Students learn to write better by writing more often. That’s why I have added a new automated evaluation to Labodanglais.com and Labodefrancais.com. It’s a self-scoring writing assignment to evaluate English and French writing. The teacher simply sets thresholds, scores, and feedback messages. Students write, submit, and receive their scores seconds…
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?
Writing compare and contrast essays takes time, but evaluating them need not rob teachers of their weekends. Labodanglais and Virtual Writing Tutor can evaluate this type of essay in seconds, hundreds at a time, draft after draft, promoting revision and better engagement.
Teachers like me want an online test that measures all four language skills and arrives at the same level placement recommendation as expert teachers would arrive at. With our innovative new evaluation tools, I think Labodanglais.com is getting closer to that goal. Here’s why.
Would you like to start using the automated evaluation tools on Labodanglais.com with your students—but without a book? You could spend your summer developing a course for your students. Sure. But one summer might not be enough. If only there were some content that you could use! Well, there is.…
A semester is like a journey. Wouldn’t it be great if we could cement this useful metaphor with a course format?
Tired of downloading files one-by-one. Download them all with a well-organized, nested file structure. All students and teachers can download all files at once as a zip archive in one shot. Here’s how. Click the Download center link You’ll find it near the top of the navigation drawer on the…
Many teachers see pronunciation as all packaging with no need for any content. We sometimes assume that if we can help students get the pronunciation right, the teacher’s job is done. But one of the central proposals of communicative language teaching methods is that language learning activities should be as…
Formative evaluations are one of the best ways to help students understand where they are now and what they need to do to achieve the objectives. The problem with formative oral evaluations is that students get very anxious and refuse to even try unless it counts because they don’t want…
Email writing is one of the most common writing tasks that adults do. As teachers, it is time to put practical writing tasks at the center of our ESL pedagogy. Here’s how.