A white egg-shaped robot, Engkey, can be seen wheeling around the classroom of Hagjeong Primary School in Daegu. Students repeat the English phrases spoken by the robot, which even corrects their pronunciation.
Don’t get confused; this is not a scene from a futuristic fiction movie; it is, in fact, a real classroom scenario of South Korea. Surprised, aren’t you?
Modern English Language Teaching Technologies
The classroom scene has definitely changed over the past years. While traditional English teaching methods are being replaced with robotic ones in some places, teachers can use innovative technology to improve their teaching methods in other places.
Teachers, who were earlier seen carrying piles of books as their teaching material, can now be seen carrying a small pen drive with them. Many more innovative methods and technologically advanced teaching tools have changed the English language teaching process. Here’s a list of those technologies.
1. Digital Connection: Bringing students and teachers together!
When the age of digitization has dawned over everything, why should English teaching be left behind? By providing an easy and safe platform for connecting, digital technologies have indeed brought teachers closer to their students. They have also enabled the teachers to easily manage a lot of classroom stuff outside, like course structure, activities, etc.
Several cloud-based tools, like Google Docs, Evernote, DropBox, etc., enable the sharing of important notes and research material easily with thousands of students.
2. Global Staffrooms: Bringing together the global teaching methods!
Many online communities act as global staffrooms for many English teachers. They can come together and share their insights and notes on these platforms that help other teachers with their teaching methods. Solving complex English language doubts of teachers has also become easy in these communities.
Various blogs and online ELT blogging sites help English language teachers come together and share their teaching methods and other tricks with each other.
3. Online Corpora: Accessing the texts to solve queries!
Students have always been questioning and inquisitive. And their doubts have always surprised the teachers when it comes to English students. Thanks to the online corpora, teachers can dig into the large collection of texts to come up with the apt answer every single time.
While earlier teachers would panic at such questions or make regular trips to the libraries for research, access to almost every text online has made the entire process simpler and quicker.
4. Mobile Applications: Helping hand to the teachers!
Open up your App Store or Play Store and try searching for English language teaching applications. A number of mobile-friendly apps will come up that will ease the English teaching process. Many applications like Teacher Aide Pro help teachers manage their classes and students.
In fact, apps like Learnist and Teacher’s Guide can be beneficial in polishing the teaching method of English language teachers.
5. Smart Classes: Simplifying teaching methods!
With the emergence of technology, traditional methods were given a back seat. The use of smart boards to explore other forms of teaching, like PowerPoint presentations and short movies, attracted the students’ interest and worked wonders in explaining otherwise difficult things.
The interactive whiteboard (IWB) is another innovative technology that helps teachers save a copy of the notes that they write on the boards. They could easily print and distribute these notes to every student.
Read- The Benefits Of Using Audio-Visual Aids In Teaching
Whether on digital platforms, interactive whiteboards, global staffrooms, applications, or online corpus, English language teaching has changed dramatically over the past few years. The traditional teaching methods have been replaced with these new and innovative ones, which have undoubtedly proved positive for all teachers and students alike.