Students speak more when using Extempore A little over a year ago, I blogged about the results of a survey on the role of Extempore in boosting confidence to speak among advanced learners of Spanish. Three quarters of the students reported feeling more confident to speak in the target language after a semester of regular[…]
I’ve been wanting to write about the crucial role of spoken output in language learning for a while. While exposure to the target language – especially in the form of comprehensible oral input – is definitely the sine qua non of language acquisition, I would argue that output is as indispensable as input. If you[…]
Have you witnessed a time when ALL your students were actively participating in the target language in a whole class discussion? Unless you teach highly motivated graduate students in small classes, I’m afraid the experience of a successful whole class discussion is not very frequent. And by successful I mean that the discussion could be[…]
If you have attended a demo on how to use Extempore for speaking practice in your foreign language classroom, you have probably met one of the three co-founders who are teachers (and who currently keep teaching because they love it!). You may be wondering what led us to conceive of, design, and embark in the[…]
Recently, we run a quick (and highly unscientific, we admit…) Twitter survey. We were trying to confirm something that our customers tell us all the time: that computer labs are very rarely used. They are expensive, they take up space… yet they are so cumbersome to book, they require so much time and oversight to obtain[…]
If your students were dropped into the target language environment by themselves right at this second, what could they do? Could they survive with more than just primitive hand signals? “Freewrite” and “freetalk” assignments give you those answers. These tasks allow students to show what they can do in the target language with no (okay,[...]
Posted on 2021-01-04 by Grant Castner
So simple yet often overlooked, reading out loud (‘oral reading’ in academic parlance) carries countless benefits for learners of second languages.
Posted on 2020-12-14 by Grant Castner
Part I – Overview Extempore, The Speaking Practice App, that’s us. On Extempore, flexible features can help you craft immaculate assessments and extra speaking opportunities for your students. It’s also a solution for a plethora of needs in the language class, including real-world tasks, simple end of class exit tickets, as well as graded summative[...]
Posted on 2020-12-04 by Grant Castner
