Last Updated on 2019-07-17Three Activities and Strategies to keep language students in the target language In this blog post I am going to share with you a couple of strategies and highly engaging activities that I use regularly in the classroom. The Can of Blah Blah Blah (La Lata de bla bla bla) This activity[…]
Last Updated on 2019-07-16One Activity: All-in-one and done? Could there be such a thing? Sometimes being a world language teacher is overwhelming. We do it all…speaking, listening, writing and reading. These are all essential elements of an effective classroom making it all-in-one! In addition to all of these moving parts, we want our students to connect[…]
Last Updated on 2017-11-27First things first. Your students probably have never heard of the Dear Abby advice column. Maybe you haven’t either. But that’s OK; it still provides a good context for your students to practice using the imperative mood in the language that they’re studying and it can be accomplished very easily on Extempore. I’m actually[…]
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 2019-08-05We all know the importance of the 4 big skills in a world language class: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Encouraging the development of each one in our students brings with it a unique set of challenges, approaches, and assessment methods. (And, given our classroom time constraints, we probably also know how hard[…]
Last Updated on 2017-01-07If you’re an educator these days, you’ve likely come across backwards design. As the name indicates, it’s a method of curricular design in which the instructor starts by establishing desired results for a particular chapter, unit, course, or sequence. Then he or she works backwards to identify evidence of learning and put into place various instructional practices (i.e.[…]
Last Updated on 2016-11-13If you teach Spanish (or French, for that matter), you know how mighty the battle can be for students to learn and use correctly the two verb forms used to talk about actions in the past. Yep, I’m taking about the preterite and the imperfect. Just mentioning those two words often sends[…]
Last Updated on 2017-12-09Although students and teachers occupy the same space throughout much of the day, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone to hear that the two groups often have different experiences at school or even in the classroom itself. During free periods, at lunch, or after school ends, students are carrying out tasks or[…]
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 2017-11-27We’ve all heard the cliché: a picture is worth a thousand words. But with Extempore, the expression might actually have some literal truth to it! That’s because our app allows teachers and students to use images to kickstart a discussion in the target language. Obviously, an audio prompt from a teacher most closely mimics[…]
Why are you giving feedback on EVERYTHING? Many of us, especially new teachers, tend to hold the unfounded belief that effective teaching means extensive feedback. Yes, feedback is powerful and beneficial for learning, but not all types of feedback are created equal. In fact, research shows that some forms of feedback have no effect or[…]
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
