A good laugh for teachers and students… Enough said.

There is an interesting article for students and teachers from any country today’s, The Korea Times. Rafael Sabio, an English teacher in a TESOL graduate program, touches on two main points in this second part in his series titled To Improve English Education. In this part he argues that

• pedagogy must be improved; and
• schools should recognise qualifications and experience and pay accordingly.

While the article is about English education in Korea, I know from my experience teaching in Japan that the dialogue between the author and the readers taking place in the comments is relevant to English education in Japan and, I would presume, other countries.

What’s Exam English?

Exam English is a website for people studying or thinking of studying for an English proficiency test. It has materials covering TOEFL, TOEIC, IELTS, BULATS, CPE, ECPE, LTE, CAE, FCE, LTE, ECCE, PET, and KET exams. Exam English describes the different elements of each exam and has online practice tests simulating some parts of each exam.

What Exam English Does Well

Exam English is probably the best place to go when you are deciding which exam to take. It provides samples that cover every major international exam.

So much for being original…

Inside Higher Ed published a news piece today on Wikipedia in the classroom titled “When Wikipedia Is the Assignment.” In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for students studying on their own and Add Some Spice to Writing Class With Simple English Wikipedia for teachers because I hadn’t seen anyone advocating students writing for Simple English Wikipedia.

A while back I wrote a couple of posts (Learning to Pronounce English Words with the IPA and More About Learning Pronunciation) about how to use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to learn English pronunciation. In one of the posts I recommended the University of Iowa online IPA chart for English students. However, the University of Iowa chart is not perfect. For one, it is intended for phonetics students and, as a result, it is not very easy to use and navigate without a solid understanding of the IPA and phonetics.

I have started getting TOEFL data ready for the Ask Olli index. I did a teaching TOEFL course about seven years ago, but I have never taught it so I decided that I need to refresh my knowledge.

So, after reading a bit about the different TOEFL flavours now available, I started looking for an online TOEFL practice exam.

The Course Management System (CMS) developer Blackboard released a report on online learning for k-12 students. I found it through an article posted on The Journal titled Study: Students Want To Learn Online.

My immediate reaction was deep skepticism—of course a study sponsored by one of the leaders in Course Management Systems finds that students want to learn online. But I decided to get the report to see if it has any lessons to apply to online language learning.

I was on UsingEnglish.com when I saw a forum post from a student asking for help finding a word that rhymed with ‘hurt.’The first thing I did was think up a few words that might help, but then I started thinking that there must be a better way of finding rhyming words.

I am not a programmer, but I do know a little about programming and there is a very easy way to match parts of words in most programming languages. Regular expression let you substitute parts of words with wildcard characters. It is very easy to program a feature that lets you match just the ending of a word to find possible rhyming matches. So I decided to look for an online dictionary that lets you find words that end with the same sequence of letters.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, the Economist magazine is having an online debate on technology in education.

Proposition: The continuing introduction of new technologies and new media adds little to the quality of most education.

I was going to write a summary of the comments on the Economist debate on technology in education because there are so many of them (they require quite a bit of sifting), but I had too many negative comments and didn’t want to seem like a jerk.

So, instead, I would like to elaborate on my own thoughts on the subject.

What’s Roy the Zebra?

Roy the Zebra is a reading site for children that centers on a group of animal characters. The main feature of the site is the nine-part story of Roy’s escape from a zoo and search for his herd. There are also a lot of interactive reading games using the characters introduced in the story, and Roy-themed songs.