Group items tagged

# Difficulty : Rating 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest) of the difficulty of learning the language for an English speaker. Many additional factors will affect the difficulty you will experience when trying to learn a given language, especially the other languages you already speak. Such a rating system has obvious limitations but I take great care in assessing the difficulty of each language. Many of these ratings have been discussed on the language forum (see for example the discussion about Korean). People always complain that the rating given to their native language is 'too low' - I wonder how they would now since they never had to learn it as a foreign language. If you can make a case for a different difficulty rating for a specific language you are welcome to bring this up in the language forum. # Popularity : Subjective rating of how popular the language is with Western learners. This obviously varies a great deal from country to country, but is a good overall indicator of the availability of learning material for the language. I visit many physical language bookshops as well as some online ones and think I have a rather objective basis for establishing 'popularity' of a language with foreign language learners in the number of courses and books available for each language. # GDP : Nominal GDP of the countries where the languages is spoken. This gives an indication of the economic importance of the language on the international scene. We have not used PPP GDP as it emphasizes non-tradable goods. When a country uses several languages we used the percentage of speakers of the language multiplied by the country's GDP. If you feel that economic factors are meaningless in language learning, please disregard this column. # Countries : Number of countries where the language is an official language or where there are important communities who speak this language at home. This gives you an indication of the spread of the language across the globe. Some languages (English, Spa

Headway elt books have been helping English language learners for decades. Now, they have joined the 21st century with Headway iTools for smartboards to compliment your lessons.

So, if restricting access to these devices isn't the answer, how do we address their presence in the classroom and use these devices to engage rather than disengage students' attention? Here are a few suggestions…

English language grammar one-page materials: exercises about reported speech with answer keys https://englishstandarts.blogspot.com/2020/11/reported-speech-exercises.html

Latest update 4th June 2013 - These are some of the best free internet resources for education. This page is constantly updated; every time the author comes across a new piece of software or an exciting website, the author lists it here. This list is in alphabetical order which makes it easy to use with a short explanation of what each software, website, or app does.

TErms related to teaching foreign languages

There is an assumption that persists in the educational community that more mature teachers are much more difficult and reluctant to be trained on the effective use of educational technology. To some degree, I think this assumption has been built on by the digital native vs digital immigrant myth. But as someone who has trained teachers of all ages all over the world I would say that, from my own experience, this hasn't been the case.

This is a "master" list of all kinds of educational technology tools in the areas of social netowrking, teacher's web resources, educational apps for the iPad, 21st-century teaching resources, google tools, and content area resources. Lots of things to see and review!

To anyone in this group who happens upon this note/page: I am simply experimenting with diigo and foreign language texts online. Obviously just adding traditional comprehension questions to a text with diigo's floating sticky notes is the easier part/path of least innovation. I am trying to figure out how to maximize interactivity, creativity, and personalization while also reinforcing those grammatical/vocab stepping stones which a learner needs to be able to appreciate the onus of the creativity the new-fangled teacher is laying upon them :) . Please drop comments and suggestions below!

videos, reading, etc. about implementing the 5Cs in the classroom