'LearnEnglish' by British Council for TOEFL prep

      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 popular daily topics. Every month there will be new learning materials added. These topics are highly related with TOEFL speaking and writing test, such as sports, festivals, etc. In each topic, learners could have access to videos and audios with scripts, vocabulary and comprehension exercises. Below each topic, there are some sub-questions that serve for reflecting purposes. Students could record comments and share their own experience online. 

(new topics will be added monthly)

      Then what could we instruct our students to do by using 'Learning hub'? 

      The lead-in video part in each topic could be excellent listening material for students. Of course, if we want to use these authentic materials in class, we should make teaching aims clear and accordingly design tasks in advance. For students with lower English level, we choose bottom to top way of teaching listening, for example, in which we ask students to recognize English stress patterns and intonational contours. 

(authentic video on topic of Valentine's Day)

click here https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/learning-hub/valentines-day

      However, in the meantime, we also help students develop their macro-skills which pave way for advanced listening tasks. For example, we lead students to recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse and try to apply the same devices in the following oral tasks. Indeed, we usually associate listening with speaking tasks and make effort to make students engage with the listening material. This step of personalizing class material could give students ample opportunities to practice. When we use authentic materials on ‘LearnEnglish’, other macro-skills for listening that are worth our attention include: 

• grasping gist and supporting ideas
• deducing causes and effects
• understanding speaking purposes in monologues and interactional conversations
• recognising implied meanings
• ……

      Besides ‘learning hub’, there are many units that we may recommend to students, like grammar, vocabulary, story zone, and etc. However, we should use this website critically. For instance, in ‘vocabulary’ unit, this website only focuses on spelling. We would prefer to see authentic contexts of vocabulary for middle school students. And this website is to sell online courses to students and free materials are limited. 

（vocabulary games on 'LearnEnglish'）

      All in all, for new students in the stage of TOEFL prep, we should make the first step to take advantage of authentic materials on useful websites, like ‘LearnEnglish’ by British council. If you have other interesting findings about free learning materials, please share with us!