday messages to Melanie, which she can only get by listening to the podcast – i.e. reducing the audience to a single person! Is that really the way we want to go?!! – (Jose’s suggestion, I think)

I talked to Melanie afterwards. She’s still rather anxious about it, but says she’ll have a go.

Just posted the latest espisode of the Bardwell Road Centre Podcast, episode 3.
TBRCP0003 – GO5 class tell how they spent the weekend

http://bardwellroad.podOmatic.com/entry/2006-01-20T06_19_46-08_00

This time, with a guest producer, José, one of the students in my pre-intermediate GO5 class. José is an adult, Spanish, works as a crewman on an oil tanker.

RECORDING

José had planned an episode where he would interview his classmates about what they did during last weekend. He had written out an introduction to the topic, and a set of linking introductions to each interviewee. José did really well, responding to people, asking more questions to try to draw quiet people out, etc. We recorded the interviews during classtime. Took about 45 minutes.

EDITING

After the class, José and I went and sequenced and edited the interviews. I acted as technical assistant and advisor, he made decisions about cuts. He chose a piece of music (free in the new version of Garageband in iLife ’06) to accompany the podcast. He also recorded the podcast “intro” and “outro”.

PUBLISHING

I tidied up the podcast, altering sound levels, etc, then posted the episode on podomatic, adding brief “show notes, and a photo of José.

COMMENTS

The biggest surprise for both José and me was that, at first, some students didn’t want to participate. In the end, José managed to persuade all but one student to participate, but in a way, I could see their point. Why should they want to have their voices published on the Internet, speaking in a language not native to them? I’d been thinking about the audience – why would anyone want to listen, but I’d pretty much overlooked the producers – why would anyone want to be recorded? Hmn…

Hopefully, in the future, other students and other classes can be involved, and take the heat off the GO5 students themselves…

Used the new version of Garageband (now iLife ’06). First impression of the new podcast studio features: great! but I haven’t scratched the surface yet. Take Apple’s Garageband 3 Quick Tour.

In case it could help others, below is my podcasting setup. [I should emphasise that I've only done a couple of podcasts so far, so I'm far from an expert!!!]

FOR RECORDING

My laptop has a built-in microphone, but there’s a lot of noise so I really needed an external microphone.

I’m using a Labtec Desktop Mic 534, a very cheap (only £5.63 GBP at Amazon.co.uk) mono microphone with mini connector (3.5 mm) connected to my laptop, and I’m really happy with it. It was incredibly cheap, and light to carry around (though made of plastic and so rather fragile probably).

This microphone connects to my laptop via an external sound card – needed because my laptop doesn’t have a microphone socket per se, just an audio line-in socket. I’m using the Griffin iMic universal audio adapter, which plugs into a USB port.

For mobile recording, I’m also (tentatively, nervously) offering my students use of my 4th generation iPod with a Griffin iTalk microphone attachment (£30 GBP from Amazon.co.uk). I have used this recently in a different context and it works pretty well, though there may be issues with hard drive noise. After recording onto the iPod, I just connect it to my computer in the normal way, and the files transfer automatically to iTunes, from where they can be exported to the podcast audio track.

Notes to speak from:

For preparation, and for prompting during recording, on the advice of Adam Christianson, I believe, of MacCast fame, I’ve been using an outlining program, OmniOutliner, onscreen at the side of the Garageband recording window.

This is a good way to work, I think, because you can duplicate the file from the previous podcast, and adapt it for the current podcast – various bits of info are probably going to repeat pretty much from show to show. I’m basically saying that if you have a rough template to operate from that may help save time organising and sequencing content.

EDITING

Hardware:

I have an 18-month old PowerBook running the latest version of Mac OSX.

Software:

I’ve been using Apple’s Garageband, part of its iLife ’05 suite (now ’06 suite). It is really pretty good: very easy to use, very full featured (voice effects, multi-track, fades in/out, can easily create short musical bits, etc).
[Have purchased the '06 upgrade, which has an inbuilt Podcast studio, with enhanced features, but haven't had a chance to use it yet.]

For each person recorded in Garageband, I used a new “Real Instrument” track: Vocals > No effects. Further configuration: No echo, no reverb. Increased gate and compressor to about 15 or 20 out 100. [I have got no clear idea what all that means. I was just trying to make a clean sound, with no background hum, echo or reverberation.]

Musical transition bits (the same 10 second bit repeated) also had one track to themselves. These musical bits were created in Garageband, very easily.

So, I had 8 tracks (1 teacher, 7 students) plus one sound/music effects track.

PUBLISHING

The audio track created in Garageband is exported in AIFF format to Apple’s iTunes, a free audio player for Mac and Windows, and then, within iTunes, the audio track is converted to MP3 format (there’s a command to do this under the Advanced menu in iTunes).

The file is then ready to upload to the Bardwell Road Centre Podcast at Podomatic.

I have submitted a few files to the File upload areas of Yahoo discussion group Podcasting ELT.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/podcasting_elt/
[I hope it's OK for participants to do that, I couldn't see where else to put them.]

1. In the Files area, Week 2, I put a copy of the document I gave to my class, when I introduced the idea of doing a podcast, a rough draft for setting up a student podcast project:
BardwellRoadPodcastProject.pdf
We also listened to my introductory podcast (which really was little more than a trial of my ability to publish a podcast):
http://bardwellroad.podOmatic.com/entry/2006-01-11T13_49_18-08_00

2. In the Files area, Week 3, I put a copy of the document I gave my students today, a small class of 7 students, about possible aims and suggestions for student podcasts.
BardwellRoadPodcastEpisode2.pdf
I also got each of them to agree to be the show’s producer for one episode, and they chose a date, one show a week for the next 6 weeks or so.
[I'm so anxious to get the thing up and running, and for it to be well received and useful and used...]

3. Also in the Files area, but back to week 2, something on preparation for recording a podcast, specifically, the use of notes or an outline to speak from, like teleprompts that TV newsreaders and so on use.
I think I learned from the MacCast podcast (over 100 episodes so far) that Adam Christianson, the podcaster, prepares an onscreen outliner software program during his “prep” for each episode, and I remembered I had a free copy of “OmniOutliner” (for Mac OS X, version 2) on my laptop. It works pretty well.
I have uploaded 2 html files which show the online outline “teleprompt” I used while recording the first and second episodes of the Bardwell Road Centre podcast:
BardwellRoadPodcast0001outline.html
BardwellRoadPodcast0002outline.html

Hope these files/ideas/thoughts can be of use to others.