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I stumbled upon this resource while researching the tools and techniques used by a school that I'm applying to teach for.The Reading Assistant is based on speech recognition technology that helps students practice reading aloud (pronunciation) and answer comprehension questions (reading and critical thinking skills). From what I can tell, this paid software is available online, for maximum student convenience. After students complete assignments, teachers receive reports on students' performances. The program claims to have 300 graded readers that align with  US Common Core standards from elementary to high school. To me, the capability of this program to "listen" to students' pronunciation and provide help and individualized feedback is its greatest advantage. The inclusion of a variety of resources for developing vocabulary and work knowledge are also important points for me. Overall, this looks like a useful resource for K-12 schools that want to supplement classroom reading instruction.

An extensive list of topics for impromptu speaking activities

This website has a large collection of audio stories for ESL students. While the rate of speech appears to be slow, the vocabulary does not seem appropriate for lower-proficiency learners. For intermediate and higher learners, the site might be applicable for classroom activities and/or extensive listening.

I'm not sure if anyone has posted this already (so forgive me if this is a repeat!), but basically Tumblr is like a blog hybrid that allows you post just about anything (as the site states: "Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors to your theme's HTML."). The site is very creativity-oriented, and seems like a potentially very useful online resource for students to express themselves creatively, to write and publish for a real audience, to gain exposure to cultural dimensions of the target speech community, and to enhance their digital literacy.

This is another digital storytelling website where you can make your own movie. You get to pick the scene, the characters, and the music, and then once you have a scene, you can write dialogue for the characters. It's easy to be really silly or really funny with this, so it would be a fun activity for students to practice writing.

Is there a way to get the characters to speak aloud, or do they just mouth the words silently when their speech bubbles appear?

Not that I could find, so it's a better writing/reading activity than listening/speaking. It's kind of hilarious, though.

If you were in listening/speaking last spring, you may remember this website I shared. It has lots of videos for learning American English pronunciation. I used it all the time while I was teaching pronunciation classes in Nebraska. At the time I didn't have any background in phonetics and was trying to teach myself. I found this site to be helpful for students as well as for novice teachers like myself. I used the videos to supplement our textbook (Clear Speech or Pronunciation Pairs). Students who had access to the internet could practice at home too. The videos show some close-ups of her mouth while making the sounds, so I brought small mirrors to class for students to use and watch their own mouths (not all students were comfortable doing this though). The site is well organized and you can easily find the sound/topic/skill you're looking for. You could also use the videos to create Grockit activities.

I came across this corpus while looking for corpora that are tagged for speech acts. I haven't had a chance to explore it too much yet, but it looks like it definitely has some potential pedagogical applications.

Google voice is a resource that can potentially be used in listening and speaking classes. Essentially, it allows the user to associate a phone number with one's Google account. From there, the user can record messages that the caller will hear when he/she dials the phone number. In a Listening and Speaking context, access to recorders for classroom use may be limited at times. However, many learners have cell phones. To complete a listening and speaking task, during class or for homework, learners can call the phone number, listen to the task, and record their responses. Many concerns with Google Voice arise, however. Most notably, the quality of the recording may be muddy. That is, learners may have a difficult time comprehending the recorded message they hear when initially calling. Additionally, the messages recorded by the learners can be difficult for the instructor to understand. Also, whereas recorders allow learners to confirm that their speech has been recorded, on Google Voice, the learners simply hang up and receive no such confirmation--unless the task is done in a classroom setting whereupon the instructor has the list of messages available. Moreover, the learners are not able to listen to their messages or the messages of other students in the class if they are not logged into the instructor's account. As far as the positive attributes, Google Voice attempts to transcribe messages, and while the transcriptions are not always accurate, even when transcribing messages from native speakers of English, the transcriptions are interesting to read nonetheless. Possibly giving learners an incentive such as extra credit for a perfect transcription due to their pronunciation is an option. Additionally, Google Voice does allow the instructor to download the messages if desired, so saving the files is possible. As far as identifying the callers, each voice message is accompanied by the phone number, so collecting students' phone numbers is probably