And the God Created EnglishCentral

Hello again! Again me and my interesting post! In this post I evaluated a EFL related website. I'm dying to show you this amazing website: EnglishCentral 

Let's begin like other times, questions and answers, because I find it very handy.

Who authored the website? Is there any information about their qualifications or credentials? 

There is more than one author in this website. I want to start with the founder: Alan Schwartz

Founder and CEO of EnglishCentral, Alan Schwartz has 12 years of experience in speech recognition with AT&T Labs, SpeechWorks and Nuance. He led Nuance's Mobile & Automotive business as VP & General Manager. He then served as the VP for Nuance's Asia Pacific and Japan operations before leaving in 2008 to found EnglishCentral. Alan's first job out of college was teaching English in China. Alan has a B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard.

There is also pedagogical adviser: Dr Charles Browne

Dr Charles Browne is the Pedagogical Adviser. He is professor of Applied Linguistics and head of the EFL Teacher Training Program at Meiji Gakuin University. Past Director of Sony Language Laboratories, National Chairperson of the JET Program. He publishes widely on the topics of English education in Japan, Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, and CALL.

You can learn about EnglishCentral here.

What is the content of the website?

EnglishCentral has the largest library of video content anywhere on the web, with over 8,000 video lessons designed for English learners. This includes both authentic and specifically-created videos for language learning. Each video is levelled as beginner, intermediate and advanced, using a combination of sentence complexity and vocabulary.  Teacher of this website have also organized the video content into over 50 courses, covering:

• General and Academic English such as communication skills, presentation skills, as well as specialized content for pronunciation and vocabulary.

• English for Special Purposes such as aviation, or hospitality.

Many of EnglishCentral's courses are based on curriculums designed by leading publishers, such as National Geographic Learning, Compass Media, Abax ELT Publishing, and Garnet Publishing.

Who is the target audience? What is the purpose of the website?

All learners of English from the beginner level to advanced level are the target language.  Courses are organized in topical or theoretical units by subject areas and each course contains a series of video units and vocabulary quizzes. They offer the following course topics to choose from:

It is a very broad based website and it’s all excitingly professional. Videos and other contents are suitable for each level and they don’t bore the learners. The quality of the videos is catching up with latest updates. There are no errors or broken links, like I said it’s all professional. 

I highly recommended this website to English Language Teachers. In our country, we begin to learn English at the age of 8 and we continue to learn it at the end of the high school, age of 18. But when the students graduate, they don’t know anything about English. They spend 10 years of learning, yet they are still in the beginner level. How come that our students spend 10 years and learn nothing? Is it because they are incapable of learning a new language? Maybe one or two of them but the whole country? At that point we, as language teachers, must questions ourselves and our teaching strategy. This website provides a range of new materials.

 

Engaging, authentic media+ Scaffolding, Noticing+ Diagnostic Speech Feedback+ Game dynamics= Personalized Language Learning.

When I was examining the website, I noticed “speech feedback”. I used it to see how it works. I was completely and utterly amazed by it. After watching the video and doing the fill-in-the-blanks, there’s a speech section. It gives a full sentence of new vocabulary and you read the sentence aloud and it records your sentence. It gives you points by how well you pronounce the vocabulary.

Teachers can use the videos in the classroom or assign them as homework. You can use video transcripts and assess the students with a rubric. Make a rubric (best if it is in the student’s L1) and communicate your expectations for using EnglishCentral with students. Even better, negotiate the categories and grades for the rubric so students know exactly what equals and A or B or C.  

You can find more information about using EnglishCentral in classroom here.

I have totally been in love with this website. So I’d like hear your opinions and I’d be more happy to see your recommendations of EFL-based websites.

Hello from the RSS side!

Hi guys, how's your week going? I caught flu and again I went back to my hometown. Currently, I'm in relationship with my blanket and herbal tea. When you get sick, nothing is better than mom's soup. 

In this post, I tell you about what RSS is and my favourite ELT blog. Okay, let's get started. 

What is RSS?

Rich Site Summary or known as RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Basically, the essence of an RSS feed is that you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

Why not using e-mail notification?

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter.

Well now that you have acquainted with the term "RSS" and what it useful. I want to tell you what RSS reader I use, Feedreader. It is very handy and easy to use. Once you upload it, you see its interface. When you press F3, you can write or copy paste your website links. And that's it. You can see when website posts something new. Here's my feedreader's screenshot down below:

Five Against One: Teaching Against The Odds

I want to tell you a bit about my favourite teaching related blog: Five Against One: Teaching Against The Odds

The author is Adam Beale. He doesn't have a real academic background. Before teaching, he joined the Army and travelled the world. He spent time at a language school in Santiago, Chile and he realised there's so much to learn about teaching and his own language.

He usually posts about lesson planning, creative classroom activities, etc. I like his writing style. He plans his lessons very organized and detailed way. If it works, he shares it with his readers. Sometimes, he shares new tools relaed to ELT and I find them really useful. I recommend you to have a look at his page.

That's all I can say about RSS. Thank you for reading, please leave a comment if you have a question about it. And I really appreciate if you share your favourite ELT related blog. 

See you in next post.

A Film Review on Miyazaki's Sprited Away

Hello! Your weekly post has just arrived! What have you been up to? I hope everyone's having a great week. So I return with a completely different task: A film review! I've been working with one of the great Tumblr blogger; Ömre Akyüz for this task. I'll explain my task by asking questions and answering them.

Why did we write a film review on a film?

In our Technology & Material Design course, we were assigned to write a film review. With my friend Ömre,we decided to write the review on a very famous animated film, Miyazaki's Spirited Away!

Who is Hayao Miyazaki?

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿 Miyazaki Hayao) was born on January 5, 1941. He is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter, animator, author, and manga artist. Miyazaki's Spirited Away was the first anime film to win an American Academy Award. You can read his full bio here.

How did we write the review? How did it go?

At the beginning, it was so hard to decide which film we were going to write a review on. Ömre and I don't know each other very well, so it was very difficult to pick a movie. Personally, I like art films and independent films. Some people really love these types of films, like me and some of them literally hate them, find them very boring. In my opinion, they are true nature of films. I like visual feast, visuality should be telling the story, not overwhelming endless dialogues between actors and actresses.

Ömre came up with Spirited Away. At first, because of its name, I thought it was a horror film. After watching the trailer, I understood that I was wrong. We decided to write a review on Spirited Away. 

We watched it twice, first alone and second with her. It was good watching it with her, because we discussed the meaning of every detail, every scene. We looked the film from different aspects and sharing opinions, especially the different opinions, on the basis of mutual respect is the most important thing for me. It was like a coffee talk. 

How was "writing a wiki" like?

Well it was a first for me. But it was easy for us to create a wiki and write on it. Because both of us love technology and our knowledge about it probably is higher than average computer users in our country. It was a very easy platform to use and the interface helps you a lot.

Teachers can use wikis to enhance interactive learning in the classroom. Children in our time are beyond Classical Methods. Learning with them is more fun than just looking a textbook. They meet with the technology in very early age, so they expect others to use them as efficiently as they do. When given appropriate instructions, students can improve their multiple step performance with wikis. 

My Thoughts on Spirited Away

When Spirited Away released in 2001, I was only 5. I hardly remembered it when Ömre mentioned it. After watching trailer, I recalled some glimpse of it, but nothing important. 

I have some biases on animes and Japan culture. I have two friends who adore animes and Japan. We are bickering with each other about them all the time. To me, animes are so colourful and full with exaggerated behaviours. After watching Spirited Away, I saw its simplicity and its right choice of colours. I'm in love with it.

First you thought, it's a very cliché child movie. But believe it is not. It's certainly an adult film with its hidden messages.

Miyazaki doesn't reveal everything easily. You have to grasp every scene and not let go. It's a thought-provoking film. Miyazaki works vey neatly  with concepts of friendship, courage and love. Chihiro, the main character, is stuck in a spirit world and she has to find a way to home.

In Spirited World, nothing is entirely good or bad. All characters are in "gray areas", like us. You can see character developments.

Okay, I don't want to give spoiler so you should watch it as soon as possible. If you have seen the film, you can leave comments and we can discuss it. 

You can read our wiki page here and watch the trailer here. You can visit Ömre's tumblr blog. I'd like the end my long post with a quote by J.K.Rowling about "gray areas":

We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

First Podcast Experience

Hi everyone,

I'm so excited and nervous about this post! I had such a lovely time with my friend Rümeysa. We did our first podcast and it turned out to be that podcasting is such a fun!

First I'd like explain this project. This project was a task based on our "Technology and Material Design" course. For this project we were asked to make a sound rich story with a partner and it should be 2 minutes long. This story should begin as our lecturer told us and it should be engaging. We found suitable sounds and edited them to make it perfect. Believe me, it was not easy. Because I had to go my hometown and Rümeysa had flu. We were in different cities, it was not easy to arrange a convenient time for both of us. It was quite challenging, we wanted to make it perfect and we recorded our voices over and over again till both of us satisfied it. We used the tool Vocaroo.

We made up a story using the words lake, guitar, beach and letter; we thought that this podcast is appropriate for young learners. It has a lesson to take, children in our time are not very helpful and we want to change this behaviour. Our story is about two girl, Amelia and Melody, who are in wheel chair. They thought that they had a quiet sunny day but it turned out to be most magical day ever.

Listen and tell me how you find it! Don't forget to let me know about your thoughts on our podcast.

By the way, I really thanked my partner Rümeysa, who helped me a lot. She was very ill but she didn't slack off. Thank you very much for being responsible, and you're really good at collaborative work.

Also you can visit her great blog

You can listen the podcast by clicking here or here.



Audio and voice recording >>

Here is the transcription of our podcast:

It was such a lovely day. We were walking in the park, actually riding would be the right verb, when suddenly we heard a loud scream. Amelia and I looked each other in horror. We tried to locate where the scream came from. Amelia began to ride her wheel chair and I followed her. And there it was in the lake! First, we saw a little blond head in the lake and we realised it was a girl, drowning in the lake! We rode to the beach as fast as we can and looked someone to help her. But there was no one here. Amelia looked me and bent under her wheel chair and took her guitar. She gave me the guitar. She came behind me and pushed me till water touched my wheels. There was no way we could get into the water. Amelia thought that we could use the guitar to reach her. It was worth trying! I held out the guitar. She saw it and held on it. We made it!

I opened my eyes and looked for Amelia. She was lying near me. We looked at each other in confuse. Because we don’t remember how we got here. Last thing we remembered was a girl drowning and we saved her. But there was not any girl here. And we were lying on the beach, away from our wheel chairs. I looked our wheel chairs and thought how we were going to reach them. And I saw a letter lying near us. There were two blue necklaces on it. I reached them and started reading the letter; “Hello, Amelia and Melody! You saved my life, the life of princess Keisa! I help people who help me and in return I will give you something you always wished.  I left you two necklaces. They have powers and they will give you what you want the most. Thank you! Make a wise wish!” she wrote. In that moment we wished to walk and now we can walk. If someday you see someone in need of help, just help them because life will help you in return!