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I love Shakespeare! But... Can I teach it ?

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  ​Hello my dear readers! ​It is such a pleasure to come back again, especially with an amazing lesson plan about one of the most well-known playwrights of all time. ​But what is this lesson plan exactly? Let me tell you first, ​Drama techniques are inevitable elements of foreign language classrooms. Languages are alive my dear friend, just like human beings; therefore, they need a habitat to live in freely and comfortably. In that sense, drama techniques provide the language we teach with a safe area where students can actually experience its most natural usage. ​Drama is a natural part of any lesson. Even when it is not planned beforehand, we can clearly see teachers using certain elements of these techniques, such as basic role-playing or reading aloud for different characters. ​However, many teachers eventually struggle to use these techniques to their full potential. To help with that, my friend and I have prepared a step-by-step lesson plan about one of my favorite plays, com...
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See You... Again ??

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 Hello again,  This time, I am not sharing but saying goodbye to you all while talking about the tasks and the course itself.  First of all I want to thank Mustafa Polat for giving us this opportunity to work on our teaching skills and abilities from a different aspect. Technology has always been a little far from my life and working on it has been a great advantage for me as a language teacher. Because as you know, developed technologies are spreading fast and it is our job to keep up with it and entegrate it when necessary.  The course itself was not a difficult one but rather enjoying. Creating it, giving feedback to my classmates and improving our works again was overall an enjoyable experience. However, since it has been a hectic term because of the given assignments, I could not find the time to apply them in a real lamguage classroom. My favorite task so far has been creating an AR / VR entegrated classroom. This was something that I was involved less so I lea...
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Let's Talk About AI, shall we?

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 Hello my dear readers,  I am here with another different approach that we can integrate into our classrooms. Artifical Intelligence .  We all love AI, don't we? We prefer using it for multiple reasons and we benefit from it. And here we have a way of integrating it into our classrooms, I will show you an AI integrated material that me and my friends created for our class.  For this project, we needed to come up with an objective for preparatory high school students, as our aim, we choose "writing". We used Gemini to get some ideas and brainstorm it among group members. First, we wanted out students to read a map and understand directions with a given image with questions written under the image. After that, we wanted them to create their own map using AI with a prompt for AI to get proper and relevent answers. Then, they are asked to give directions to a friend of them who visits the city for the first time by using their map, (the destinations are are the one they ...
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Pack Your Bags — We’re Headed to Tokyo!

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 Hello My Dear Readers ! Welcome back to my blog page.  As you see from the title, we are getting out of our usual and boring classrooms and heading to a complete different country... through Technology!  Today, I want to talk about AR and VR technology a little. Augmented Reality (AR) enables us to add digital elemants such as, images, texts or 3D objects. AR gives us a virtual reality through bunch of technological devices without replacing physical environment completly. We can think of many examples in real life, such as using navigations to find a location, or posting pictures with instagram filters.  On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that creates a total digital environment and places user in that environment. This can be very interactive, it allows users freedom, such as looking around, moving themselves, or manipulate objects as they like. It is a very good application to the classroom because it is authentic and it immerses students' at...
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A Total Different Approach to English Language Teaching !!

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 Hello Everyone !  I am here again to tell you about a way different teaching method that I have not mentioned before in this blog.  That is, Flipped Classroom Approach. It basically reverses the traditional foreign language teaching methods. Students learn the new content, vocabulary and structures at home mostly via videos or audios. So that, the classroom time can be used for active practice and interaction. For language classes, it is a very impressive method to increase the time for speaking and communicative activites which we need the most in order to achieve proficiency.  One advantage is that students come prepared so the lesson is more engaging and interesting. A disadvantage can be when a student does not complete the tasks, he/she might fall behind very easily.  For our project, we have prepared a short flipped lesson. We have aimed to teach 8 vocabulary items chosen from 5th Grade English book from the unit 7. Instead of isolated vocabulary, we want...
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An AI-enhanced Corpus-Based Teaching Material... But, what do we mean ??

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 Hello my dear readers,  I had a very enjoyable group project and wanted to share it with you all!!       In this assignment, me and my friends created an AI-enhanced, corpus-based teaching material according to the ASSURE model. Our objective was to teach modal verbs must and have to and it was to direct turkish EFL high school students to discover functional differences between these two items through self-teaching and evaluating. We designed our material around Ma et al.'s design principles, which means our class session moves from exploration to induction and then to output in the classroom environment.       We initially used SKELL for the worksheet we prepared because its interface is quite friendly and understandable for students. On the first page, we asked students to look up the words must and have to themselves and find which tense they refer to. On the next page, they were expected to find which functions these expressions co...
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Knock Knock... Is There Anyone Out There?

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 Welcome back my dear readers !  I am Irem, but I like to call myself "polyglot-to-be" As I have already stated this before in one of my previous posts, here I am again to offer you a slightly different perspective and posts this year about foreign language teaching and learning either individually or in a classroom, mainly focused on English as our instructor Mustafa Polat has given us the amazing opportunity to continue this blog page.  But Irem, how is it going to happen? Let me tell you.  This year, we change our perspective to a different point than last year. We have already learned that technology is an integral part in our lives and the integration of technology into foreign language education is inevitable. Despite this fact, If you never use technology in your classroom I can guess that the students, right now they may also be called as "digital natives"  will get bored as well.  However, we will understand the important role of technology, all th...
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