TESOL Community

Hi, 😀Beijing colleagues. Staying in room for my assignments these days make me recall the moments when we had online classes during the period of pandemic. We were all confused with how to draw students’ attention to our lessons and make them participate in the learning. Today I am to introduce a tool called VoiceThread ( https://voicethread.com/ ), which could help us with online teaching and interaction with students after class. Voice Thread is a platform where students develop critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity skills. Firstly, we upload educational images, documents and videos to Voice Thread platform, and then students can make comments on the items that you upload. Students can choose whichever form they like to make comments, such as video, audio, written comments, etc., and they can insert comments at any point in the video. For instance, students can make comments or ask questions relating with the teacher’s video of instruction in reading

Hi, Beijing colleagues. Today I am excited to introduce a marvelous website for English listening practice. It is elllo ( https://elllo.org/english/ ). On elllo , there are extraordinarily rich natural English conversations in different accents all over the world. The videos and audios on this platform are recorded by both NS and NNS speakers, which makes this learning website very useful for TOEFL learners. As we know, different accents listening material are included in TOEFL tests. Our students who are familiar with American accents often complain about, for instance, Indian accents in TOEFL tests. From this perspective, the listening materials of diverse accents on elllo website are excellent exercises for our students.             (audio material on elllo )                                                 (video material on elllo ) What’s more, besides test-oriented aims, we should bear in mind that the TOEFL training is also to make students be equipped with capabilities for s

Hi, 😀Beijing colleagues. From the perspective of sociocultural theory, interaction is at the core of SLA. We are always on the way to explore means of interactive TOEFL class. In this blog, I am to share an interactive education platform, called ‘ Nearpod ’ ( https://nearpod.com ). Nearpod is a mobile assisted learning tool designed for interactive classes. It can synchronize materials on the electronic equipment of both teacher and students. When the teacher presents learning materials on big screen, students can get access to the materials by Nearpod on their mobile electronic equipment at the same time. Imagine when the teacher presents reading tasks on the big screen in TOEFL class, back-row students without either this kind of mobile tool or paper copies would have difficulty in dealing with the reading tasks especially in the case of a long reading text. But with Nearpod, students could use their own electronic equipment to read and take notes while following the teacher’s pa

    Hi, Beijing colleagues. 😍Again, it’s time to share my experience of ICT in TESOL. During this week, I have conducted an experiment in English teaching with my son. I employed several tools in the lesson with my son, including ChatGPT and Voki . While preparing and delivering the lesson, I realized what appealed me most was that technological tools could stimulate learning autonomy and motivation if we could unitize them in appropriate ways.     As usual, I asked my son to repeat after authentic cartoon videos under my instruction. This time I selected a video in Blippi series ( click here https://www.youtube.com/user/BlippiVideos ) as the learning material (my son earlier complained that Peppa Pig was childish ☺ ). The topic was seaplane. The following words from the transcript I selected were the vocabulary target of this lesson.     Then I planned to do some vocabulary tasks so that he could be familiar with these new words. However, I had to avoid making him watching the seap

      Hi, Beijing colleagues. How is everything going? February is the month that your students would gradually receive offers from outstanding oversea universities. You must be enjoying such exciting moments in your teaching career. In the meantime, you might be meeting new students who just choose the international education pathway and have comparatively lower initial English proficiency. We know that TOEFL is definitely beyond their current English abilities. Thus, selecting appropriate learning materials is our top priority. The ideal material should be authentic and cover topics which are frequently included in TOEFL tests. Recently in Tilly’s ICT class, I found a useful website for TOEFL greenhand to explore, that is ‘ LearnEnglish ’ by British Council. click here  https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/       The ‘ Learning hub ’ on LearnEnglish website is one part that I eager to recommend to you. This is a place where L2 learners could input authentic language about popula

Hi, 😎 Beijing colleagues.   I have already studied in University of Warwick for 4 months. I am extremely grateful to all the teachers here for their help. I feel that I am making progress every day. I also have experienced several moments when I questioned my effort, ability, and experience. Fortunately, the encouraging words from my teachers here always inspire me whenever I felt disappointed with myself. I gradually realize that the learning activity, to some extent, is similar to the experience of leading a life. They all continue in a process during which I explore, upgrade and then further explore. Sometimes I don’t exactly know where the next destination is, but I do know I am climbing the ladder to the next deck.  Voki One of the best ways to reinforce my own learning is to turn around and teach it to somebody else. In this blog, I want to share with you one technical tool called Voki ( https://www.voki.com/ ), which I have just learned in ICT class. Voki accords with PPP (pre