ELT Practitoner's Guide

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...

A word cloud on stormboard As teachers we all know how essential it is for students to brainstorm and generate ideas before they attempt to write any piece of writing. All we try to do, in a writing class, is to guide students to use mind-mapping or spider webs to plan their ideas! But have we ever thought we could engage our students in an online collaborative platform where they can freely construct and share their open thoughts and ideas through innovative 'sticky notes' ? Yes, Stormboard has made it possible for us! Let's find out how it can enrich our experience of teaching writing! Stormboard and its outstanding features Stormboard is a cost-effective virtual whiteboard that allows students and teachers to collaborate both in class and at home. Students can generate and share ideas either individually, pairs or groups and come up with conclusive points. What is the most attractive feature of this tool is the chance to post sticky notes or 'stick...

Scott Thornbury's A-Z blog https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/ provides a wealth of information on a range of ELT topics for interested readers of the field. As the title suggests, the blog is literally a one-stop forum covering nearly 200 concepts, all synchronized in an alphabetical order. Scott Thornbury's A-Z blog homepage User-friendliness Useful website links The blog is user-friendly particularly because of its unique dictionary-like index. Although the list can be tedious and overwhelming sometimes, a quick glance at it gives a clear idea of what topics the blog mainly covers. Readers can also open-up several browser pages of different topics at the same time using the hyperlinks. In addition, readers have been provided with a host of useful links at the right side section named 'Common Handy Websites'. This can be a very useful quadrant for practitioners who are interested in getting a detailed understanding of some areas of professional ...