A selection of Internet tools that can be highly useful to teachers of English as a second (or foreign) language.
By Krystian Aparta
They say that children learn languages the best. But that doesn’t mean that adults should give up. We asked some of the polyglots in TED’s Open Translation Project to share their secrets to mastering a foreign language. Their best strategies distill into seven basic principles:
Get real. Decide on a simple, attainable goal to start with so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. German translator Judith Matz suggests: “Pick up 50 words of a language and start using them on people — and then slowly start picking up grammar.” .
Make language-learning a lifestyle change. Elisabeth Buffard, who in her 27 years of teaching English has always seen consistency as what separates the most successful students from the rest. Find a language habit that you can follow even when you’re tired, sick or madly in love. .
Play house with the language.The more you invite a foreign language into your daily life, the more your brain will consider it something useful and worth caring about. “Use every opportunity to get exposed to the new language,” says Russian translator Olga Dmitrochenkova. Label every object in your house in this language, read kids’ books written in it, watch subtitled TED and TEDx talks, or live-narrate parts of your day to an imaginary foreign friend. .
Let technology help you out. Dmitrochenkova has a great idea: “A funny thing like resetting the language on your phone can help you learn new words right away,” she says. Ditto for changing the language on your browser. Or you can seek out more structured learning opportunities online. Dutch translator Els De Keyser recommends Duolinguo for its gamified approach to grammar, and Anki for memorizing vocabulary with its “intelligent” flashcards. .
Think about language-learning as a gateway to new experiences. To Spanish translator Sebastián Betti, learning a language has always been about focusing on the experiences that the new language would open up, from “visiting theme parks, attending air shows, enjoying cowboy poetry and folk-rock festivals, to learning about photo-essay techniques.” In other words, he thinks of fun things that he wanted to do anyway, and makes them into a language-learning opportunity. Many of our translators shared this advice. Italian and French translator Anna Minoli learned English by watching undubbed versions of her favorite movies, while Croatian translator Ivan Stamenković suddenly realized he could speak English in fifth grade, after years of watching the Cartoon Network without subtitles. So the next time you need a vegan carrot cake recipe, find one in the language you’re trying to learn. .
Make new friends. Interacting in the new language is key — it will teach you to intuitively express your thoughts, instead of mentally translating each sentence before you say it. Find native speakers near you. Or search for foreign penpals or set up a language tandem online, where two volunteers help one another practice their respective languages. .
Do not worry about making mistakes.One of the most common barriers to conversing in a new language is the fear of making mistakes. But native speakers are like doting parents: any attempt from you to communicate in their language is objective proof that you are a gifted genius. They’ll appreciate your effort and even help you. Nervous about holding a conversation with a peer? Try testing your language skills with someone a little younger. “I was stoked when I was chatting with an Italian toddler and realized we had the same level of Italian,” recalls German translator Judith Matz. And be patient. The more you speak, the closer you’ll get to the elusive ideal of “native-like fluency.” And to talking to people your own age.
Life hacks you’ll appreciate: The helpful talks in Session 4 of TED2016
Posted by: Kate Torgovnick May, Brian Greene and Thu-Huong Ha February 16, 2016 at 7:00 pm PDT
Noah Zandan has analyzed speeches from visionary leaders — from Sheryl Sandberg to Elon Musk — to figure out what they have in common. He spoke onstage at TED2016 on Tuesday, February 16, 2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
Pay attention. The talks in Session 4 offer takeaways you’ll find yourself using in everyday life — from a new way to end an argument, to how to talk about gravitational waves at a party, to the hidden benefits of learning a foreign language.
Recaps of the talks in Session 4, “Life Hacks,” in chronological order.
What the discovery of gravitational waves means. “1.3 billion years ago in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably toward each other, and collided,” says theoretical physicist Allan Adams. They didn’t spiral slowly — think more like your blender: the densest objects in the universe, spinning at a rate of 100 times per second. “All that energy was pumped into the fabric of time and space itself,” says Adams, “making the universe explode in roiling waves of gravity.” These waves are still in motion today, though they’re now “preposterously weak.” About 25 years ago, a group of scientists decided to build a giant laser detector to search for gravitational waves. It’s called LIGO, and on September 14, 2015, it noticed something. The waves from that collision “passed through the world. They passed through you and me,” says Adams. “Every single one of you stretched and compressed under the weight of that wave.” The detector noticed this anomaly, unthinkably small — less than 1/1000th of the radius of the nucleus of an atom. And yet, says Adams: “Listening to changes in amplitude and frequency of those waves, we can hear the story. We can literally hear the universe speaking to us.” He says that this will be the lasting legacy of the discovery: we can now hear the universe, rather than having to see it. Every “rustle and chirp” will give scientists new clues into the history of the universe.
The mind of a procrastinator isn’t pretty. There’s absolutely no good reason to wait until three days before your 90-page senior thesis is due to start writing it. Tim Urban of Wait but Why knows it. And yet … it happened. He knows that procrastination doesn’t make sense, but he’s never been able to quite shake his habits. In fact, he believes that procrastinators have different minds from normal people. Normal people have an agent in their mind that’s a rational decision-maker — and procrastinators have those, too, but they also have a second agent: the “instant gratification monkey,” who lures them away from productive activities with promises of YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window. Luckily, there’s a third agent in the mind of a procrastinator: the “panic monster.” This monster, says Urban, scares the monkey into disappearing and puts the rational decision-maker back in charge. “It’s not pretty,” he says, “But in the end it works.”
Tim Urban from Wait But Why shows what the inside of a procrastinator’s brain looks like. He spoke onstage at TED2016 on Tuesday, February 16, 2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
The positive power of failure. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: successful people who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. Originals aren’t the type-A overachievers you might think they’d be. Instead, they’re nonconformists who feel doubt and fear, have bad ideas … and procrastinate. In his research, Grant found that “pre-crastinators,” people who get their work done well in advance, are actually less creative than those who put off work and give themselves time to think in nonlinear ways and develop new approaches to a task. He’s also found that originals have the ability to look at something they’ve seen many times before and see it with fresh eyes, an idea Grant calls “vuja dé,” the opposite of déjà vu. The worst fear of originals isn’t failure — it’s not trying. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”
How we transcend our personality traits. Personality psychologists like to talk about traits: shared behaviors that combine to make us who we are. But Brian Little is most interested in those moments when we transcend our personality traits — sometimes because our culture demands it of us and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. He takes as his example the mysterious introvert who acts like an extrovert — read why in our full recap of his talk.
Alzheimer’s after time. David Larson was only three months into medical school when he felt completely burnt out. He was doing exactly what he was told — going to eight hours of lectures and studying for three hours — and if he was lucky, he got even five hours of sleep a night. So he came up with a clever plan to help him study and in the process totally upend the way we’ve been learning for the past 1,000 years: set your lectures notes to the tune of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” OK, maybe that’s not so revolutionary, but we bet you won’t forget: “If you’re lost, you can look and find 4 APOE.”
Linguist John McWhorter revels in the act of learning new languages — for their sheer mind-blowing strangeness. He spoke onstage at TED2016 on Tuesday, February 16, 2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
Why should we learn another language? English is quickly becoming the world’s universal language. It’s already the de facto language of business, diplomacy, the Internet, air traffic control and music, and real-time speech translation is getting better every year. So is it worth it to learn a foreign language? Linguist John McWhorter says it is. Of course, if you really want to enter and “imbibe” a different culture, you have to be able to communicate in that culture’s language. Likewise, it’s been shown that speaking two languages makes you a better multitasker, and less likely to get dementia. But finally, and most compellingly, “Languages are simply really, really cool,” he says. There’s a thrill to mastering things like the different word order or vowel formations of a truly foreign language. “It won’t change your mind,” McWhorter says, “but it most certainly will blow your mind.”
How visionary leaders talk. Noah Zandan is a data scientist who analyzes communication, and he was curious: what makes a CEO or politician sound compelling? He set out to analyze how leaders talk, and he noticed three things about these people he calls visionaries. The most striking thing: “I assumed they would create this vivid picture of future world with all its benefits, but the distinguishing factor was that they speak in the present.” They say “we plan to achieve these results” versus “we will achieve these results” — they talk 15% more about today and 14% less about tomorrow. The second thing Zandan noticed: visionary leaders communicate with clear, simple language. They focus on cause and effect, and speak 20% more clearly than the average communicator. The third thing: they favor the second-person pronoun “you,” and opt for sensory language, the kind of words that pop ideas to life for listeners. “We all want to hear vision and we all want our visions to be heard,” says Zandan. “With data we now know how.”
In defense of strangers. When we talk to strangers, we shift our perceptions on who counts as human. And as Kio Stark, author of the upcoming TED Book When Strangers Meet, says, “Seeing someone as an individual is a political act.” Stark wants you to try talking to more people you don’t know. She personally loves speaking to strangers: she makes eye contact in the street, says hello, listens. One day in New York when an old man told her not to stand on a storm drain because she “might disappear,” she thought it was silly — but she stepped off. And they had a moment. In many parts of the world we’re taught not to trust strangers. “Instead of using our perceptions and making choices,” she says, “We rely on this category of ‘stranger.’” But, says Stark, there are two great benefits to talking to strangers: first, it brings a special form of closeness we can’t get from friends and family, because there are no consequences; and second, we often expect loved ones to read our minds, and with strangers we have to tell the whole story to be understood. It’s a practice all of us should take on.
Kio Stark advocates talking to strangers — and offers three tips for better stranger convos. She spoke onstage at TED2016 on Tuesday, February 16, 2016. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
8 Great Online Resources for ESL/EFL Teachers
by Justin Boyle on July 11, 2013
A selection of Internet tools that can be highly useful to teachers of English as a second (or foreign) language.
The ever-growing Web has caused the availability of resources for teachers of English as a foreign language to skyrocket over the last several years. Whether you teach in a virtual or traditional classroom, chances are that at least one or two of these resources can help you craft enjoyable and effective lessons.
The sites on this list don’t all do exactly the same thing, but each of them may help improve your workflow with your ESL/EFL students. From lesson plan assistance to databases of recorded listening exercises to quizzes based on YouTube videos, these tools can each contribute something special to your classroom.
SpeechPeek is an online portal that allows ESL/EFL teachers to create interactive speaking and listening exercises for students to complete and submit remotely. Using peripheral or embedded laptop microphones, students record themselves speaking the exercises you provide, and their results are saved on the site for you to listen to and grade. Teachers have the opportunity record “solutions” to the exercise in their own voices, and a feature of the site allows you to provide personalized feedback to each student on each exercise.
BusyTeacher is an extensive repository of affordable e-books, downloadable classroom posters, informative education articles for ESL/EFL teachers and over 10,000 free printable worksheets in dozens of categories. You can find innovative methods for coaching grammar and punctuation, new teaching ideas, timely lessons specific to the season and more. Free online tools at BusyTeacher include applications for creating word search, jumble and letter tile puzzles as well as a daily warmer that you can slip into your curriculum or use as inspiration for fun exercises of your own.
English Listening Lesson Library Online (ELLLO) contains hundreds of pre-recorded monologues and discussions on an enormous variety of topics, geared to English speakers at six distinct levels of skill from beginner to advanced. ELLLO recruits speakers from more than 60 countries, helping you introduce your students to a variety of different English accents, and some exercises contain comprehension games as learning aids. The lessons come in video as well as audio formats and can be sorted by topic, skill level or speaker’s home country.
ESLvideo takes an innovative approach to educational technology and turns something students probably do already into an ESL/EFL learning experience. Users register for an account, choose a YouTube video and then create quizzes based on the video content, which learners can then watch, answer and rate. Quizzes are ranked by recommended level of skill at English and contain a comment section for students to practice their written English. The diverse content on the site has been created by over 1,400 registered teachers, and registration for the site is free.
TEFLnet presents its materials mainly in British English, but nevertheless offers a broad spectrum of resources for ESL/EFL teachers in the U.S. and internationally. Features include a worksheet generator, downloadable lesson plans, a discussion board for teachers, basic information about TEFL qualifications and a job board for aspiring ESL/EFL professionals worldwide. The name of the site comes from the acronym TEFL — for Teaching English as a Foreign Language — and the site’s founder has helped produce a documentary on the subject , called “Talking TEFL.”
FunEnglishGames.comis a great resource for ESL/EFL teachers in early childhood education, offering a wide variety of teaching tools aimed at children. Features include a long list online interactive games and printable puzzles, quizzes and worksheets on numerous topics. The site also offers suggestions for fun classroom activities, jokes, anagrams, tongue twisters and a healthy selection of videos focusing on vocabulary, grammar, history and humor.
Tefltunes uses the principle that music is a great teaching tool and memory aid educators in the ESL/EFL field instruct students on English grammar and topical vocabulary at multiple skill levels. The full site operates on a subscription basis, but a handful of lessons are available for free so you can test out the concept as a part of your method. Songs can help relax the classroom atmosphere, introduce students to colloquial English and provide an authentic cultural dimension to your lessons. If you’ve ever had lyrics stuck in your head, you’ll understand how this approach works.
Busuuprovides online interactive lessons in English (and 10 other languages) using photos and recordings by native speakers and other types of audio-visual material. Busuu also offers a mobile app for Android and iOS that contains a vocabulary of over 3,000 words and covers 150 everyday topics in its lessons. Combining classroom work with Busuu work might help engage students in multiple ways.
The sheer volume of educational assistance available from these and other ESL/EFL resources online can seem overwhelming at first, but it shouldn’t take long to do a little exploring, become accustomed to the (sometimes unfamiliar) site or app design and start making use of them in your own classroom. Whether you use Web resources as supplemental instruction or online classes are your medium, at least one of these sites is bound to help you make learning English easy and fun.