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Conversation Questions for the ESL/EFL Classroom
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The Japanese Language: a Masterclass for Beginners
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With nearly 125 million speakers, the Japanese language is one of the most
popular languages on the planet. Japanese is a great language to learn as
Japa...
21 hours ago
Such topics can be fun but the reason many such canned questions fall flat in the language classroom is that the approach is teacher-centred. Put the students first as in a new book called Catalyst. This is an interesting resource as it addresses this concern. Catalyst: A Conversation Taskbook for English Language Learners has an automatic topic generating routine built-in and the topics always resonate with students because it's student-centred: all about them. The main point about Catalyst is not that topic creation and topic substance are automatic or appealing however. Rather generated conversation is used as a means to the acquisition of a whole variety of essential communication tactics. Catalyst has review built around principles of "space repetition" and has instructor-, peer- and self- assessment protocols integrated as well. With all that going on there's not a lot of prep to do. Teachers can focus on facilitating the lesson, not the lesson plan.
ReplyDeleteCatalyst is the first ever interactive, "multi-touch" ESL textbook and has just been published for iPad. You can find out more by visiting http://www.speekeezy.ca/ or you can just download the free sample on iTunes here:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/catalyst-esl-taskbook/id564638682?mt=11. This is clearly what Apple had in mind when they released iBooks Authour in January 2012.
Catalyst is also available in traditional paper.