Last Updated on 2018-08-28Have 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[…]
Last Updated on 2017-11-27If you’re a teacher, you probably already know that one of the big pushes in education in recent years has been to incorporate self-reflection into the classroom, both for students as well as for teachers themselves. On the student end of things, self-reflection has been shown to promote responsibility and total engagement in active learning, among other benefits.[…]
Last Updated on 2017-12-08All world language teachers have surely encountered the student who is content to sit back in class and allow others to speak up first. Maybe he’s naturally soft-spoken or maybe he’s anxious about making a mistake. Whatever the reason, some students take a back seat in class and, in turn, deprive themselves[…]
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
