Obama: A Moment in History

In today's activity I'd like to celebrate a moment in history and help you to understand Barack Obama's great acceptance speech at this year's Democratic Convention. This is a listening and text reconstruction activity which has kindly been donated by VOICEbook.com

For this activity you will need to download a small software program (14Mb) and install it on your computer. You can download the activity from here: VOICEbook.exe

The file is a .exe program, so you may get a warning when trying to install it.

Task:

• Download and install the program from http://www.voicebook.com/download/vbplayer/obama_setup.exe
• Click on 'File' and then 'Open' and the exercise should appear. Click on the small folder icon to get started.

• You will see an introduction and then a text. Click the play button on the side of the screen and you will start to hear the speech.
• Type any word that you recognise into the area with the title 'Scratch pad'. If the words are part of the speech they will appear in the area 'So far so good'.
  

• You can listen and re-listen as many times as you need to. Once you have finished this part of the text move on to the next by clicking the numbers at the bottom of the screen.

I hope you enjoy this activity. If you would like to watch this speech you can see the first part here on YouTube.


If you would like to find out more about other Voicebooks that you can listen to using this software, have a look at the VOICEbook.com website.

I hope you enjoy this activity and I'd like to thanks everyone at Voicebooks for donating this free activity to the site.

Related links for teachers:

• Dictation goes Web 2.0
• Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Listening Dictation Puzzles for EFL ESL

Best

Nik Peachey