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.
Dictation exercises accelerate learning. They help you remember words, they help you remember how they are spelled and pronounced, and they help you learn capitalization and punctuation rules that are difficult to learn otherwise.
Students told me that they want help with their pronunciation, so I developed an automatically scored speaking assignment. Students read the prompt and compose their answer to a question, finish a sentence, or translate a phrase. Then, the student records his or her response with a microphone and submits it…
Automated email reminders on Labodanglais help procrastinators keep up with the homework.
Students have told me that they had trouble navigating 15 weeks of lessons on Labodanglais.com. A long list of links and text is a lot to process in your second language. The problem becomes more acute on smaller screens. To help students navigate, I added icons. Now each lesson has…
I sent CEGEP ESL teachers across Quebec red pens inscribed with the words “Don’t use this pen.” Why? I want teachers to try Labodanglais.com. It’s a Moodle-based website with companion courses for the Actively Engaged Series. Labo is packed with engaging content and interactive features, and it can score students’…