Learning English essay writing as an EFL student can be challenging especially if the conventions of essay writing in the student’s native language, such as Japanese are different. EssayJack’s smart writing templates provide structure and delineate the conventions for English academic essay writing with options for educators to customise the templates to provide varying levels of writing guidance and instructions including choice of transition sentences, tips, interrogative prompts, video, and audio files according to student writing proficiency. Studies of students who have used the platform show that it increased writing confidence and reduced writing anxiety as it demystifies how to organise and what to write for an essay in English.

In this practical session, John will revisit the differences and challenges of assessment and evaluation in the remote teaching context. Through examples from modern coursebooks, participants will explore a variety of practical methods for approaching assessment and evaluation of the four skills at different points in the learning process. This session will focus on young adults but many of the ideas will be relevant for younger age groups.

As language teachers, we face many frustrations and complications in delivering our lessons. These frustrations have only multiplied in the post-pandemic world.

Technology can help, but often presents its own problems. Unintuitive or overly complex interfaces. Lack of functionality. Lack of features specifically designed for language teachers.

TeacherTools.Digital, on the other hand, has been designed by language teachers for language teachers. Each teacher gets their own account, with their own classes, student lists, and activities.

TeacherTools.Digital offers 8 innovative activity types that cover all four skills of speaking, writing, listening, and reading, and empowers teachers to deliver both new and existing content in a variety of contexts, including online, blended, hybrid and even face to face.

In this presentation, the designer and developer of TeacherTools will demonstrate and explain how the platform helps teachers to create engaging and effective language learning activities quickly and easily.

Join Paul Raine, a 15 year veteran in Japanese university classrooms, to find out how TeacherTools can both reduce teacher stress and improve student engagement in a variety of language teaching and learning contexts.

Providing low to intermediate language learners opportunities to practice speaking is challenging. Traditional choral listen-and-repeat class activities have been replaced with shadowing practice or recording apps, but the problem is still one of providing sufficient individual corrective feedback, accurate speech models and student engagement. The English Bento app solves these issues by implementing the principles of micro-learning, feedback, gamification and fluency training into its design. The student app provides these features while the dashboard allows teachers to track students’ progress using three metrics: progress, score, and time-on-task. The presentation will be split into 2 parts, the first will briefly demonstrate each activity and the educational principles that drive them. The second half will be a description of the instructor dashboard which allows teachers to create classes, set assignments and track students’ progress using three metrics. The interplay of progress, score, and time-on-task allow teachers to make nuanced interpretations of students' learning progress. The presentation ends with a brief description of how English Bento can be used inside and outside of the classroom in remote and face-to-face environments. English Bento is available free to students for both Android and iOS devices. See their website at englishbento.com for more information.

Connecting with the theme of the last year of emergency remote teaching, presenters explore the development of language learning communities during online classes. In the spring of 2020, we were all suddenly faced with the obstacle of bringing our institutions of learning to a fully online environment. This undoubtedly challenged the way we interacted, worked, and learned. How did learners and teachers first respond to the emergency? What problems and questions were encountered? How did learning evolve into a “new normal”? What aspects of this new normal will affect the ways the community will return to classroom learning? In this Learner Development SIG Forum at JALTCALL 2021, we will hear both teacher and student narratives into the social constructs that developed with online learning. Digital presentations will explore the evolution of communities in synchronous online learning platforms. In addition, the attitudes of learners and teachers to both their devices, learning management systems, and even particular game-based learning applications will be discussed. Presenters and participants will have time to share both the rewards and barriers that they encountered in this period of online teaching. We will also explore how these experiences could challenge future directions to learning and learner development.

For detailed abstracts for the individual presenters, please visit the Learner Development SIG Forums page at https://ld-sig.org/ld-sig-forums/.

A FREE Team Challenge Vocabulary Study Tournament will start on June 14th and end on July 25th. Winning teams will receive virtual trophies and merchandise awards. Thousands of students in hundreds of classrooms from seven countries have participated in our prior Team Challenge tournaments. Participating students will learn from 1,500 to 5,500 new high-frequency words over the six-week tournament period. Best of all, because high-frequency words occur so often in both authentic and inauthentic English (eg graded readers) your students' newly learned words are highly likely to be repeated, reinforced, and internalized through multiple near-future encounters in your classroom and beyond. All participating students will be provided with 8 weeks of free access to the WordEngine online mobile vocabulary study application. All participating teachers will receive free progress reports and tournament updates for their teams. This presentation will answer your questions about the next FREE Team Challenge Tournament and take reservations from those who wish to participate.

Using Poodll Languages autograded activities for efficient learning Poodll Languages is a set of four formative assessment applications for language learners. The applications are ReadAloud (oral reading), Wordcards (vocabulary acquisition), MiniLesson (listening and speaking) and Solo (open speech assessment). Each activity can be graded automatically, freeing up teacher time and giving students immediate feedback and the opportunity to re-attempt at will.

In the presentation the Poodll founder and lead developer will introduce and demonstrate each activity. Poodll Languages is developed for use on the Moodle LMS but can also be used with Blackboard, Canvas and other LTI compatible LMSs.