Speaking Tool: Speak & Improve

    Speak & Improve (https://speakandimprove.com/) is a research project from the University of Cambridge. By using it, English learners can both improve their speaking/pronunciation by talking to the robot on the screen and also help Cambridge improve technology that will help English learners around the world. 

    The robot's called Sandi and it asks the learner some questions, then gives them a grade for their speaking. It uses new technology developed at the University of Cambridge so it can tell how well one speaks English just by listening to them. Plus, the grade that English learners get is an accurate grade on the internationally-recognised CEFR scale. This can help students understand their speaking ability for study and exams (including Cambridge exams).

Listening Video: What's the smartest age?

Comprehension check question: Why is there no single answer to the question of what's the smartest age?

Writing Tool: Ludwig

     Ludwig (https://ludwig.guru/) is a sentence search engine that helps learners write better English by giving them contextualized examples taken from reliable sources like BBC or ScienceDirect. Furthermore, it helps learners organize their thoughts and put their words in order.

    It has also a translation option where one can type a sentence in any language and the website shows if the automatic translation makes sense in real contexts. It is very useful for students of every level who want to improve their writing skills in a different language. The fact that the website acts as a corpus promotes independent discovery and learner autonomy through the exploration of authentic language. 

Reading Tool: Reading Rockets

 

    Reading Rockets (https://www.readingrockets.org/)  is a nationwide multimedia initiative that provides a multitude of research-based reading techniques, lessons, and activities to assist young children in learning to read and improving their reading skills. The website's reading materials help parents, teachers, and other educators help struggling readers improve their fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

        It has an option as "Teaching Reading" and you can find many detailed options including classroom strategies, which might be helpful for novice teachers. Also, reading courses come as modules and each module focuses on a different feature of teaching reading such as fluency, vocabulary, spelling, assessment etc. 

    There are many reading topics that can help teachers to find information and assistance and the topics come with videos.

Vocabulary Tool: Lexipedia

    Lexipedia (https://www.lexipedia.com/) is an online visual semantic network with a dictionary including the searched words' thesaurus (synonym), antonym, and fuzzynym (connotation) reference functionality. The website presents words' with their semantic relationships displayed in an animated visual word web. Other than English, it supports 5 languages; Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

    The noun, verb, adverb, and adjective forms of the searched word are also represented with different colors, so the students can see the definition of the word they searched in different forms when they click on those colored dots in the semantic diagram. Besides, every word comes with an example sentence which enables students to see the words in different contexts. As former English language learners and future teachers, the presence of fuzzynyms is a feature that we usually do not encounter in basic hard-copy dictionaries, so Lexipedia gives the students the opportunity to learn about the connotations of words with the visual word web. 

    For instance, when they search the verb "swim", the fuzzynyms that will pop up along the verb would be the ones below that we can see in purple, several of which are sail, drown, go down, etc. 

    When used by language teachers for vocabulary building, the visual aid of Lexipedia allows students to unintentionally see and learn many different words and contexts related to the word they are searching for.

 

Grammar Tool: British Council

    British Council (https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar) is an online grammar-learning website that provides language learners to practice their English grammar with clear grammar explanations while allowing them to test their understanding with its exercises after each grammar topic. It has lessons regarding all levels and the learners can easily find out which level they are in by taking a quick grammar test. 

                                                                                                                                                                              

    With interactive exercises under each subject, it enables students to actively participate in the class by discussing the answers with each other in the classroom environment, so the teacher can benefit from these exercises as, for example, an end-of-unit assessment test. The website also has detailed grammar lessons in text form including plenty of examples.