Wishing all community members a happy Christmas and hopefully also a good and healthy 2021. 
And to wet the appetites of those of you who have not attended one of our annual MOOC editions yet find this corpus-based quiz offered by the Corpus for Schools project at Lancaster University.
Which of the 🎄expressions above is more frequent in current spoken British English?
[The quiz and the answers are based on the findings from the British National Corpus2014]
We updated the information about the ICT-REV collection of digital tools for language learning as earlier this year the ICT-REV team ran the international webinar: Taking your language teaching online! A webinar for language teachers
Find links to the webinar registrations of the English, French and German versions there.
Via Nick Peachey’s blog:
If you are planning ready to teach soon today/4y this week then perhaps we can save you some time with some of our lesson plans and digital materials for the remote and physical classroom.
We have a new business English lesson plan ‘The 4 Ps of Marketing’:Â https://payhip.com/b/FKeW
This plan is great for intermediate students and can help them to learn more and share their knowledge about key elements of marketing and types of promotion.
You can download this half price over the next few days by using this coupon code:4PS
We also have a great collection of short Image-based Lessons which are ideal for encouraging speaking and interaction in the remote classroom if you need to stimulate your students’ imagination and get them speaking more.
You can download this half price over the next few days by using this coupon code:4PS
We also have a great collection of short Image-based Lessons which are ideal for encouraging speaking and interaction in the remote classroom if you need to stimulate your students’ imagination and get them speaking more.
Download from:Â https://payhip.com/b/LrCG
Download from:Â https://payhip.com/b/LrCG
If you are looking for creative ideas to stimulate your students then check out Hacking Creativity. This book has been shortlisted for the British Council’s prestigious Innovations award for Innovation in Teacher Resources. Download from: https://payhip.com/b/HDeb
This week you can download it for half price using this coupon code: ELTON2020
If you prefer to learn through watching rather than reading, there is a 45-minute video of Nik Peachey presenting some of the ideas from the book at:Â https://payhip.com/b/YAfX
This blogpost was triggered by the announcement I received earlier this week of a number of webinar sessions on the use of Perusall.
Perusall is a collaborative annotation tool, in which students work together interactively. It helps students to prepare for class. They read and analyze texts/articles, ask questions, make comments and respond to each other. Teachers see all student annotations and can go deeper into them in class.
Like comparable software such as e.g Hypotes.is  this type of technology aims to increase student engagement, expand reading comprehension and build critical-thinking and community in classes by making reading active, visible, and social, enabling students to engage with their texts, teachers, ideas, and each other in deeper, more meaningful ways.
IMO, this type of software is the more relevant in LSP and CLIL contexts where deeper processing of domain specific contents will contribute to thorough subject understanding and awareness of genre characteristics and so to the development of the related writing competence.
In this way it lends itself perfectly to support read/write pedagogies and blended and/or online teaching approaches by making students better prepared for the lessons and thus allowing better use of contact time with this preparation through discussions, tasks and exercises.
See the options for the upcoming webinars below:
Would like to share information about two resources I recently added to our inventory.
They are both Padlet pages.
The first offers an overview of paper abstracts and videocordings of online presentations at (the online version of) the 2020 EUROCALL conference.
One of the contributions of specific interest for our community (and teachers of Italian in particular) is ‘Data-driven learning for languages other than English: Charting the territory’ (Forti et al., 2020) about presenting MALT-IT2. This stands for “Measuring automatically the level of texts for second or foreign language learners of Italian”. It is a freely accessible online tool that assigns an inputted text to a specific CEFR level. This can be a great tool for producing customised teaching and learning materials.
The second is a Padlet page on using corpus tools in LSP and CLIL.
In addition to links to several mega corpora this resource about the use of big data in language teaching and learning lists a number of other resources, some accompanied with introductory materials such as tutorials, exploratory tasks and sample activities.
Especially for LSP professionals the column ‘LSP Corpora & DDL’ has recently been added to facilitate knowledge sharing about specialized corpora and related resources in a range of languages.
Its current first entry is ‘Check your Smile’, a digital game-based collaborative language learning website to learn Languages for Specific Purposes and Specific Vocabulary in particular.
Furthermore, in the column ‘More Tools & DDL Resources’ we aim (again collectively) to curate tools, materials and teaching practices that are useful for introducing data driven teaching and learning approaches in the classroom.
As the padlet page is editable (no registration required) we hope that thanks to the contributions of our LinguaCoP members to the ‘LSP Corpora & DDL’ and other columns its usefulness for the LSP community will be enhanced.
On behalf of TELLConsult partner Christine Appel (Open Universiteit Catalunya) I am sharing the announcement below.
The tandemMOOC Project, aims to bring together learners of English and Spanish in order to practice their oral skills. This is a free course that takes place over a period of six weeks, starting on the 21th of October. This MOOC is designed to be a complement to regular language courses for adult learners at the B1 level or higher by providing them with additional speaking practice (Spanish/ English) with native speakers via an online videoconferencing tool.
Interesting features for learners is that the MOOC offers the possibility of speaking with a variety of tandem partners using the Roulette Tandem Tool or prearranging a session with the YouChoose Tandem Tool. Both tools launch tasks designed to guide learners in their conversations and to create a communicative need.
Teachers of Spanish might find particularly interesting the portfolio which their learners can download from the platform and bring to class. This contains:
Number of video sessions completed
Total time spent practising
Number of different tandem partners
Feedback they’ve received from native speakers of Spanish
Feedback they’ve provided to their partners
You can find further information about tandemMOOC on our website:
http://mooc.speakapps.org/
Am sharing this as, IMO, it provides another interesting way in which you can enrich your teaching practice with third party, Open Educational Resources (OER) and practices (OEP). See this LinguaCoP resource to find out more on what OER could mean for your practice.
