Group items tagged

A collection of resources related to vocabulary learning and teaching, some of which are annotated.

Think of "Pronunciation for Teachers" as a professional clearinghouse for information. We include links to teaching and research resources, information about what researchers and teachers are... This seems like a great collection of resources for teaching pronunciation. It is supported by some big names in the field.

Nice, Randy!

Let's say you end up teaching EFL where you have access to the internet but no online academic site like BlackBoard to use for grading. Or, maybe you just don't like BlackBoard all that much. Engrade is an incredibly useful website in that it serves as an online gradebook for tracking academic performance and attendance. I found out about the site from a fellow GA at NAU whose department had decided that Engrade was simply easier to use than BlackBoard. While you can't upload all the content--readings and such--as you can on BlackBoard, at least as far as I can tell, Engrade does allow you to upload rubrics and word lists for flash cards. It also has a system for warning students similar to the GPS system at NAU. Yet another great feature is that if you're ever required to turn in hard copies of your gradebook or your attendance, you can easily export that information. Engrade is also FERPA compliant for those of you teaching in the US. I used it at NAU last semester, and it worked like a charm. I can't recommend it enough.

Alan, I'm glad you posted this. I piloted the use of this program along with a couple of other EFL teachers when I was in China. We ended up using it during the entire year I was teaching there. It has been a while since I used it, but I remember it being fairly user friendly. It also allowed for the sharing of reports with students. It would be interesting to see what upgrades they have made to it since then, as that was about four years ago. I would second your recommendation.

This looks like an interesting site for teaching students about a range of social issues. Complete lesson plans can be found and a variety of other resources related to "teaching tolerance" in the ESL classroom.

My blurb: Teacher training videos, for your ongoing professional development. These videos seems to be geared towards K-12 education and are on a variety of subjects. However, there are 391 videos about teaching English, some of those are TESL specific (I noted at least 3 on teaching Listening and Speaking skills). They also have 108 videos on teaching Modern Languages (mostly French and Spanish). Also, they have ideas for using technology in the classroom, under the "ICT" subject. For instance, they have a "Using web-based software to enhance speaking skills" video, and a "Flip Video Cameras" video. Their blurb: Education video resources, lesson plans, inspiration and ideas to use in classroom. Professional development, CPD and training for everyone working in schools.

"A free website to teach children to read with phonics. For preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. Exciting phonics games and online interactive books." I used this site when I was teaching preschool. It could also be used to teach language learners. However, because of the content, it should be used with beginners who are young. When I used this site it was mainly with children between 4 and 5 years old, and they absolutely loved it. Not only were they using a "big person toy" by being on the computer, but they were truly learning valuable language skills.

"Teaching English with Technology (TEwT) is an online peer-reviewed journal that seeks to disseminate work mainly focused on how technology is being used, or could be used, in TESOL." A journal solely dedicated to teaching English with technology. This is obviously a great resource for our class, but also for our current and future classrooms. From what I've seen, I like this journal because it features ideas and research done in this setting. Very interesting!

"Create your own jeopardy template online, without PowerPoint. Or browse the pre-made templates created by other people!" This is a handy site that allows you to build custom Jeopardy games, and it's all hosted online. I personally used this when teaching EFL young adult literature and it made for some really nice review games. Also, a lot of user generated content is publicly available, so if you happen to use a popular piece of literature, there might be something pre-made that you can use on short notice. It's also very easy to share content you create with coworkers or reuse it the next time you teach the course. Jeopardylabs is 100% free, and you can certainly do more than novel review themed games with it.

English-Guide.org is an incredible website, albeit it looks like it is designed for children. That said, if you're teaching children English learners, great; you're all set to go. If you're teaching adults, this site could be used as a respite from the intensity of intensive English programs. While many of the resources on the site are language learning games that take the form of drill-and-kill exercises, not all of the material is so rudimentary. For instance, the Career/Business section under Listening links to many listening passages at elllo.org (another useful site for listening and speaking teachers). On elllo, learners can listen to business passages, such as one on personality traits and answer comprehension questions. It would be tempting to let a class full of learners loose on this site to see what resources they would gravitate toward. The major categories of resources Vocabulary, Listening, Grammar, and Others, and within these categories, like I mentioned, there are both games and more sophisticated exercises at the learners' fingertips.

BarryFunEnglish is a site aimed at ESL/EFL for younger learners. It has a good number of boardgame style games that can be quickly set up and customized- this is the chief advantage for using the site over a traditional version of Monopoly or Battleship. Coupled with a large display (i.e. projector, large TV), classes of up to ~12 students can be included in playing the game without too much downtime for any one student or team. You can set up custom vocab lists, but it's limited to the vocab items in the site's database, so you're mostly limited to beginner level English. Having used this at my past job teaching young EFL learners, I will say that it can be tempting to use it as a crutch- don't just play a game for the sake of playing a game, or killing time. I'd also recommend varying the games you use and definitely make use of the customizable vocab lists. Still, a huge part of being a child is playing games with other children, and linguistically, that means game playing can help develop a lot of the meta-language that children use for games.

This site has many world languages and teaching/learning materials for these languages. English is one of them and there are many documents available. All the documents are peer reviewed and given stars so that you know how well these activities worked in the past.

Even though I presented on Flickr, I thought I'd share it here, too. I had never thought of using Flickr for second language teaching purposes, but it has a lot of potential as a teaching tool. I particularly like the mapping option which allows you to search for pictures of a particular item or concept in a particular city/region/country. This would be great for writing or speaking classes that have a compare/contrast component.

Dipity is a tool for creating timelines. Students could create timelines and view each other's timelines, as well as practice citing sources with this software. Photos can also be view as a flipbook, list or map (if geography is important in your class). I think this tool would be great for teaching history in CBI, or for having students tell their personal story. Students could create a timeline for a loved one, or maybe follow their favorite celebrity. A word of caution: many of the users on this site have created timelines that are NOT classroom-appropriate.

There has been a lot of discussion on the web about how one can create their own Personal Learning Network (PLN). This term represents a purposeful approach to using technology to network with other professionals who share similar professional interests and goals. This article explores a number of technologies that are used for creating a PLN. For staying abreast on recent developments in technology and the use in teaching, I believe that developing a PLN is a must.

This site has ideas, printable materials, discussion forums, and employment opportunities. It shows how to teach Film and Video, teach with the Internet, and using songs and music. You can sign up for free and download a limited amount of worksheets per month from www.education.com/worksheets. You can select by Grade or Subject. These are mostly useful for homeschoolers or in regular children's classrooms. It offers content-based ideas with integrated skills including conversation, listening, speaking, reading, writing, and Vocabulary. The Grammar is practiced in communicative settings. ESL PartyLand is a nice home base for Internet tools including up-to-date addresses for Dave's ESL Café, EF Englishtown, Kent's ESL Wonderland, On-line TOEFL Materials, and Randall's CyberListening Lab. It funnels all these sites into one page for easy reference. Other sites it observes as interesting include The All Music Guide, The Discovery Channel on-line, Earth Alert, and Lonely Planet On-line.

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 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.

We talked about MICASE in class, but if you aren't familiar with the site, you might not realize that they also offer a set of prepared lesson plans and activity ideas that use MICASE corpus data.

Some of us discussed pecha kuchu last semester in Dr. Stoller's foundations course. It's a method of presentation that literally translates to "death by power point." The idea came about because people were getting so bored at large conferences when presenters were going on and on about there research. This style of presentation allows each slide to be up for 20 seconds and the total time is 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Presenters were not allowed to go over this allotted time. Students in Dr. Stoller's class last semester were given 5 minutes to present on the research we did all semester. Personally, I found it difficult to present all the information I wanted to, but I also was surprised by how much I could actually fit into five minutes. So how does this relate to language learning/teaching? Pecha Flickr is a program that allows you to type in a tag word, like fish or dog. Then, it will pull up different pictures on Flickr that are tagged with those words for 20 seconds at a time. Students could give a mock presentation or even be writing sentences for the 20 seconds each picture is shown. This is a creative and fun way to get students to think on the spot using random pictures. Although I feel this would be a fun and creative way to get students thinking, I would be cautious using this because some of the pictures are tagged inaccurately. For example, I typed in fish as the tag and the second picture was a couple kissing. However, this might be a unique way to bring in slang and informal language. Kissing with a fish face?

Eyercize has significant potential in high-intermediate and high level language learning classrooms. The premise is fairly simple. The site allows users to paste text into a text box. From there, the users can learn to read faster in that the site will sequentially highlight groups of words at a time. The site allows the user to adjust how many words are highlighted and at what speed the highlighting occurs. Teaching language learners and readers of all types to read in such a matter is important in that advanced readers do not read one letter or word at a time, for the most part. Advanced readers take in groups of words and quickly progress through a passage. Eyercize can help learners learn this ability.