ELT Practitoner's Guide

Duolingo is a widely popular free web and mobile application for learning foreign languages. Language enthusiasts can explore and practice more than 22 languages through Duolingo . According to Wikipedia sources, with a nearly five-star rating, this tool has over 200 million users worldwide. The application is downloadable to desktops, android and iOS smartphones. The green owl sends you nice reminders via email once you register yourself for a language. It motivates you every time you complete a level of the language tree. In simpler terms, its all about learning by doing. Here is a YouTube video on how Duolingo actually works: This tool offers scheduled practice for learners and based upon the frequency of practice and retention, learning becomes spontaneous. The  basic idea behind portability of such an app is informal autonomous learning, anywhere, anytime. The game like learning space constitutes of exercises such as fill in the gaps, building sentences from word

Wordsift is an useful site to create graphical images of words. Wordsift not only makes the words look prettier than other word cloud generators such as Wordle , Tagxedo , it constitutes many different options which make it a compelling tool for ELT students to learn new words and their different contextual meanings. No doubt it can make you the smartest teacher in the school who can manipulate learners' thoughts using quick and easy-to-create digital images.  I have created this colourful word cloud using Wordsfit and it amazed me when I found out that each word, if the cursor hovered around it, says it frequency in the text from which it is drawn. You might be wondering what is the basic premise of a word cloud? It is an image made up of words where the the size of the word indicates the frequency of it occurence in the given text. For instance, the word 'vocabulary' has occured in the text 11 times, which is the highest, therefore, the word is sized the biggest

Vocaroo  is an online voice recording tool with simple options for saving and sharing. It can certainly add a new dimension to your classroom teaching. There are a number of tasks you can accomplish using Vocaroo: you can provide oral feedback to your students, ask them to record their speech, give them simple home tasks for example, reflecting on a chapter they have covered in class and share their recorded thoughts via online platforms.These are just some instances.  We teachers can always  be creative in assigning purposeful tasks to our students and Vocaroo is here to support our teaching aims. Features of Vocaroo Vocaroo is giving you the chance to record your voice online for free. isn't it amazing? The layout you will see in the first place is not that eye-catching, neither for you nor your students. But once you start playing with its features, I am sure, you will realize how it can be an asset to your classroom. Some other interesting features of Vocaroo are dis