We are storytelling animals. Our brains are optimized for stories. Stories captivate us, simplify comprehension, and enhance recall. You can accelerate language learning with storytelling. Here’s how.
AI-powered courses are the future because they give teachers superpowers to develop meaningful lessons, correct errors, and respond to students’ ideas at a level never considered possible before.
Teachers often spend a lot of time and energy in the classroom trying to transmit information from inside their expert heads into the novice heads of their students. This is the tradition view of pedagogy that needs changing. Here’s why…
Wouldn’t it be great if a student could instantly receive a score and feedback, after watching a video and explaining to a classmate what he or she heard? An evaluation like that would be much closer to the way language is actually used in the world. Labodanglais.com makes it possible. Students watch a video and then record themselves summarizing it. The assignment plugin scores their oral automatically. Doesn’t that sound so much better than giving students a listening quiz?
Saying words and phrases aloud has several benefits. Here are some oral practice strategies that work well. Did you know that it is 10% easier to remember items that you say aloud compared to items you read silently (MacLeod & Bodner, 2017). And practicing difficult to say words will help to improve your pronunciation and rate of speech. Also, you will gain confidence in your ability to communicate complex ideas as your memory, pronunciation, and rate-of-speech improve.
Competency-based education does not mean that teachers should select a listening test at random or suppose that introducing the theme the lesson before the test is likely to be adequate preparation for our weakest students. Demonstrating a ministerial competency is achieved by performing a predictable complex task after step-by-step instruction.
A pedagogical narrative is a highly structured story that includes context, characters, a series of dramatic events, and their consequences—creating obligatory meaningful contexts for target grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics.
Imagine two students. One student took the practice test before taking the test that counts. The other student skipped the practice test. Which student do you think will do better on the final test? The answer is pretty obvious.
To help students put their argumentation skills to use in our democracy, repurposed the argument essay discourse model they learned in Actively Engaged in Persuasion to write a letter to the House of Commons in Ottawa. Here’s what happened.
Students learn much more when they teach each other compared with when the teacher does all of the teaching (Hattie, 2009). Students teaching each other is called reciprocal teaching, and it has the second biggest effect on student achievement of all the classroom processes, accelerating learning by 37%