TESOL Community

Hi, 😀Beijing colleagues. As TOEFL teachers, we treasure the limited time in class and desire to equip students with more power over TOEFL test. But we all know that language improvement derives from daily input and output largely on the part of students themselves. So, we commit ourselves to creating conditions for individualized learning and learning autonomy. Today I want to bring you an English learning tool that can boost our students’ listening skills, which is TubeQuizard ( http://tubequizard.com/ ) . (you can choose videos that suit you fine) TubeQuizard can make interactive listening quizzes for any subtitled YouTube video. The quizzes that TubeQuizard creates are aimed at top frequency expressions and grammar. These highly effective listening quizzes will train students to understand real life pronunciation of high frequency language. Students could choose videos of different levels, language focuses, topics, and accent varieties on the platform. For instance, I choose vide

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