Tag: english

Back and There Again!

Such a good title after the last post and yes i may have been under the influence of “Tolkien” as i’ve seen the latest film on him and rewatching the LOTR series. Anyway, I welcome both you and I.

This blog has been left in the dark for a while so I need to turn on the lights, sorry and be careful while reading. YES! Let me start!

I wanted to start focusing on the blog again and i’ve already planned two posts these past months BUT I was being lazy and i was trying to find a job. I will publish those posts soon enough, however I didn’t want to leave the blog with the last post so I decided to write an “update post” and talk about how and towards which direction this blog will be shaped.

No more just an ELT teacher blog

As you know, I started this blog when I was a preservice teacher and the main focus of this blog was the technology in ELT classes. Although this was for a course I had I liked writing and developing ideas about the technology and English. I will still continue to post the things i find interesting and useful but I also want to share my experiences about being a preservice teacher. That’s why, i will have a section about this topic to help other preservice teachers.

Another thing i want to post on this blog is the educational philosophy. I believe that every teacher has a philosophy on teaching and education. I also would like to discuss more about the educational system around the world. Our approaches to the system and governments’ perception of education etc.

Last but not least, i will write about the language itself. Of course, I’m not going to talk about what is language, why we need it etc. as they have been discussed a lot but i will take a different route about the language. I want to share my language adventure and the attitudes towards the FLs and people’s perception of them.

Vous ne pouvez pas oublier le Français

C’est-à-dire, I will also create something on this blog that i’ve had at the back of my head since i started this blog. I will also post in French all the things i mentioned above and maybe slightly different things as well. You may jump into a pool full of ELT blogs but you have to dive deeper for French ones. I really like French and I really want to make a room in this blog for it. It will be good to discuss French Language Teaching, learning French and the approaches, the attitudes towards it and i will again share my experience as a french preservice teacher and compare these two experiences. Je ne sais pas ce que vous pouvez attendre mais on vera ensemble.

I’m quite excited about how this blog will turn out to be. I hope for the best and I will try my best. Please bear with me and be with me when all these things above happens!

Thanks,

Bilbo Baggins ✨

Illustration by unfortuantely i couldn’t find it sorry

Storytelling at its best…

Hello my fellow friends!

Do you listen to your grandpa enthusiastically when he starts telling you all his youth stories or you pretend to like it while counting the minutes? If your answer is yes to the first question, congratulations you’re an amazing listener. Don’t forget to thank your grandfathers for their interesting, creative storytelling skill.

Storytelling is a creative way to breath life into written works and the good news is grandpas ARE NOT the only ones who can tell amazing stories. Students and teachers can tell a lot of creative stories in ESL/EFL classrooms.

Why should we use storytelling?

The answer is simple. Storytelling,in fact is quite popular. So many youtubers have storytelling videos and “Draw My life” was actually a digital storytelling trend. Moreover, learners can tell their original stories and share this in a very vivid, fun way  with their peers. Storytelling will let them improve not only their writing skills but also their pronunciation as well. They will develop their speaking abilities and will be able to talk freely.

Why Digital though?

Back to grandpas. Some of us enjoy listening to their stories but unfortunately some of us lose interest listening to them. Have you ever asked yourself “why”? Is it because of their old age? NO! The reason is, we find it boring. Not the stories. The way of telling. We don’t want our students to get bored while telling stories so teachers and students should make these stories as attractive, as effective as possible by providing audios, videos, images, posters etc. related to them. They can even draw or make animations! They can use various tools to make their stories digital from online tools to movie making programs.

Our Digital Storytelling Experience

My friend Murat and I tried digital storytelling for our course to experience it and show you how you ,as teachers or students, or grandparents 🙂 can use digital storytelling. We’ve talked about our friendship, we made a video with our photos as slides. We used “iMovie” to make our video but you can find many alternatives for yourself and students. It was nice to tell our story of friendship and how we perceive friendship. Digital storytelling is actually something quite powerful if you can carry your message in an effective way. You can watch our video here and check out Murat’s blog as well. We’ll appreciate it.I hope you like it!

Thanks

K.

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,

K.

A Full of Mystery Podcast

Hello everyone!

It has been a week since i posted on this blog. Today i’m going to post something that i had fun while creating.

As you may know, “A linguaphile’s Notes” was created as part of an assignment for “Instructional technologies and material design” lesson. Another task we had, was to create a podcast. I love listening to podcast and this time i was the storyteller, not the listener.

I wasn’t alone though. I’ve created the story and the podcast with my friend Murat. Don’t forget to check on him as well!

Without any further due, enjoy listening the podcast.

Thanks for listening!

https://vocaroo.com/i/s1nOR9vJH6qb

P.S: Keep in mind that i’m an amateur ☺️

P.S: Let me know your thoughts on the ending! What could “the thing” be?

K

Illustration: Myeong Minho