English Studio

Voicethread is a web application that has caught my attention since I discovered it online. I think it holds a great potential to be exploited in class both to be used as an online presentation , to offer students audio extracts of written discourse that has to be read aloud to practise pronunciation -when students are in class they can ask for the pron of words to the teacher but they can't keep the teacher's voice in their schoolbags unless they record it while the lesson is being delivered and limitless possibilities. I used the video below last week to get students to listen to daily routines (sth they had been dealing with before)and show them what they can do to actively interact with a webpage , synchronously or not. There is much more that should have been done, but it was just a first step. First time they had to listen , watch, react and record their reactions after understanding how the web application works(everything at the same time).- Related post...

Practice, practice and practice on paper is time consuming for students to copy from the board and, honestly, quite boring ! Boring activities, experience tells, are sometimes necessary in the English classroom. However just a simple idea may make the difference. A Synchronous online activity can be developed and the "practice atmosphere" is likely to change for the better. Using the messenger to replace paper and pen is something new for students and typing the same sentences they might have to copy on their notebooks in a boring way turns into a challenge that implies fun for them. You type "Sheila is in London", expecting that they type back "She's in London" . You type "Tony and Joseph are at school", expecting students to type back "They're at school" , etc. You also have the chance to type OK / right/ wrong (provide instant feedback) so as to give students the chance to correct themselves if they type s...

One of the classics was presented through this videoclip: Students were then given some info about the background to the song . and they answered some questions about what they could infer from the video images and random voice sounds/ sung text they were able to get. Next students were provided with an interactive-gapped text containing the song lyrics -"interactive" because the gapped text was made using an office word application which showed blanks. On placing the mouse cursor on the gap and pressing the F1 key , hints for the gapped words were released to guide correct text completion. The follow up activity was to get students to memorize the song. But not by simple "parrot like repetition". A new webtool was to help them: MEMORIZE NOW , a great resource I came across while exploring the web. It gives students the opportunity to learn and enjoy songs, which is -as Nik Peachey affirms - an excellent way to improve listening, vocabulary and pro...

It's always a nice idea to get students to practise the "classic" language items through innovative ways as they often tend to get bored at doing exactly the same sort of things. Do you know how many times they've gone through the Present Simple Tense? And the classic "read a text and answer questions in the present simple" kind of activity? Well, this could have been another boring practice again : Three different texts taken from somewhere online ( Scarlet , Amr and Asan and their habits around their school lives)- Sets of 10 questions per pair (they were working in pairs) that they made themselves-ie each pair was assigned a text an allows d they had to prepare the set of questions for that text. They would then interchange questionnaires and answer the questions the other teams had made. Typical activity that could have been well developed orally or even in writing (on paper). However, a new alternative has come up : Typewith.me , a web applicat...