The atmosphere of a language class can be heavily influenced by how excited the students are to learn, engage, and progress. If students are unengaged or fearful, you may be working with a very quiet or even potentially hostile classroom with kids teasing each other or choosing not to speak. If you have students that[…]
We hear this question sometimes: you are using Extempore as a language lab alternative, assigning oral homework and doing oral exams on it. You’ve set up really good questions, with timers and one-attempt parameters. You are saving a lot of time, enjoying grading on your couch with a nice glass of Pinot Noir instead of[…]
If you are a language teacher who has decided to incorporate Extempore into your classroom, congratulations! You are about to embark on a journey that is going to save you time and energy while also engaging your students in more speaking exercises than ever before in your classroom. You will find that your students are[…]
Extempore is proud to support the 5th Chinese Innovation Forum, a two-day conference (Oct 25-26, 2019) hosted by the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. The Forum is a new initiative, spearheaded by a group of K-16 educators, whose objectives are to jumpstart the conversation on Chinese language and culture education and to provide[…]
Every language teacher knows how difficult it is to get students to speak in class. It is even more difficult, and can be extremely time-consuming, when there is a need to evaluate each student’s speaking skills individually. Imagine you are a language teacher with 30 students and you need to provide an oral exam to[…]
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
