elt – A linguaphile's notes

Websites to use, websites to teach!

Hello my fellow friends!

How have you been? I’ve been busy all this week but that’s how a student’s life is, right? I couldn’t even get a chance to sit in front of my laptop and check on my blog. All I could do -when I had the chance- was visiting certain websites and just spend a few minutes there before I doze off.

We all have a few websites we visit on a daily basis. But as an ELT teachers and learners, how many of us have an ELT website that we cannot stop using? Or why do we need them and how useful are they? In this post I want to share an ELT website and my evaluation on it.

Websites -either authentic or created for English learning and teaching purposes- are part of our teaching in the classrooms. There’re thousands of ELT websites all over the Internet for students and teachers to benefit. One of these websites that I have found is EnglishClub.

EnglishClub is a website dedicated to English language learners and English language teachers by offering various activities, games, tests etc. for learners and lesson plans, worksheets, articles etc. for teachers. The website is part of TEFL and EasyEnglish and founded by Joe Essberger.

The Purpose

EC is a free website designed to help students learn English online. It allows students to;

make their own English page with blogs, photos, videos, music, groups and friends
test their level in English and get help with English grammar
study English grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation
play English games and do English quizzes online
chat in English with other students and teachers
find schools where they can learn English at home or abroad
find penpals for English practice

The Site and the Author

Joe Essberger is the author of the site which was found in 1997 and is the contributor almost all activities on the website as well as the others. He is an English native speaker and an English teacher. As far as I could observe he is still active and writes post on the blog and forums regularly.

The Content

As I mentioned above, the content of the website is extremely rich. From listening activities to games and more, you can find what is suitable for yourself. If you want to improve your speaking skill, not only you can check the activities on the website, but also use the forumsand MyEC section to find pen pals and communicate with other English speakers. Moreover, I think the content is original as well. You don’t see typical topics to teach certain vocabulary but some different functional content. The site allows you to contribute articles as a guest for the learners of English. In addition, EC is written mainly in British English. But they have pages about other varieties of English such as American or Canadian. Overall I liked the content they have so far.

The Accuracy, the Broken Links and the Images

As I went through the content of the website I haven’t seen any mistakes or irrelevant, unrelated topics or stuff. Even if you encounter some spellings that you can take as a mistake, do not act on a whim! In fact they’re not spelled wrong, they are just written/pronounced in either American accent or Canadian. Although everything was going so well, I didn’t like the website’s organization. I find it quite dense. The images of the websites are in high quality and mostly relevant to the topics they are presented in. There’re lots of exterior links in the website and I tried a few of them and they were working just fine. I don’t think you can see a broken link as the site gets updates frequently.

Is it applicable to EFL teaching?

After all these points I’ve discussed in this post, I believe that the website is already meant for EFL/ESL learners and teachers and I can say that it can be applied in EFL teaching. Teachers can benefit from the worksheets and lesson plans of the website and they can still use it as an online tool as well since the website has lots of online activities, games etc. Students can use EC easily at school and at home yet the website lacks attractiveness for students, it is just so simple.

My overall evaluation is that we can make EnglishClub as a part of our classrooms as it has useful sections and keeps students engaged.

Pay a visit to EnglishClub and tell me if you agree with me or not in the comments section below. One more thing, if you already have some websites you use for English, put those in your comments as well.

I hope you enjoy my evaluation.

Thanks,

“CALL” Me Maybe?

Hello my fellow audience,

It is such a great day to talk about an innovative learning as the 12^th March is the birthday of the internet. It is hard to deny the need of technology in our lives as it facilitates everything around us. Since the technology started to develop, it affected the field of education as well. The revolutionary teaching devices shook the whole foreign language world. So, what does “CALL” stand for? CALL is computer-assisted language learning that the teachers design and use in their foreign language classrooms.

Although the rise of CALL may seem to start in 1950’s, it actually occurred way before, in 1930s and mid ‘40s. I’m going to put a timeline on the historical development of CALL from behaviourism to Integrative CALL on this post. Don’t forget to take a look at it!

Thank you for spending time here 🙂

https://vizzlo.com/share/eGlNqmw5QZWt69RLWHrsIg

The learning of this century -The learning we need, the skills we need-

Hello my fellow audience,

There is nothing in this world that time has changed, including foreign language teaching. Era by era we’ve seen how our learning or teaching adapted to the circumstances we lived in. Unfortunately we’ve also continued with the same learning skills in different periods of time. But; educators, methodologists and teaching experts realised that we had to have learning and skills which belong to this century, the era we live in. Eventually, an innovative and creative learning which belong to 21^st century was born.

21^st century learning provides various skills for Ss to develop as they will be essential for their lives in the future and changes the way they learn. 21^st century learning includes learning and innovation skills, ICT skills and life and career skills. Learning and innovation skills are important in an English language classroom. These skills focused on 4 core points;

Critical Thinking Skills
Creativity
Communication
Collaboration

Students need all 4Cs to succeed in a foreign language classroom and to develop their communicative skills to speak easily with native speakers. Nonetheless, 21^st century learning is learner-centred which also puts an emphasis on learner as “doer” or “creator”. Personalized, creative real world tasks make students use the language beyond the classroom as it is one of the purposes of 21^st century learning.

I would love to finish my post with a quote from Sir Ken Robinson: “Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something out of it.”

Thanks for reading!

A Welcome Note

Hello, Welcome to “A linguaphile’s notes”!

You may wonder why you are here or how did you end up here or even right at this moment you may think “why bother” but do not leave the page yet. I will answer your question in a minute but before that, i would like to welcome you to my blog. Welcome and Nice to meet you!

I’m not new to blogging but i’m new to writing about the field i study. You won’t see anything extraordinary but you’re going to like what this blog offers you! So, back to your question;

Why are you here?

If you’re an ELT/ESL/EFL teacher, a FL student or just a curious person about language teaching, you should definitely be here! On this blog you will read so many interesting, creative and innovative things on ELT, from technological teaching tools to various materials, theories etc. Nonetheless, if you want to improve yourself as a teacher or as a student, why don’t you give me a chance to enlighten you?

Enjoy your stay here!

Illustration by: DarkCube