New Blog at

http://tinyurl.com/d48ge4

However this “old blog” has

good archives about Real English and

the Deaf, the Webheads (1) and (2),

Real English Victiom of Extreme Plaigiarism

and other items of interest to

ESL EFL students & teachers,

especially Real English users

Also, please note the NEW Real English blog is at

http://the-original-real-english.blogspot.com/

Please go to http://the-original-real-english.blogspot.com/

Concerning the most important threads from Jan 2005 – Jan 2009, please see below!

I was intrigued, so I looked deeper: only  4% of the visitors are doing the Real English Lessons, while 27% of visitors come to this old wordpress blog, which I don’t even update regularly!

This is crazy. The best thing about the RE site is that students can actually learn English with a minimum of motivation. I spend almost all my time improving the lessons, and improving the videos for the lessons, to capture students’ interest, increase their motivation (I hope), encouraging them to get to work. But most students only look at the index type pages with videos, apparently, and go no further.

Excuse the tired adjective, but it really is fun to learn English on the RE site.

Here is a 3-step procedure I recommend, and it’s really simple:

1 – When you arrive at the Real English site, click on the “New Lessons” link.  There’s a really big one in the upper right corner.

2 – From this “New Lessons” page, choose ANY lesson you like.

3 – You arrive at a Lesson index page, for example lesson 29 home. Click on  “Exercise 1″ or the picture under “Exercise 1″, or even the Real English logo on the left. Any of these links will bring you to Exercise 1 where the fun begins.

English Star® and Real English® - Collaboration at its best - Subtitles in English, Chinese, French, Korean, and Japanese!

Read in English.

Grâce à notre collaboration avec English Star (sites en anglais et en japonais), Real English utilise un nouveau lecteur video qui permet d’afficher de multiples langues en sous-titres. Le stagiaire/étudiant(e) choisit sa langue… 

French Bubbles = Bulles Françaises – Qu’est-ce que c’est que les French Bubbles? Regardez la photo. Dans cette image d’un clip débutant (extraite de la leçon 2) nous voyons une exemple d’une annotation, affichées ou non selon les choix de l’utilisateur.

Cliquer sur pause lors du passage des sous-tires et les bulles. Sinon, vous n’aurez pas assez de temps pour les lire. Les personnes que vous rencontrez semblent parler vite, mais dans la réalité ils parlent à une vitesse normale.

Ecouter/regarder/lire grâce au nouveau lecteur video, et parler/comparer/lire/écrire dans les phases actives des leçons Real English, font une combinaison précieuse. 

Regardons  3 photos, et ensuite nous allons manipuler une version réélle, fonctionnelle.

PHOTO: Exemple d'une French Bubble et soustitres en français. Voici ce que vous allez voir sur la côté gauche de l'écran. A vous de choisir! Le vrai lecteur est en bas de cette page.

Voici ce que vous allez voir sur la côté gauche de l’écran. A vous de choisir!

PHOTO, choix des French Bubbles

Les sous-titres sont disponibles en anglais, français, chinois, coréen et  japonais. 

The Choice of Subtitles

Dans la réalité, si votre objectif est de PARLER, il vaut beaucoup mieux NE PAS regarder des sous-titres, mêmes pas les sous-titres en anglais, pendant la PREMIERE PHASE de l’apprentissage. “Ecouter la musique” même si vous ne comprenez rien du tout! Ecoutez une dizaine de fois avant de passer aux nombreux exercices dans les leçons Real English, et avant d’utiliser le lecteur AVEC les sous-titres, et les French Bubbles (sans oublier les sous-titrtes en langue anglaise)!

Voici un clip Real English avec le lecteur d’English Star. Ceci n’est pas une photo. Vous pouvez l’essayer:

Les leçons déjà comprenant les French Bubbles et les sous-titres en anglais, français, chinois, coréen et  japonais:
  2 – 3 – 6 – 8a – 8b – 8c – 8d – 11 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 23 – 24
 

This is my favorite Real English exercise for beginners so far this year:

http://www.real-english.com/reo/8-d/8d-9.htm

simply because it REVIEWS 3 structures already covered quite well in RE  lessons 3, 4, and 6, and,

while introducing nothing new for beginners, it  makes the “learned material” a challenge of considerable proportions.

The New Open Source Recorder

The Real English lessons now include a Record function. I have found very useful places for it so far in every exercise in lessons 1 to 7, and right after I finish writing this post, I will continue this job, beginning with lesson 8 and will continue until all the many hundreds of Real English exercises include this function.

Students now will speak. “Say it!” they are reminded, every step of the way. They listen to the teacher speaking in the exercise, or the interviewer and the person answering the questions in the video, and are again reminded Say it!

They record themselves. They listen to themselves, and then they listen to the model (the “teacher audio” or the video), and then once again record themselves, in a pleasant cycle of acquisition, without forgetting to type, or click, or drag in the exercise where they are working!

Thanks to generous Open Source folk who make tools like this, we can all offer our students more and more. Check out any lesson between 1 and 7 to see it in action. Requires Java. Here’s an example of its use on the Real English site. Support is here.

I am a member of EVO (Electronic Village Online) sponsored by the CALL Interest Section of the 40-year-old, 14,000 member TESOL organization. Every January/February there are free workshops which each last 6 weeks. It is not necessary to be a member of TESOL to participate. The sessions are all powered by volunteers, mostly Webheads, and include experts in many fields related to EFL / ESL. Last year, I helped moderate the Video workshop, and this year I am one of 318 members of a new group called Images4Education (Also a must-see  http://images4education.ning.com/ )

Be sure to see the summaries of all the workshops at http://evosessions.pbwiki.com/Call_for_Participation09 

This is clearly the best year for EVO workshops, with so many competent experts and facilitators taking the time necessary to do great work.

This video is my first contribution to the session I joined. One of the tasks for the first week in Images4Education is to introduce yourself and to add a few words about your general use of images for education. One member of the team of moderators had the idea of asking all participants to post a picture of the view from their window. The results show that this was a brilliant task for all of us, a pleasure for all concerned, as we see at
http://images4education.pbwiki.com/Week1#Task1SessionExpectations
and so many other URLs!

 This video is my way of completing this task. I could have used photos and text instead, but I had this idea…

Attacked, but recovered.

After 60 hours of hell, recovering from an asp specific attack to the server, Real English is back online. I have fixed the most important links, so students can get back to work.

I will spend the next few days reconstructiong a lot of other, less essential pages which have been destroyed.

In the meantime please look at my last post: The Christmas Contest for Teachers