How do you teach ESL online to language learners who feel they know enough English to get by and are not motivated to take another English course?
What materials do you use to teach ESL online that appeal to disillusioned language learners?
Here are four good reasons why Actively Engaged in Communication (AEC) will get students excited about learning and simplify your teaching.
First, the course puts learners at the centre of their learning. Second, the AEC gives them field-related reading and listening materials that catch their interest. Third, the course encourages students to do interesting real-world, communicative tasks and projects. Fourth, the AEC gives them corrective feedback showing ways to improve their speaking and writing.
Actively Engaged in Communication – listen to an oral presentation – is a classroom-tested multimedia online course that helps learners improve the four language skills.
Learner-centered
The course challenges learners to do their best. It engages students by having them do a short talk, a short audio-visual presentation to classmates related to their field of study.
The course also encourages students to be creative in designing and contributing regularly to their own blog, which serves as a personal archive of all their course work.
Field-related materials
The course focuses on eight field-related subjects which may be part of students’ technical or pre-university program: education, film studies, psychology, sociology, music, anthropology, health and food as well as business. Most students actually relish the opportunity to talk about a specific topic – in a short talk – related to their field of study.
In topic 3, for example, learners read and talk about a popular film based on a novel, that they have chosen.
Communicative tasks and projects
Actively Engaged in Communication gives learners the opportunity to express themselves in three stimulating classroom-tested projects. First, the film project is a highly successful activity that puts learners in the shoes of a film reviewer. In a mini-job search project, building on the film project, students write a CV as well as cover letter for a job in the film industry related in some way to their field of study. In the debate project, students prepare a debate leading to summative speaking and writing evaluations.
Opportunities to practice and corrective feedback
The course provides self-correcting online formative quizzes and automated writing assessments.
With other helpful resources – a writing workshop for example, extra writing activities, and model essays, students know just what to do.
