Are your students struggling with their pronunciation? You have tried everything but they are still stumbling over simple words? Maybe it is time to recommend some funny tools for them to brush up their pronunciation skills. I'll share with you a very interesting online pronunciation tool that I came across this week. Then stick around and I'll tell you more!
YouGlish
YouGlish is a website that works as a type of "pronunciation corpus". It has a collection of videos from YouTube with real speakers using the English language in various ways and in different situations. The purpose of this website is to help users to improve their English pronunciation.
How to use YouGlish?
It is quite easy to use YouGlish. All you need to do is to type the word you need to practice or learn the pronunciation in the search bar and click on Say it! Then the website will automatically select the videos where the word you typed appear. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos for each word you type. This makes it really easy for you to master the pronunciation of a specific word you are looking for. In addition, you can also listen to the pronunciation of the same word in different varieties of English such as Australian English, Irish English and Scottish English, for example. Another plus is that the website offers the subtitles of the videos, and every time the word is spoken in the video they highlight it in yellow, so the users know exactly where and when the word appears.
Students are able to listen to words being pronounced in different varieties of English.
Words are pronounced by real people and used in real contexts.
One thing to bear in mind π¨
Although the students can rewind and adjust the speed of the parts of the video where the word is pronounced, I think some begginers might feel challenged by the way the word is delivered by the speakers in the videos. A good alternative to tackle this situation is to recommend other online resources such as online dictionaries as an extra option for students with lower level of English to use. There are many good online dictionaries that offer the pronunciation of the words both in American and British English. Here they are:
According to the Oxford learner`s dictionary, collaboration is the act of working with another person or group of people to create or produce something. Many people believe that we learn better when we work together with someone, and I totally agree with this belief. Making our students to work together with their classmates, in pairs or in groups or even online, may facilitate their learning process. They can help and learn from each other as well as becoming less dependant on the teacher. In this post, I intend to introduce an application that has great potential to be used with our students when it comes to making them to collaborate and learn from each other.
The Flip platform
Flip is a video discussion platform where you can create groups and add different discussion topics to each group. It is a very powerful tool when we need to involve our students in virtual discussions about a specific topic. Flip is very user-friendly and it is FREE. In addition, you can create as many topics and groups as you wish. You can use Flip's website or you can download the app and use it in your cell phone or tablet.
First, you need to create a free account and log in. After doing that, you have to create a group. It is very simple. All you need to do is to click on the "group" button and a new group will be added to your dashboard. Your "group(s)" is/are the place(s) where you will be posting the topics of your discussions, activitivies or collaborative tasks. You can introduce a discussion topic or an activity there, for example, and tell your students to come up with their answers and opinions on the topics and activities proposed.
How do I use it with my students?
I use Flip with my students in many different ways - giving and receiving feedback, promoting speaking activities, group discussions, study groups and fostering teamwork.
Regarding the teaching of the four language skills, I woud be very wrong if I said we could only use it to promote speaking activities. Actually, you can use it to work with all the four skills. It all depends on your level of creativity and your lesson goals. However, in my opinion, it works best with speaking-based activities.
I would say that all the features available in the Flip platform make it really attractive for our students to use it. They can add backgrounds to their videos, drawings, texts, emojis and so on. Whenever I prepare any activity using Flip, my students get very excited about it and really engage themselves in the activities. It works pretty well with teenagers and adults.
Things to consider before using Flip
1. The main interactions between students using Flip occur through short videos, so if your students are a bit shy to show their faces or record themselves speaking, it could be a problem for you to use it with them.
2. There is not a virtual whiteboard or sth similar to allow students to share written texts or files in the groups. Although they can comment on each other's videos individually, I think it would be useful if they could offer an extra collaborative space inside the groups so that eveyone could share things or post comments at one place only.
Let's get down to business!
I have been giving a teacher training course to EFL teachers who are interested in working with young learners. It has been three weeks now and this past week we were talking about social and emotional learning. I decided to create a very simple collaborative task for my students by using the Flip platform. I created a topic called "When do kids feel sad?" and asked for their help to answer this question. This worked as a preparation task for the class that would take place in that week. I used it to brainstorm some ideas from my students and make them collaborate with each other. Here's the result:
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! π
Much has already been said about students' autonomy and how to promote it. However, things change when it comes to dealing with teachers' autonomy under the perspective of the teacher as a learner. There are many definitions of what teacher autonomy is about. The most common one is when teachers have 'academic freedom' (Sehrawet, 2014) - when they are able to make their own choices regarding the teaching materials, the methodology as well as the types of assessment they will use in their day-to-day teaching practices. Here, though, I will focus on the perspective of the teacher-learnerautonomy.
Teacher-learner autonomy
flickr.com
Defining it briefly, teacher-learner autonomy is associated with the idea that teachers should have ownership of their own learning as teachers (Smith & Erdogan 2008). This perception is closely connected to professional development. How can we promote autonomy inside of our classroom if we are not autonomous teachers? This is one of the questions that come to the minds of many English teachers when they are told that they should do their best to foster their students' autonomy. Being an autonomous teacher is also about recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. Learning more about our weaknesses and being willing to improve them will lead us to successful teaching practices. We shoud try to learn more and more each day. We always need to ask ourselves the following questions:
What do I still need to learn?
What should I improve in my teaching practices?
How can I delevop my English teaching skills?
By reflecting on these questions, it is gonna be much easier to spot possible constraints regarding our practices as well as to find a solution to them.
Having said that, I personally recognize that a teacher's workload can be very heavy. There are always exams to grade, lesson plans to prepare and lots of students to teach. In addition, in certain contexts, it is very difficult for some teachers to attend conferences or even participate in teacher development courses. So, here, I intend to introduce you to three websites that will help you to develop your teaching skills. You can be either an experienced or novice teacher, there will be always something you can learn from the resources available in these websites.
BBC Learning English - The teacher's room
https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/
BBC Learning English is a fantastic website full of resources for both teachers and students. The section The teacher's room is dedicated to offering a lot of tips on how to teach English. They cover many useful topics such as teaching models, drilling, teaching vocabulary and so on. It is very interesting the way they bring theory and practice together in their videos. They always start their lessons with an introductory video on the topic - there is a brief explanation and practical examples on how to apply the tips they are giving. They also provide their audience with a full written explanation about the topic they are dealing with. In addition, there is always a quiz in the end of each "lesson" so that you can check what you were able to learn. Overall, it is a wonderful platform for teachers who are not much familiar with journal articles reading or who do not have enough time to read them. You can watch a short video demonstration below:
Another interesting website is the VOA learning English. They offer FREE online training for English language teachers worldwide. They have a collection of ten teacher training videos on topics such as English for Specific Purposes, Critical thinking skills, Learning strategies, Listening skills, etc. Each "unit" has a script of the video as well as the lesson plan of the class that was used in the unit. Overall, the videos are very useful. We can learn a lot from them. I really recommend them for novice teachers; However, if you are an experienced teacher, you can benefit a lot from them as well.
Last but not least, there is this wonderful website from the United States Department of State - American English. There are hundreds of useful resources for both students and teachers. They have a special section for teachers called 'Teacher`s Corner' where you can find a lot of articles and materials focused on teacher development. Also, they have a collection of recorded webinars covering topics such as speaking, listening and pronunciation, global citizenship, reading and writing, teaching methods and so on. Everything there is of high quality.
Another interesting resource are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). They are online free courses offered in partnership with many American Universities. Some of these courses can be taken on a self-paced basis, while others require that you attend a few synchronous online classes. When you complete the course, they issue a certificate for you. I took some of these courses a few years ago and I really recommend that you take at least one of them. You learn a lot from these courses, and the best of all is that it is FREE of charge.
That's all for today, guys. See you on the next post! π
References
Sehrawat, J. (2014). Teacher Autonomy: Key to Teaching Success. Bhartiyam International Journal of Education & Research, 4(1), ISSN: 2277-1255.
Smith & ErdoΔan. (2008). Teacher-learner autonomy: Programme goals and student-teacher constructs. In T. Lamb & H. Reinders (Eds.), Learner and Teacher Autonomy: Concepts, realities, and response (pp.83-103). John Benjamins Publishing.
.jpg)
