English Central.com

Englishcentral.com


Discuss; Share; Enjoy & Learn

Students always complain about having materials that are not real, fabricated, irrelevant, and most importantly boring. Well, that is true! In such an ever-developing age, we, teachers, have a great liability laid on our shoulders. We need to accept the face that English has become a lingua franca and provide education on an up-to-date entertaining individually-tailored dish to every student.

What is this tool and why to use it?

This tool is an amazing repository for learners and teachers of English alike. Although on the surface it focuses on speaking, but it is a great source of motivation for students due to the versatility of its contemporary topics that gives learners the chance to a substantial amount of exposure to different accents in English such as Canadian, British, American, and Australian. Not only that, but it also has 38 different topics ranging from cultural aspects, entertainment, politics, famous people, animals, environment, commercials, celebrities, to health issues.

It makes use of video, sound and transcripts to add an enjoyable flavour to the learning process. All these materials are realia that are not intended for teaching which make them authentic source of information. Most importantly, students can check them at home at their own pace.

How to use it?

 Once you are signed up for free, you can play the introduction video that leads you through the whole program.

 Then you choose the list of topics you are interested in and this can be of great use for ESP, English for Specific Purposes.

 They can spark very strong arguments and discussions among learners if they are asked to discuss them. So, students are shown some part of video and then they are given the chance to discuss them or write a small essay discussing their opinions about them. The most important advantage of this tool is that teachers can direct students to work on them at home to increase their learning autonomy.

For Speaking and Pronunciation:

01 Learners can watch videos of their choice and learn the vocabularies that matters to them the most.

02 Then, they can activate the Auto-Pause button that allows them to record their voice, compare it with the original, and automatically get their grades and overall scores. This feature is called Speaking-a-video as appears at the bottom left corner. In addition, you can see in the left bar the ability to repeat parts of the video or to hear it slowly.

03 A screen shows what the weaknesses are and help students practice them. At any time students can move the cursor on any words of the video-accompanying text and automatically they can hear the pronunciation of the word. The reason why this tool is so important is that it does not follow a linear robotic approach. On the contrary, it provides feedback that was proven to be crucial in the acquisition of language. After the students had recorded their own voice words that are not pronounced correctly are coloured in yellow and the ones that are not heard are coloured in red. In addition, students will get their accumulated scores at the bottom screen simultaneously.

04 Finally, the previous feedback shows learners their weaknesses and offers a link that offers a training workshop on how to strengthen these weaknesses with a personal tutor. What is so unique about this feature is that it gives a real  profeesional tutor rather than a robot or a set of buttons. She has worked with the most famous celebrities in the world and has a well-established reputation. This tutor shows the right places of articulation of each sound or vowel in addition to professional tips and many other examples.

05 There is a bar at the top of the screen that gives a detailed report on how many videos the learner has watched, what level he or she has achieved and his or her ranking in an on-line community.

06 To contextualise the learning process, learners can view all the videos related to a certain word on a topic in different contexts with a press of a button.

Quizzes:


Enabling learners to reinforce the meaning of the vocabularies they had already learned to pronounce is an unparalleled feature in this tool.

• It offers a variety of exercises that include matching, multiple choices, and gap filling. These exercises are given in a random order more that once with many opportunities for practice. They also offer two levels of practice, the first is studying and after the learner had practiced the word in different situations, they can reach the level of learnt words with an instant score and a record of all the learnt words.

Limitations:

• Since most of the work can be done at home, most learners should have a speedy internet as opposed to the have-not ones, especially because it is a video-based tool.

• Teachers should warn learners against spending many hours on this tool watching videos aimlessly. They should set themselves goals and try ti achieve them purposefully. Fortunately, this website has an overall progress every time learners log in.