TEFL & Ed Tech

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham identifies what he thinks is the 21st century skill that young people lack the most.

To paraphrase Orwell, the English of the world wide web – loose, informal, and distressingly dyspeptic – is not really the kind people want to read in a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper. But there's an assumption that that, because it's part of the all-conquering internet, we cannot do a thing about it.

Have you ever given someone the cold shoulder? Look at our body idioms illustration to discover how you can learn English with Kaplan. Take the first step on your English learning journey!

Washington Post English-language proposal has French up in arms Washington Post One intellectual heavyweight who jumped into the English-language teaching polemic was Jacques Attali, an adviser to the late president Francois Mitterrand and a...

Primary teachers share their top tips for turning younger pupils into linguists

Michael Wilkinson: "not all translators – and especially student translators – are prepared to invest in […] software, especially if they are uncertain whether they will be using it on a large scale. One solution is to turn to a freeware program such as AntConc.

The first version of AntConc was released in 2002 by Laurence Anthony. It was a simple concordance program, but since then it has undergone continuous improvement and development. The most recent “stable-release” version at the time of writing (February 2012) is AntConc 3.2.4(Anthony, 2011).

AntConc can run on Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, but whereas WordSmith requires additional software to run on systems other than Windows, AntConc runs on all three systems without additional software. In addition, AntConc is able to process texts in almost any language in the world, including Asian languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Moreover AntConc can process both UTF-8 and all legacy encodings on different systems, so it should be able to process texts saved in the operating system default encoding on all systems.

Like WordSmith, AntConc comprises, in addition to the concordancer, various other features, such as a tool for generating word-lists as well as a keyword tool that can locate and identify words that occur with an unusually high (or low) frequency in a corpus when it is compared with a reference corpus. However in the following I shall focus mainly on how well the concordancer serves the needs of the translator.

The study uncovered a range of factors concerning the teaching of English to young learners globally from the perspective of teachers involved in implementing these programmes. In particular, it shows that many of these factors are commonly experienced by teachers across different countries and contexts. The paper concludes with five key recommendations for future action to support teaching English to young learners.

"You became a teacher not to pontificate to trusting minds, but to teach children how to succeed as adults. That idealism infused every class in your credential program and only took a slight bump during your student teacher days. That educator, you figured, was a dinosaur. You’d never teach to the test or lecture for forty minutes of a forty-five minute class."

photo of T by Mary McHenry Back in January, I wrote a rambling, terribly earnest post titled How Does a Child REALLY Learn to Write? That post generated a slew of thoughtful and heartfelt comments.

"Julie Greller's blog A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet features some great content for teachers. Posts are sorted by subject and grade level, and there's also a link to some free ebooks. ...

Trust me, I'm a "Linguist" This one goes out to all language teachers who want to terrify their young L2 learners.

EducationGuardian.co.uk (blog) Beginners' guide to using technology in language lessons EducationGuardian.co.uk (blog) A teacher can set up a class blog with individual student pages and it is incredibly easy to do and manage and allows the pupils...

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Five great websites collecting EdTech resources in one place, making it easy to sort, search and find the best cutting edge tools for the classroom.

From vibrant communities on social media to inventive lessons using video conferencing, Joe Dale explores how languages teachers have embraced technology in the classroom (Are language teachers leading the way with education technology?