.Learning chocolate,-a new way of learning vocabulary

What is this?
To access this website, click here->learningchocolate

Learning chocolate is a revolutionary vocabulary-learning website. The words on this website are divided into different categories systematically. For example, the picture below is some words concerning airplanes:

What's great about this website is that it not only provides the spelling of the word, it links the word directly to a certain component or a subject, making the meaning of the word obvious and self-explanatory. Also, when you click on the word, you can hear the pronunciation of it.

Why is the content good for language learning?

1.The words provided in a certain picture are more or less related, so the students to memorize them more effectively and systematically.

2.Spelling and pronunciation are both available.

3.It is specially ideal for young learners to use to help them remember new words.

4.There are some follow-up quizzes to ensure the students understand and remember the new words.

How might you use it in a teaching context?

1.Give students handout of the words and the meaning in advance, and use a picture like the above in class to check if the students remember the meaning of the words.

2.Familiarize the students with a certain group of words, ask them to do the matching exercise to check understanding.

3.After going through a certain group of words, give the students a dictation test.

4.Do the fill-in exercise after requiring them to memorize the words in class.

Limitations:

1.Most of the words are very simple. so the target student group can be quite restricted.

2.The captivating pictures might distract the students, especially the young ones.

3.The words are separated from sentences.

The Great Breaking News English

What is this?

To access it ->breakingnewsenglish

Breaking news English is an absolute phenomenal website which provides us with thousands of readily available lesson tailored for EFL teaching context. More importantly, all those great lessons are free and a new lesson is updated every 3 days.On top of that, all the lessons and listening recordings can be downloaded for free in no time!

Why is the content good for language learning?
1.All the lessons are created based on the latest news and information, which can surely appeal to the students.
2.It can spare the teachers huge amount of time preparing for a lesson, thus allowing the teaching making better use of the preparation time.
3.There are loads of different kinds of exercise, aiming of enhancing students English from different aspects like speaking, listening, reading and writing.
4.Some of the exercise are fairly collaborative, thus making the classroom's atmosphere more interactive and relaxing.

How might you use it in a teaching context?
1.Choose a chunk of exercise from the lesson related to a certain topic for your class to do some warm-up activities and brainstorming with the students.
2.Expanding students vocabulary by giving them exercise of matching synonyms from a certain lesson on Breaking News English.
3.Engage the students into pairs or groups to do some of the reading exercise together.
4.Assign the students to work in groups to design a unique lesson based on the pattern on the website. In this way, the students have to understand the text thoroughly.

Limitations:
1.It can be extremely time-consuming.
2.The text form is a bit humdrum and can be pretty boring for the students if they have to do it every time.
3.There are not much pictures or other visual attractions in the lesson.

How to apply wordle to our teaching

To access wordle, click here->WORDLE


Brief Introduction of Wordle:


On the official website, Wordle is defined as a “toy for generating word clouds”. Wordle is useful for:

• gathering and collecting ideas
• making vocab exercise less boring
• highlighting the key points in a conference
• greeting with more visual aids
• depicting creativity and novelty

How to create a Wordle

In general, wordle is very user-friendly, except the fact java needs to be installed before it's available.In terms of the detailed operating steps, we can take a look at this:

1. Steps to create your own wordle

Also,a lot of customization is possible with wordle, be it the change of font or choice of color. All this can be accomplished with the buttons on the top.

As to how this fascinating website can be adopted to my future teaching, I also have some interesting ideas.Since I plan to be a teacher specializing in IELTS and TOEFL, it should be very helpful with the writing class. For intance, I can select the sample compositions written by the examiners and transform them into wordles. The most frequent words, in other words, the words with the biggest size in the pictures would be most obvious and salient on the screen. In fact,those are the ones students should really bear in mind and try to employ themselves in their future writing. It is advisable to draw lessons from the examiners' writing style and word choices. Moreover, by looking at the colorful wordle pictures, the classroom atmosphere would be definitely liven up a bit.

Another possible proposal here:
If the student finds one particular article difficult to understand, he can "wordle" it and try to figure out the new words that appear most frequently in that text. This might help him better understand the meaning as well as capture the gist of the text..

One more proposal according to Max:
Try it with the listening practice: Before listening, wordle the text and show the picture to the students, asking them to make up their own versions of stories independently firstly. In this case, their schemata will be already activated when they listen to the actual text and the listening exercise stands to be more interesting and to some extent, encouraging to the students.

In conclusion, with wordle, vocabulary is so much more than a mere torturing and painstaking exercise. Everyone can have his or her own wordle and make the best use of it.

Enjoying Music or Learning English?

What is it and why is it good for language teaching?

Learning English for most Chinese students have been long stereotyped as something boring and difficult, especially memorizing some new words.

However, it is a brand new scenario with Lyricstraining. As the name of this website shows, it's about lyric training. You may wonder how we can apply this tool to English teaching, let me explain how this works for you:

How might you use it in a language teaching context?

The above picture is a screeshot from the web when I am doing the training. When you select a song, you will watch the music video of it from youtube and need to fill in the blanks of the lyrics as the song goes. If you fail to fill in with the right word, the video will automatically pause. Then you can replay this single sentence by simply typing the "up" button on your keyboard. You can listen to each sentence as many times as you like. You can also skip a certain blank when you really feel desperate. Further, you can start over anytime you like.

This website is perfectly suitable for training intensive listening skills. With visual aid while listening, the exercise stands to be much less boring.

Also, we don't have to spend too much time on it. 10 to 15 minutes per day is quite enough for a student. They don't have to treat this some exercise, rather, it can considered as some unwinding and entertaining activities when they get tired from homework.

Limitations:

1.Some students might be an expert in music, and they might've been fairly familiar with the lyrics before listening, so not really much of exercise for them.

2.Most of the videos are from youtube, which is still blocked in China. In this case, lyricstraining is not that practical in China now.