TEFL

NGSL Redirect

Paul Raine TEFL

If you are coming from Charlie Browne’s NGSL/NAWL/TSL/BSL sites, please see my new blog post for multilingual and other additional data for these lists:

The NGSL, NAWL and TSL are now available for Quizlet in 16 different languages. Paul Raines originally had them up directly on the Quizlet site, but they needed to be taken down due to too many lists being associated with one account. Fortunately Paul has figured out a good workaround by making all files available in .csv format from his website. He’s generated definitions and part-of-speech from public domain dictionaries for the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. Links to the lists can be found via a blogpost on his website.

10 years in Japan

Paul Raine TEFL

Today I mark 10 years living and working in Japan. To commemorate the occasion, here is one of my first blog posts from October 2006:

Some things about Japan that I’ve noticed:

  • The plugs don’t have switches, so if you want to turn something off, you have to physically unplug it
  • Semi-automatic doors: they lack motion sensors and only open when you press the button
  • Pelican crossings have no buttons to press
  • When it rains, everyone uses an umbrella
  • There are little racks in which to put your wet umbrella when entering shops
  • The Japanese are incredibly polite: one night some of us got lost, and when we asked for directions, we were escorted by a stranger for a good half-mile to the train station, which was the opposite direction to which he had been walking
  • The local gaijin pub, Mattari, serves fish and chips
  • The Japanese like queuing even more than the British. You might even expect to find them queuing on the platform for trains
  • There are lots of bikes
  • Pachinko parlors: buy yourself a tub full of ball bearings and pour them into an inverted pinball machine. Adopt an expression of post-lobotomy desolation. These places are completely insane.

For a more comprehensive run down of the past decade, check out my post on TEFL Journey.

20 Tech Tips from Vocab@Tokyo 2016

Paul Raine Tech Tips, TEFL
  1. Tom Cobb’s venerable Lex Tutor now has a mobile interface
  2. Collins and Merriam-Webster both provide free online dictionaries
  3. The University of Texas at Austin provides a wide selection of free handouts (PDF) for teachers of English language writing
  4. Calibre is a comprehensive e-book manager and converter
  5. OmniPage and ABBYY FineReader are powerful OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applications
  6. The Lexical Research Foundation is “a not-for-profit organisation to promote excellence in lexical and vocabulary acquisition, description and pedagogy.”
  7. AntWordProfiler, Web VocabProfile, Range, and P_Lex (PDF) are tools for profiling lexical sophistication of a text, i.e. the proportion of advanced (rare) vocabulary…
  8. …while TextInspector can be used to measure lexical variation, i.e. the proportion of word types to tokens
  9. Michael Covington has developed a number of algorithms and tools for analyzing texts, including Moving Average Type-Token Ratio (MATTR)
  10. Paul Nation’s book, What You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language, is available as a free PDF download…
  11. …as are all his Vocabulary Size Tests (VST)…
  12. …which can also be taken online via Tom Cobb’s site
  13. Laurence Anthony’s WebSCoRE is “a free, parallel concordancer with a specially developed bilingual pedagogical corpus”
  14. Paul Meara’s Lognostics website “is designed to provide access to up to date research tools for people working in the field of Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition”
  15. Vocabulary Learning and Instruction (VLI) is an open access international journal for research relating to vocabulary acquisition, instruction, and assessment.
  16. Showbie is a great tool for keeping digital portfolios of students’ work
  17. Coh-Metrix is a system for computing computational cohesion and coherence metrics for written and spoken texts
  18. Lexile Analyzer can be used to compute the complexity of a text, including sentence length and word frequency
  19. Cambridge University Press’s English Vocabulary Profile (EVP) “offers reliable information about which words and phrases are known and used by learners at each level of the Common European Framework (CEF)”
  20. The CEFR-J website provides a series of “can-do” descriptors specifically for English language teaching contexts in Japan.

If you found these tips useful, why not check out the new version of my book, which has been revised, updated and expanded for 2019: 50 Ways to Teach with Technology

30 Tech Tips from JALT CALL 2016

Paul Raine Tech Tips, TEFL

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  1. James Rogers gives pronunciation advice for Japanese learners of English
  2. Linode is a powerful and good value web host
  3. The Multiplayer Classroom (Lee Sheldon) was one of the first publications arguing for gamification of education
  4. Class Craft helps you to make learning an adventure
  5. Socrative allows you to administer assessments and surveys via mobile phones
  6. Kahoot provides gamified classroom activities
  7. QuizUp offers a competitive multi-player gaming experience
  8. Sendtodropbox is a great way of getting files from your students into your Dropbox account…
  9. …while QuickVoice (iOS) allows you to record and send audio files as email attachments up to 5MB in size…
  10. …and MailVU are specialists in sending video via email
  11. Moxtra is a mobile-first embeddable collaboration platform…
  12. …and VoiceThread allows students to submit audio as attachments to images
  13. Schoology is a modern Learner Management System
  14. Ginger offers a variety of apps for online translation and grammar checking…
  15. …while Grammarly claims to make you a better writer by finding and correctly 10 times more mistakes than you word processor
  16. WikiTude is the world’s leading augmented reality SDK
  17. Diigo allows you to annotate and save web pages as you browse them
  18. Tiki Toki is web based software for creating beautiful timelines
  19. iBuildApp allows you to easily make apps for iOS or Android
  20. Mobyx (iOS) provides high quality VOIP (Voice over IP) services
  21. KanjiTomo is a comprehensive OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application for Japanese characters…
  22. …while Yomiwa (iOS) provides a real-time offline camera translator for Japanese…
  23. …and Perfect Master Kanji (iOS) is a fully fledged kanji practice app for people learning Japanese as a foreign language…
  24. …and Nihongo Shark provides free daily lessons for learners of Japanese
  25. Discord provides all-in-one text and voice chat for gamers
  26. Continuous Partial Attention (Linda Stone) is “motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network”
  27. Wiggle allows you to easily import sporting goods and accessories (a weird one, but a good one for those of us who struggle to find bicycles big enough in Japan!)
  28. Phonologics offers automated pronunciation testing
  29. Words and Monsters taps into the addictive game play of apps like Puzzle and Dragons and Candy Crush by offering uncertain and unexpected rewards
  30. Paul Howard Jones is the preeminent expert on the effect of games on the brain

If you found these tips useful, why not check out the new version of my book, which has been revised, updated and expanded for 2019: 50 Ways to Teach with Technology

JALT CALL 2016 “Unconference”: App Exchange

Paul Raine TEFL

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We all like to leave presentations/conferences with practical tools that we can put straight to use in the classroom. Almost every teacher has a selection of bookmarks or apps they come back to time and time again. The most popular of these apps and sites are well-known, but some little gems can take a long time to spread via word-of-mouth.

In this 30 minute slot, attendees were asked to write the names of their favorite ELT apps and sites on the whiteboard. We amassed an impressive 73 80 apps and sites in total. Here is the list, in alphabetical order:

  1. a4esl
  2. Anki
  3. Apps 4 EFL
  4. Breaking News English Lessons
  5. Busuu
  6. Cambridge English Online
  7. CamScanner
  8. Can You Escape
  9. Doki-Doki Universe
  10. Dotsub
  11. Duolingo
  12. English Clip
  13. English Listening Lesson Libary Online
  14. EnglishCentral
  15. EnglishClass101.com
  16. engVid
  17. ESLvideo.com
  18. Espresso English
  19. EuroNews
  20. Extensive Reading Central
  21. Flubaroo
  22. Formfuse
  23. Freerice.com
  24. Google Sheets
  25. Grammarly
  26. Health Matters
  27. Imiwa
  28. Inogolo
  29. iTalki
  30. Kahoot!
  31. Keybr
  32. LanguageCaster
  33. Listen and Write
  34. Many Things
  35. Memrise
  36. MeWe
  37. Movie Clips
  38. New Internationalist Easier English Wiki
  39. Newsela
  40. Nobelprize.org
  41. Odd News
  42. One Night Ultimate Werewolf
  43. Padlet
  44. Peanut Gallery
  45. Pearson VUE
  46. PhoTransEdit
  47. Phrasebot
  48. PhraseMix
  49. Pixabay
  50. POPjisyo
  51. Quizlet (Live)
  52. QuizUp
  53. Readlang
  54. Reuters
  55. RhinoSpike
  56. Samorost
  57. Ship or Sheep
  58. Simple English Wiktionary
  59. Simple English Videos
  60. Socrative
  61. Spaceteam ESL
  62. Spreeder
  63. Story Dice
  64. Storybird
  65. TED (Ed)
  66. Telltale Games
  67. The Mixxer
  68. Tiki-Toki
  69. TitanPad
  70. Trace Effects
  71. TypeIt
  72. VOA
  73. Vocabulary.com
  74. WeVideo
  75. Word Engine
  76. Words & Monsters
  77. Wordfast
  78. WordFlex
  79. Xreading
  80. ZType

Do you use any of these apps or sites in your teaching contexts? Do you have any other recommendations? Please write your comments in the box below!