Authentic tasks in the World Languages classroom are those that resemble a real-life situation, that is, a communicative experience that students could have outside of school. Because of this “real world” condition, authentic tasks in the WL classroom have a purpose that goes beyond language use; in other words, learners aren’t just practicing particular target[…]
Any teacher would love to have just the right activity or the perfect strategy to get every single student in the classroom to actively participate in class discussions. Foreign language teachers especially are always searching for the magic trick that will make their students talk non-stop. It’s often the case that regardless of how engaging or interesting[…]
In our blog from Nov 29th, we told you about Extempore’s origins: our founders’ desire to avoid the hassle of having to schedule 1:1 interviews with each of their students to assess spontaneous speech… and consequently having to find something else for the students to do while not taking part in the interview. Like all good[…]
As we do every year, we use the summer break to push updates to the platform. Some of these updates are major new features; but many others are small tweaks, performance and usability improvements that are reported to us during the year. That being said, we’re excited to announce the first one of the summer![...]
Posted on 2020-06-26 by Thomas Murr
Guest Post by Susana Perez-Castillejo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of St. Thomas. Beyond the Zoom breakout rooms for speaking activities and shared Google docs for collaborative writing practice, there are other tools we can leverage to make our synchronous class meetings a bit more interactive. These are ideas I have been learning these past few[...]
Posted on 2020-04-16 by Thomas Murr
Nowadays technological developments have affected our lives, how we communicate, how we learn and, of course, our way of teaching. Indeed, it is almost impossible to find a language class that does not use some technological support. Computer assisted language learning has changed the practice of teaching (Chapelle & Voss, 2016). Technology in Language[...]
Posted on 2020-02-10 by Thomas Murr
