As a language teacher, I was always looking for new activities to keep learning fun and engaging for my students. As a student myself, I hated nothing more than the constant Question-Answer type exercises we did all day long in every subject. Especially for language teaching, I believe it is crucial to offer various activities to include all types of learners. While it is possible to create many different activities in the classroom, most online platforms are limited to some Fill-in-the-blank or Multiple Choice activities. But not the SmartClass Teaching Platform! Here you will find 20 different activity templates to engage your students and include all learners!
3. Speaking Activities (Video and Audio-only)
4. AI-based Pronunciation Activities
A viewing activity is a great way to share charts, lists, and overviews with your students. Anything that you want your students to read or take a look at should be assigned as a viewing activity. Some examples:
• Vocabulary: Look at the vocabulary list for this chapter/section/week
• Grammar: Look at the grammar chart / Review this grammar concept
• Weekly Schedule: Here is our schedule for this week. Make sure you complete the activities on the correct dates. (especially important and useful during asynchronous learning)
Within our SmartClass platform, we offer two different writing templates: Open Text and Question-Answer. In the introduction to this blog post, I said how much I hated always writing down answers in complete sentences. While I am still not the biggest fan of them, I know their value and have found a way to make them (in my opinion) more useful and fun. By combining a written activity with an auditory and/or visual component, you can engage your students and train multiple senses and skills at once. Here are some examples of how you can use our writing templates in combination with a video/ or audio stimulus:
We offer a variety of different templates for speaking and listening activities. You can choose various different files or audio or video as the stimulus and create two or three different types of activities with each.
Open Recording activities are valuable when you want to give your students a lot of time to talk freely about a topic. Their recording keeps going while they speak, think, correct themselves, or look at the visual/written prompts given.
Watch this video to see an example
The second speaking template is Segmented Recordings. You choose where the system adds pauses in a given audio file, so you don't have to leave pauses while you record the file.
Watch this video to learn how to create segmented recordings
It is also fantastic for audio files you might already have, such as songs, lectures, or files from other materials you are using. By clicking "variable-length responses," you allow your students to take as much time as needed to answer the question after hearing an audio segment. Students then click on "DONE" to automatically move on to the next question/segment they listen to and respond to. Some examples of interactive and engaging segmented recording activities are:
The third option for a speaking activity is Continuous Recording. For this type of activity, you need to build pauses into your audio file before uploading it. Remember to leave enough time for students to respond or repeat and also build in a pause at the very end for the last question. The difference between a segmented and a continuous recording is that you decide how much time your students have to answer with a continuous recording. They can't choose when to move on to the next question, but as soon as their time is up, the following question/sentence will automatically be played, and they have to respond/repeat. This puts more pressure on the students but also prepares them for a conversation in the "real world." Here are some examples of how to use continuous recordings in your foreign language classroom:
If you prefer to see your students when they talk or have them give a presentation or show what they are talking about, then our Video templates are perfect for you. Open Recordings and Continuous Recordings are possible as well. Some ideas of how to use these two different video recordings are:
Our pronunciation activities are a fantastic tool to have students practice pronunciation and work on their articulation even when you, the language model, are not around. Our AI-supported pronunciation templates offer speech-to-text and text-to-speech features in 20 different languages: Arabic (15 variations), Chinese (4 variations), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (9 variations), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish (20 variations), Swedish, Thai, Vietnamese.
While it does not replace the teacher as a language model and certainly has its flaws, it can still be used to get students to listen and speak more in a foreign language and help them overcome any barriers, fears, and nervousness when speaking in the new language.
My students really enjoyed these activities because they gave them a chance to practice in private, without the rest of the class or even me listening to them. They could make mistakes without worrying about others laughing, and they could repeat each sentence as often as they wanted until they got it right. I never graded my students on these activities because I wanted them to keep practicing and playing with the language while also receiving instant feedback from the AI software, how much they got right, and which words they didn't pronounce correctly.
There are three different templates possible for pronunciation, of which I believe the Listen and Speak one is the best and most valuable, as it allows the students to listen to the AI that reads the sentence you (the teacher) wrote and then lets the students repeat the sentence while typing out what it (the AI) heard.
It is also possible to set up these pronunciation activities as Listen only or Speak only. Suppose you'd like to test your students and trust the AI to give accurate enough grades. In that case, you could have students practice by listening to the sentences in one activity and then have them only be able to read and speak the sentences in another activity another time, so they can't listen to the AI pronouncing the sentences first. However, I chose to do this kind of testing with a simple recording activity as I wanted to be able to listen to their pronunciation and give them the grade, rather than solely relying on the AI to evaluate my students.
A question that might have come to your mind while reading this: "This is all wonderful, and I would love to get my students to talk more, but how am I ever going to have enough time to listen to all these recordings?"
Well, I had the same doubts. The wonderful thing about the SmartClass Teaching Platform is that it is designed especially for language teachers, and we, the content team's former language teachers, are always driving our programmers insane to add more teacher-friendly features.
Therefore, we are proud to be able to offer eight different, auto-graded activity templates for you and your students. Not only does that allow you to spend less time grading, but it also gives your students a nice mix of activities that challenge them in different ways and keep them engaged and focused.
Another benefit: It allows you to choose different media files as stimuli for all of these activities, so you are not limited to texts that your students have to read. You can have a video that students watch and then a corresponding multiple-choice quiz, or you upload an audio file that students need to listen to fill in the blanks.
All the activity examples you see here in this post are taken from our complete ESL/EFL curriculum, "Let's Talk! English". We also offer German, Spanish, and Arabic supplemental materials where all the activities focus on speaking, listening, and pronunciation.
You can use the SmartClass Teaching Platform to create your own language activities or get it with our English, German, Arabic or Spanish materials preloaded. You can always edit and manipulate the preloaded activities to fit your students' needs, and you are still able to create your own activities and assign them to your students.
Not enough yet? While we have a long list of ideas of what kind of activities or features we want to add to our platform, we also want to hear from YOU! Leave us a comment or send us an email to let us know what you would like us to add for our next release!