Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• Enigma of English education | Daily News

  An article from the Sri Lankan press.

  tags: communication education job-readiness learning linguistic competence English teaching teacher development

  • we did not have enough competent English teachers. By late 1990s, plans were afoot to train 50,000 school teachers to teach English. Much effort and money were spent on the project but the standard of English among the trained teachers remained low
    • Teacher training failed to accomplish goals (What went wrong? ¶1).
  • traditional Sri Lankan society put far too much emphasis on proficiency exams. Not only are they insufficient method of assessing language abilities, but also they put an insurmountable amount of pressure on students as well as teachers and schools
    • Students and teachers faced "insurmountable" test performance pressure (What went wrong? ¶1) from parents and administrators.

• Improve Your Pronunciation By 'Shadowing' Others

  Voice of America, Learning English, Education Tips # 4 This 6:35 min. audio program included "the opinion of Marla Yoshida, an English as a Foreign Language teacher at the University of California, Irvine" (transcript, ¶2) "that English learners need to do more than listen and repeat in order to improver their pronunciation" (The problem with listening and repeating, ¶2).

  tags: audio learning listening pronunciation resources shadowing strategies transcripts Voice of America

• Top 6 Open Source Web Conferencing Software Tools For eLearning Professionals - eLearning Industry

  Pappas proposed six "budget-friendly ... open source web conferencing software tools to consider" (2016.05.27).

  tags: collaboration elearning IT4ALL open source technology tools software web conferencing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.