Potential of Voice Recording Tools in Language Instruction

One of the most prevailing difficulties I have faced as an English instructor is students’ dependence on teachers even though many language classes have been shifting from teachercentered to student-centered influenced by the communicative language teaching (CLT) approach. Class evaluations and needs analyses often reveal that many students expect every single one of their errors to be corrected by teachers. Some students even attribute their lack of improvement to not being corrected promptly. Prompt error correction or individualized feedback from teachers may be beneficial for students, but it is unlikely to be feasible for teachers to listen and respond to students individually all the time, especially given constraints such as large numbers of students and limited class time. Another major issue I have faced is a lack of opportunities for students to speak English outside the classroom. In the English as a foreign language (EFL) setting, generally, the only chance for speaking English occurs in the classroom. Surprisingly, even in the ESL setting, this issue arises when students interact with peers or family from the same native language group outside the classroom. My teaching career as an English instructor started at a private conversation school in Japan. I taught EFL there for two and a half years. I taught beginning, intermediate, and advanced conversation classes as well as preparation courses for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Student population varied in age, ranging from 18 to 80 years old. The average class size was small, allowing up to eight students in one class. Since it was a conversation school, the goal of the classes was to improve students’ communicative abilities in English, and students were highly motivated to develop their English speaking and listening skills. My classes met once a week for 50 minutes during a six-month term. Students had access to authentic listening materials outside the classroom, and they were motivated to expose themselves to English. Therefore, they had the means to receive authentic input in English. However, as is often the case with most EFL settings, for many students, the only opportunity to practice speaking English was limited to their class time. The lack of output made it challenging for them to improve their speaking ability, especially in regard to fluency. Students had difficulty getting high scores in the speaking section of the TOEFL. Instructors at the conversation school did not hold office hours, so directly helping my students practice speaking English outside the classroom was difficult, although I occasionally had ten-minute, face-to-face meetings with individual students to talk about their learning progress and provide feedback between classes.