Rapid advances in AI offer opportunities to use speech recognition technology to enhance speaking tasks and improve speaking assessment for language learners. This online session will guide participants through the process of designing speaking tasks that can be automatically scored and that can provide individualized speaking feedback using the popular Moodle course management system. The speaking tasks can be designed and deployed using a free Moodle quiz-type plugin called ‘Speech Assessment’. The Speech Assessment quiz-type makes use of either the Google Speech Engine or the Amazon Transcribe engine to transcribe student speech into text which is then automatically scored using a phoneme-based algorithm.

In this session, participants will be provided with a demo Moodle course and user account, and the process of designing custom speaking activities using text, images, audio and video prompts will be outlined by the presenter using Zoom’s screen sharing function, and a shared Moodle course that all participants will have access to. Participants will be able to create their own auto-scored speaking task in the demo Moodle course as they follow along with the presenter’s screen share. Both close-ended and open-ended speaking tasks will be introduced along with suggestions on best practices for deploying online speaking practice and assessment activities.

Teaching online makes it challenging to encourage student engagement and interaction. In this workshop, I will share how I utilized Nearpod, an online teaching platform, to enhance my online English teaching practices. Research has shown that using Nearpod in English classes aids in promoting active learning by facilitating collaborative participation between students, teachers, and lesson content (Amasha et al., 2018, Hakami, 2020). My workshop will showcase how Nearpod can be used for effective discussions, reading activities, vocabulary activities, student-paced assignments, informing future instruction through its post-class reports feature, and more. Teachers will receive opportunities to test the functions as well. Finally, I will share the results of a quantitative opinion survey of 197 students’ self-reported perceptions of Nearpod, which indicated they felt an overall positive effect on their motivation and interaction in classes. Regardless of teaching online, hybrid, or face-to-face, the Nearpod lesson platform contains plenty of tools to increase interactivity and engagement in language learning. It is my hope that educators will leave this workshop feeling more confident in their ability to use this technology to facilitate interactive classes.

The Covid-19 pandemic has popped the online teaching genie out of the bottle into the spotlight.  One of the great challenges language teachers now face is finding ways to help learners engage each other through the computer screens in different areas as opposed to the traditional face-to-face method in a unified classroom. One method that has proven successful is the adapting of popular games and activities from exclusively face-to-face versions to computer-based models. This presentation will introduce a variety of games and activities that can be used with Zoom or other online learning platforms in either paper or digital form. Furthermore, this presentation will demonstrate how you do not need exotic software nor a high level of computer expertise to use these games and activities. This presentation will be highly interactive and participants are asked to bring writing materials that will allow them to make written notes that can be seen by the other members when held up to the camera. Activities will include online versions of the American TV game shows “Match Game” and “The 20,000 Pyramid” as well the murder-mystery game “Clue.”  Materials for these activities will be available in the form of PDF files for anyone interested using them in their classrooms.

In the online classroom, finding meaningful ways to engage students and to maintain a collaborative dynamic despite the barrier of the computer screen can prove daunting. This presentation will examine the “One Word to Describe Me” paragraph activity that was used in a university English writing classroom with students who had already acquired basic paragraph writing skills. Participants will be introduced to Jamboard, which is a free whiteboard program designed by Google, and examine its benefits as a communicative tool for concept mapping. Next, using the concept map created in Jamboard, viewers will explore the ways that Google Docs can be used to promote collaborative writing and peer editing. Finally, the presenter will detail the results of a student survey that asked them to evaluate the collaborative and interactive appeal of both Jamboard and Google Docs. Through this experience, individuals will come away with a greater awareness of how Jamboard and Google Docs can be utilized in the online classroom to encourage collaboration.

‘I only know one thing about the technologies that await us in the future: we will find ways to tell stories with them.’ (Jason Ohler). The technology in question for this presentation is a virtual world called OpenSim, which is similar to Second Life but more suitable for education. We present the main challenges addressed and the outcomes produced towards inspiring the participants to transcend previous achievements throughout our workshop "Immersive Storytelling In Virtual Worlds". For five weeks earlier this year, with moderators and 110 participant English teachers, our EVO session focused on the skills, methods and techniques required for promoting the use of VWs for Immersive Storytelling in the new classroom. The affordances of a 3D user-created virtual environment such as OpenSim can prove indispensable to the language teacher, educator, tutor, course designer or trainer moving their classes online or resorting to hybrid and blended practices, at any stage of the Educational system. The process of recreating popular narratives in Virtual Worlds can effectively accelerate immersive language acquisition by motivating learners to take charge of their own education with an avatar, in a creative, imaginative and memorable way. In addition to the workshop outcomes, Heike Philp presents the rich resources created by 10 universities during three EU funded projects over a period of 6 years exploring the potential of language learning in virtual worlds like Second Life, OpenSim and Minecraft.

The workshop aims to demonstrate the use of Grammarly, automated instant feedback software, in improving EFL students' writing skills, particularly, grammar.

Previous studies showed that students have positive attitudes towards using Grammarly ( see O'Neil & Russell, 2019; Ventayen & Orlanda-Ventayen, 2018).

In terms of teaching grammar, Iranian students were found to improve their usage of passive structures after using this software (Qassemzadeh & Soleimani, 2016).

By using a premium version of Grammarly, we want to demonstrate practitioners how to use the software to help their students eliminate some of the common grammar

issues Japanese learners of English face, such as pronoun reference, wrong word form, and subject-verb-agreement. The recommendations presented here are based on

an ongoing study at a public university in Japan. As with other automated writing evaluation (AWE) tools, knowing the 'whys,' 'hows,' and 'whats' of the feedback helps

learners improve their writing and affects their willingness to engage with the feedback. The key to successful use of the software by students is adequate training on using

Grammarly and understanding its feedback, and instructor supervision.

My dissertation investigated the introduction of the GIGA School Program into public Junior High Schools in Mihara, Japan. The Program is a major Information and Communication Technology (ICT) initiative, providing computers and internet access for all school students and teachers. The primary purpose of the survey was to ascertain the major attitudes, beliefs, and concerns that Junior High School teachers held towards technology and the use of ICT in the classroom. The survey also sought insight into teachers’ views of themselves and feedback on issues they felt would help or hinder their adoption of ICT in the classroom. The study found that while teachers held overall positive views of the upcoming change, a range of first-order (external) and second-order (internal) barriers to adoption were revealed. Recommendations were provided to address these issues and facilitate the successful introduction of the Program, and some recent first impressions of the initial introduction of the technology will be given.

Plagiarism in academic writing is an enduring issue. Approaches to combating it previously took the form of explaining its consequences and creating stricter rules (Brown, 2017). Recently, deeper investigations have been undertaken to discover why students plagiarize (Gunnarsson, Kulesza, & Pettersson, 2010; Chen, & Van Ullen, 2011; Brown, 2017). Although the reasons given are varied, one, in particular, may affect learners in Japan: “unintentional” plagiarism. This refers to plagiarism which occurs because of a lack of understanding of what it is and how to avoid it (Yamada, 2003). Thus, teamed with knowledge about what plagiarism is, the teaching of paraphrasing skills to students has been offered to remedy “unintentional” acts (Yamada, 2003; Keck, 2006; Gunnarsson, Kulesza, & Pettersson, 2010). Paraphrasing, a skill that can be challenging even for L1 students (Yamada, 2003; Keck, 2006), is nonetheless still a vital tool in our students’ repertoire set that allows them to complete academic writing tasks and should be nurtured (Keck, 2006). The purpose of this workshop is to offer a systematic approach to teaching paraphrasing while making use of a digital tool called Padlet. Padlet’s features allow for use while teaching online. It can also be used in face-to-face classes where each member has a device or during group work using one device among group members. A hands-on approach will be taken to allow participants who have never used Padlet to experience its features and at the same time, try out the target techniques meant to develop students’ ability to paraphrase.

Considering the goals of meaning-focused learning activities, the existing vocabulary levels tests and lexical profilers fail to match most Japanese EFL learners with lexically appropriate meaning-focused or fluency development materials (Stoeckel, McLean & Nation, 2020). This presentation shows how through the use of https://vocableveltest.org/ and https://nwlc.pythonanywhere.com/ Japanese EFL learners can be more appropriately matched with lexically appropriate materials. These tools allow teachers to more accurately establish a learner's reading or listening lexical level (knowledge that can be employed when reading or listening) and the lexical load of target materials (and then edit them if necessary). This workshop will first introduce self-marking online vocabulary listening and reading levels tests based on a more appropriate (a) word counting unit (flemma), (b) item-format (meaning-recall), (c) word-band size (500), (d) sampling ratio (40/500), and (e) combined frequency and difficulty vocabulary list that considers loanword status. A parallel profiler based on the same wordlist can profile texts at 250 or 1000-word levels. The increased precision of the levels test and profilers mean that they can match even very low L2 English proficiency learners with lexically appropriate materials. Second, the workshop demonstrates how to interpret the results of levels tests and lexical profilers when making meaning-focused or fluency development materials online. Finally, participants will be encouraged to provide feedback and critique the online tools considering their educational settings.