Blogging Your Way To Greater Engagement

One of the most important roles we fulfill as language teachers is create opportunities for engagement with language our students are attempting to acquire.  Of course, we have time devoted to this in the classroom.  However, as many teachers know (especially those working in foreign language contexts) the opportunities for practice and engagement are often insufficient for effective acquisition to take place.

For me, there are two ways I have tried to bridge this gap and foster greater engagement.  These are social media and blogs.

Social Media
I've tried and tried to use Learning Management Systems (LMS - such as moodle) to foster greater engagement.  And while this does work as an addendum to lesson content, or for quizzes and submission of assignments, the students are not 'there' all the time.  This led me to make the decision to go (online) to where my students are.  As a result I'm now using Twitter, WeChat, Line, and Facebook groups to build greater engagement with my students.  Of course, use of such technologies does blur the space between classroom and the social sphere.  There are issues with this.  But one thing I cannot deny is the explosion in engagement for many of my learners.

Blogs
Blogs were the first way I started to explore the online space with my students.  I've started blogs for my Business English students (http://daryliti.blogspot.co.nz/) as well as for my EAP students (http://darylacademicenglish.blogspot.co.nz/).  These have had success as online repositories for my students to access resources which allow them to find their own learning opportunities.

If blogging is something you're interested in, I'd highly recommend reading the following post by Matthew Loomis - Teaching Blogs 2016: How to Benefit Your Students, Your Peers, and Your Pocketbook, by Starting an Educational Class Blog

Reading! The Secret to Success!

One of the best ways for students to improve their English vocabulary and comprehension is through reading.  Of course, this reading has to be level appropriate.  In addition, if they can find a resource which aids them in practicing certain strategies, all the better!  The following is a list of online reading resources I've made use of over the past 6 months.

Read Theory - This one is my favorite. It's free and adjusts to your level.  Everyone should be doing this!!!

My English Pages - A special page for English language learners with lots of different texts.

100 Essays - These are mainly American, but provide some good practice.

5 Minute English - Again, lots of different reading exercises for English language learning.

Reading Labs - University of Victoria reading exercises.  Lots of different levels.

University of Illinois - Lots of different kinds of exercises (not only reading)

Teacher Phil English - This is a Youtube site which has some really good explanations of Wikipedia readings.

*edit*

I'm adding two additional sites to this post:

Literacy Net Reading Resources - a great collection on many different topics.

VOA Learning English - This combines reading and listening on current news stories.