This article discusses automatically scoring film analysis essays. Here are links to other automated evaluations on the Virtual Writing Tutor. Pen pal exchange project IELTS practice tests Argument essay evaluation system Lately, I have been developing automatic essay evaluations for IELTS and now for college-level academic writing. I sent an email to colleagues in my
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Off2Class Explained by Chris Rush
I love meeting talented and passionate ESL teachers. In a recent episode of Little Rascals, Frank and I got to interview Chris Rush from Off2Class.com. Chris explains how he got started, what Off2Class can do for teacherpreneurs, and how Off2Class might be used to support English Second Language Help Centers at colleges and universities. Watch
Read on »How can I give detailed feedback with the Win-10 Multi-Clipboard?
For corrective feedback on writing to be effective, it must be consistent, frequent, immediate, and explicit. That’s difficult for a teacher to achieve with 120+ writing assignments piling up and lessons to plan. Difficult, but not impossible. How can I give detailed feedback? Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of having to use terse correction
Read on »How can teachers promote achievement using persuasion secrets?
We all want our students to succeed, but sometimes we encounter resistance. If we could persuade students to cooperate with us sooner without having to resort to rewards and threats, we might be able to get better results, right? Here are some sneaky persuasion secrets that marketers and advertisers use to influence behaviour. Teachers can
Read on »Grammar Checker Testimonials
This semester, I asked students what they thought of the Virtual Writing Tutor Grammar Checker as a learning tool for their English course at Ahuntsic College in Montreal. You can learn more about the VWT here. A number of them replied using our internal messaging system (MIO) in either French or English. I have blurred
Read on »Self-Publish or Perish
Ouch! No college teacher is going to die because they don’t self-publish. What an overstatement! Luckily, the pressure in academia to publish research does not extend to college ESL teachers like me, so why use such a provocative title? Because self-publishing keeps you engaged in the best parts of teaching. Also, teachers who are not
Read on »Where can I get free board games and card games for my ESL class?
Despite the enormous popularity of video games, young learners still love to play board games with family and friends. Designing a game for others to play can double the fun. And it can add engaging learning opportunities to a course on any subject, including English as a Second language. Why are games so engaging? Most
Read on »Essay Checker
Imagine a website that could help students write better essays with automated feedback. Now imagine the same website but with additional commenting tools to help people record audio comments and rate each other’s essays using IELTS and TOEFL rubrics and comments. There you have it: an essay checker for the Virtual Writing Tutor. For a
Read on »Translation Card Game
English has borrowed 60% of its vocabulary from French over the centuries. Some words have entered English almost unchanged. Some loanwords are unrecognizable. Some words look the same in both languages but are used in different ways. False Cognates These “false-friends” or “faux-amis” are often referred to as false-cognates, from the Latin co for “together” and
Read on »Stickers for teachers
You can design your own custom stickers and even sell them for a commission, and /or order stickers for your school that others have designed and have them delivered.
Read on »Free Go Fish Card Game
Play this card game in groups of three or four. Shuffle and deal six cards each. Players take turns asking “Do you have any _____?” to complete books of the same rank. The player with the most books at the end of the game is the winner. For complete playing instructions, see How to Play
Read on »Postcards for Pen Pals — Free Download
Postcards are great. The colourful picture on the front can surprise, inform, and inspire. The stamp on the back can form part of a collection. There is just enough room to write a few well-chosen sentences. Messages are short and focused. The beginnings and endings are formulaic. Good Pedagogy Indeed, the skills you learn from
Read on »A Pen Pal Exchange for Communicative Writing Practice
More on pen pals: Start a Pen Pal Exchange project for students on the Virtual Writing Tutor. For instructions on how to create a pen pal exchange for your students, check out these step-by-step pen pal exchange creation instructions for teachers. Click here for an article on pen pals that students can read to introduce them
Read on »How to Create a Pen Pal Exchange on the Virtual Writing Tutor
Click here to start a Pen Pal Exchange Click here to read about the features on the Pen Pal Exchange Step 1: Click on “Templates.” Click “New” to create a template from scratch. Give your template a descriptive name. Pen pals will see the name on their dashboards. If you want to try a ready-made
Read on »Free Grammar Practice Activities
Here are some links to free online grammar practice activities to help you or your students get additional grammar help eliminating grammar errors. Online activities provide instant feedback, which helps learners know what they are doing right and what they need to improve. These activities are best done on a computer rather than on the
Read on »Storytelling at the World Bank
Many ESL teachers feel that argumentation skills are essential for academic and workplace success. Essay-writing remains at the heart of every college ESL course and Business English course. There are good reasons to question the over-emphasis on 5-paragraph essay writing and to reintroduce narrative writing into English Second Language courses. In Storytelling in Organizations, Stephen Denning
Read on »Teaching the Social Curriculum
Schools usually have a very strict and clear academic curriculum. The social curriculum can be less clear, but it’s just as important for the development of children into healthy adults. The social curriculum relates to teaching students how to interact and empathize with others. Learning these things helps young people to build healthy relationships and
Read on »Add your own ESL grammar checker to a webpage with an iframe
Hey Teachers, you are going to love this! Create your own English Second Language website and embed a free grammar checker into it in seconds. Here’s how: Step 1: Create a blog Create a blog on Blogger or some other blogging platform to communicate with your students. Step 2: Create a blog post Click on
Read on »Are Narratives Superior to 5-Paragraph Persuasive Essays?
Many teachers believe that the 5-paragraph persuasive essay is the only appropriate writing task for college-level students. Almost all of the college-level ESL textbooks published for the Quebec market include units on the so-called 5-paragraph persuasive essay, but units on narrative writing rarely appear. This dearth is unfortunate since there are some very good reasons to
Read on »10 Mind-blowing Research Findings to Supercharge Your ESL Lessons
I presented the following 10 research findings at the Rascals Conference in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec, on June 4th, 2018. The handout is here. Get the error correction card game that I described. The PowerPoint and references are below. I have created a web version of the talk that I gave and uploaded it to YouTube so
Read on »The Economic Benefits of Bilingualism
On paper, Canada is a bilingual country. It has two official languages: English and French. All students in Canada take second language courses at school, but many do not learn enough of the second language to be considered bilingual. In part, this is because the second language is not always taught effectively in schools, and
Read on »Academic versus Conversational Vocabulary Differences
There are “extensive linguistic differences” between different registers of English (Biber et al., 1999, p.9). Academic and conversational registers reveal a complementary frequency distribution of vocabulary and grammatical forms. Some of the principle differences are as follows: Vocabulary Differences Arranged by Parts of Speech Nouns Conversation has a lower density of information and therefore fewer
Read on »Aelfric’s Grammar, the First Grammar Book Written in English
If you are a fan of BBC’s story of Uhtred and Alfred, The Last Kingdom, you might be interested to learn about an important scholar working at that time, called Aelfric. Who was Aelfric? Aelfric of Wessex (955-1020) wrote the first grammar of Latin in a vernacular language. The Historical Context of Aelfric’s Life In the
Read on »How to Comment on Student Writing
Good writers understand their readers and the effect their choices have on a reader’s experience of their writing. In contrast, novice writers struggle to anticipate difficulties readers face with imperfect prose. The purpose of a teacher’s comments is, therefore, to “dramatize the presence of a reader” (Sommers, 1982, p.148), letting the writer know what has
Read on »How can I improve my English?
Students often ask me this question. They want to practice their English, but they don’t have anyone to practice with. Whenever I am asked, I am tempted to tell them my friend’s solution to the common question, How can I improve my English? I had a friend named Joseph who moved to Montreal from Czech
Read on »20 Reasons to Use Games in College-Level ESL Courses
At the front of a class, a teacher delivers the lesson she has spent hours preparing. She has tried to make it engaging and is animated as she attempts to convey the importance of what she wants her students to learn. Some of the students are listening and attentively taking notes. Others are struggling to
Read on »Healthcare Communication Problems with Linguistic Minorities
Effective communication between healthcare providers and their patients is an important factor in patient satisfaction. Global patient satisfaction with healthcare has been found to be lower among patients who have more provider-patient communication problems (Charles, Goldsmith, Chambers, Haynes, & Gauld, 1996). The most commonly reported problems involve failures on the part of providers to communicate
Read on »Absenteeism and a Cooperative-Learning Attendance Policy for ESL
There are plenty of good reasons to skip class: if you have a contagious disease or have a doctor’s appointment that you cannot reschedule, if car trouble or bad weather interferes with your commute, or if you are flat broke and need to work an extra shift to make rent and avoid eviction. Most people
Read on »Instructivist vs Constructivist Instructional Design
In this serious game, imagine you were asked to hire an instructional designer for your college or company. Who would you hire? Use the audio players below to hear the candidates talk about their views on instructional design. At the end of the first part of the interview, the candidates will ask you if you
Read on »200 Day-in-the-Life Career-Related Articles
A Day in the Life of a Professional in Your Field of Study Click on one of the links below to open a new tab with a day in the life article related to one of these 224 professions. Paraphrase and summarize the article you choose. Try the VirtualWriting Tutor’s Paraphrase Checker to check how close your
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