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The following article is the first of several tutorials which will outline the development of Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab, with special emphasis on how educators can create their own Internet-based listening exercises for language teaching and learning.
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- Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab

- Joining the Multimedia Revolution

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Breaking the Silent Barrier on the Web - Backgound

By Randall S. Davis
Audio Introduction
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PLAY - Divace

Randall's ESL Cyber Listening Lab (http://www.esl-lab.com/) was created in January 1998 with the purpose of providing interactive listening activities at the reach of students worldwide. Like many teachers in the profession, I was aware of the plethora of ESL and EFL related sites for teachers and students that had sprung up over the past several years. However, I noticed that the majority of the sites for language learners were very static in nature, that is, they (a) did little to engage the visitor in interactive learning activities and (b) were lacking in presenting a more enriched learning experience beyond reading and writing. The Web was like watching a silent film, limited to text and pictures. Godwin-Jones, (1997) commented: "Static pages provide information to users; interactive pages make users into participants."

"Static pages provide information to users; interactive papes make users into participants."

Godwin-Jones
I was particularly interested in earlier research (Li & Hart, 1996) that pointed out that ESL and EFL students have a very keen interest in seeing more listening activities on the Web. Li and Hart suggested that based on their work, "the ESL community's top current priority is audio material (and video when it becomes available)" (p. 9). However, creating digitized sound and video files that were manageble in size has been the biggest roadblock to the development of more listening sites. Previously, Internet users would have to download these enormous audio files first to their local computers before they would play.

Imagine this. A one-minute clip of audio saved in WAV format at 44kHz, 16 bit stereo (i.e., very good sound quality) would take a whopping 10-megabyte chunk out of your hard disk (Remember, we're talking pre-gigabyte days). And then while you're out making a balony sandwhich waiting for the file to download, your computer chocks and freezes. Ahhh! You've lost the file and valuable online time. Furthermore, you might download the file only to find that it is not what you wanted in the first place.

All of these obstacles disuaded some website developers (or in our case, teachers) from even attempting to create listening activities on the web, and students often had little patience or money to deal with early dinosaurs.

Then, audio streaming appeared and everything has changed--or better yet--is changing and evolving. Unlike other audio files, streaming audio plays simultaneously as it downloads, making listening to long sound files a realistic option to creating home pages for language learning. Once I became aware of the potential of this medium, I decided to develop a site that would really be a boon to students.

The development of the lab has followed different phases or steps which I will outlined in these tutorials. Enjoy!


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