RANDALL’S site as a tool for English teaching and learning

Esl-lab is a listening laboratory that contains many listening exercises for English learners. It was first created and launched in 1998 and developed by Randall Davis. The purpose of this website is to meet the needs of all learners and help them to practice and improve through step by step guides focusing on the development of their listening and comprehension skills. 

Randall´s lab is a quite voluminous and easily navigable site that has accurate and authentic information. This Esl-lab offers users more than 80 listening exercises in four sections: short listening exercises, listening quizzes with real audio, listening for academic purposes and long-conversations with real audio. Each section is developed across 4 levels: easy, medium, difficult and very difficult.

This site doesn’t have age limitations, so the users maybe adults and high school ESL (English as a second language) students, or EFL (English as a foreign language). The learners have many advantages to practice the language: variety of listening exercises, quizzes with graphics and listening practice using authentic topics and materials outside the classroom. Moreover, in this laboratory, it is very important to take into account the learners autonomy because they control their own time in the realization of all activities.  

To access this service it is necessary to have a standard browser, real audio/video player and 2 MB of free space in your hard disk; this site is available with for any version of windows.

Randall’s site is an effective tool for English teachers and learner because they can use it as reinforcement for the activities developed in the classroom. For the teaching process there are guides, language learning tips, self-grading quizzes and teaching tips; all these resources are located on the left hand side of the home page. 

For learners there are also many other ways to acquire English these are some complementary websites: www.trainyouraccent.com,  www.ezslang.com, www.dailyesl.com, and www.eslnetwork.com .The first one consist of improving accents and speaking naturally; the second one in understanding slang for natural communication; the next contains mini audio lectures and pronunciation tips and the last one is used by ESL students for creating websites.

The feedback is the most important feature on this site for learning English because Randall’s always lets the learner listen to a segment of spoken English, often with some visual aids; it also shows a set of questions based on the spoken script and evaluates the responses given by the learner.

Many people have used this page and they think that it is a great aid: “in my opinion the information is accurate and authentic, and I didn’t find any errors. Randall’s encourages users to email him with corrections and suggestions”. (Voula Annas, January 26, 2006). 

We think that Randall’s is a very useful website in the learning and teaching process because there we have the opportunity to develop our skills in the second language we can study in independent way to improve and to learn.

http://www.esl-lab.com/

Written by

Yesica Alejandra Moreno

Isabel Cristina Álvarez  Londoño