Last Updated on 2019-07-17Triangle Talk/Triángulo de Tertulia This is not only a great speaking activity for world languages, but also a student-led activity. The first time I did it this year, the students were scared, but they grew to love it and it became almost a weekly occurrence in the classroom. By the end of[…]
Last Updated on 2019-12-02Do you need a couple of fun activity ideas to fight end-of-the-year boredom? Do you love scavenger hunts for language learning? If you answered yes to both questions, this post is for you. Scavenger Hunt Idea # 1 Have students record short videos about a personal experience (for example, your best summer[…]
Last Updated on 2017-02-05Sure, you’ve probably heard someone say–and maybe you’ve even said it yourself–that everyone speaks English, so what’s the point in putting a ton of effort into learning a new language? We at Extempore certainly don’t subscribe to that notion. In fact, we think learning a new language is one of the most[…]
Last Updated on 2016-12-04Hopefully you read our post last time about the problems that many students encounter with giving presentations in a world language classroom. I wrote a little bit about how a “speed-dating” or “marketplace” format can actually put students at ease and promote a fun, more vibrant, and more engaged classroom atmosphere on[…]
Last Updated on 2017-11-27A few weeks ago, we posted about student-centered paired activities meant to develop speaking skills in the classroom. We mentioned how beneficial these role play or dialogue tasks can be: they foster autonomy, responsibility, creativity, peer-teaching, fun, and authentic language output. Today I wanted to give a quick example of one that I’ll certainly[…]
If you read our blog, you’ve probably noticed that we talk a lot here about using Extempore for regular speaking practice at home as a way to reinforce skills learned in the classroom, to build fluency, and to develop confidence. Although those are undeniable benefits of our app, students and teachers can also use Extempore[…]
Last Updated on 2016-07-22We live in a mobile world. We take our devices everywhere we go and do countless daily tasks on them. And increasingly, mobile technology is becoming part of daily life in education as well. So, why, when it comes to language learning, are so many of our lessons still so “non-mobile”? The language lab,[…]
Last Updated on 2019-03-28Are you a beginning learner of Spanish? Do you just need some help getting started with a conversational partner? Or are you a teacher of beginning Spanish trying to get your students to use the language? Well, we wanted to take a moment to post a quick, handy guide to starting your conversation in[…]
Last Updated on 2018-08-28There’s been a lot of talk these days in educational circles about differentiating instruction. In some ways, we world language teachers have been ahead of the curve here, partly because it’s inherent in our classrooms to some degree. In other words, we teach different skills–listening, speaking, reading, and writing–in an assortment of ways, so providing[…]
Last Updated on 2017-11-27If you’ve been following our blog, you’ve probably noticed that we often emphasize Extempore’s unique ability to elicit spontaneous speech and provide one-to-one, student-to-teacher interaction. In this post, though, I want to highlight how Extempore can also facilitate meaningful peer-to-peer interaction, especially in classroom environments, such as those implementing project-based learning, where these interactions serve as key[…]
Last Updated on 2019-03-05The Huge Potential of a Flipped Language Classroom Perhaps you’ve seen our list of activity ideas for the Extempore app. One of them brings up the idea of a “flipped” (or inverted) language classroom. Flipping the classroom isn’t really an activity; it’s more of an approach towards presenting–and ultimately putting into practice–the course content. What[…]
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
