Using Encore!!! To Teach Language Using Real World Scenarios: Tips For Teachers

When considering how to teach a language to students, making it relatable to the world outside of the classroom is an incredibly effective way to help the lessons stick. The Encore!!! app lets you put real world scenarios right into your lessons. We are going to look at how this combination of two of the best tools for teaching foreign language can be best used to achieve a positive outcome for students.

How To Teach Someone A Language With Real World Scenarios

When teaching a language, you need to be able to make the lessons relatable to the students. The more the student can relate the language lessons to their own lives, the more they are able to retain and recall the vocabulary words. Different students will have different goals, and the most effective teaching strategies will be the ones that resonate with student goals. When possible, the best way to approach this is a combination of general real world scenarios and ones that are focused towards specific student needs or interests. Here are a few ways to integrate this teaching strategy.

Current Events

The world around us provides plenty of opportunities for conversation. The news is one of the most underappreciated resources for language teachers available. Teachers can have students engage in discussions of current events, translate a news story, or many other activities centered on related events and the language being learned. Mining these articles for vocabulary words allows the lesson to keep going and can introduce whole new words and ideas.

Simulating Real Interactions

One of the reasons why most students choose to learn a language is to ensure they have the ability to communicate with native speakers in the real world. A teaching strategy that has students participating in simulations of real world interactions is a great way to keep hold of students’ interest. This could include interactions such as ordering at a restaurant, asking for directions, or visiting a doctor. 

For some students who want to learn a language for specific reasons such as a job, you can bring those scenarios to the class too. Medical students who need to know how to communicate with other staff and patients, office workers who need to know how to handle job related interactions, and many others who might have specific learning goals.

Problem Solving

Anyone who has participated in problem solving activities knows that they are great ways to get students communicating and sharing ideas. Problem solving groups are also a great answer to how to teach foreign language to students and get them thinking creatively in the language. 

Put the class in groups and give each one a real world problem to solve while using the language they are learning as much as possible. Give the students a series of vocabulary words related to the subject that relate to the problem solving exercise too. Then, have the students present their solution to the class while speaking only in the language being learned. If you want to add even more complexity, allow the class to ask questions after each presentation.

Get Out In The Real World

Field trips are not possible for every language and every class, but the best way to teach language is immersion. When possible, these excursions into real world practice can be excellent for letting students practice their skills. Depending on where your class is located, you might not even need an expensive trip to another country. Many cities have communities where immigrants from various communities have made a home. These areas can make for fantastic opportunities to take students on a local trip that will let them communicate with native speakers.

Combining Encore!!! And Real World Interactions For Teaching A Language

Encore!!! is one of the best resources for language teachers available due to its flexibility. Of all the modern language resources for teachers available on the internet, Encore!!! gives teachers the most ways to create their own lessons for their classrooms and even individual students. Encore!!! is also useful for both teachers who teach in a classroom as well as ones who teach language online. Let’s look at the ways teachers can combine Encore!!! with real world interactions for classroom success.

Real World Simulations And Encore!!!

Encore!!! is a great app for teaching a language with simulations of real world interactions. Before the simulations, you can create a lesson using the My Entries tool that will feature the vocabulary words and select phrases to be used in the simulations and share them with the class. After the simulations teachers can also create lessons that will focus on what students struggled with during the simulations.

Teachers who want to integrate more technologies into their lesson planning can combine those with Encore!! too. For example, you can use AI technologies in language learning by using an AI chatbot to help you make scripts for the interactions as well as extract vocabulary words and key phrases from the scripts it creates.

Encore!!! And Current Events

If you are wondering how to teach a language with current events, Encore!!! is the tool you need. Much like with real world simulations, you can use the My Entries feature to create lessons that center around the current events of the day. Students also have the ability to add to their lessons with the feature, and when they find words or phrases in their discussion that they will find useful they can add those into playlists for study.

Problem Solving Exercises With Encore!!!

Problem solving is a perfect real world interaction type to use with Encore, due to the nature of the exercise. As a teacher, you know which problem solving assignments you will be giving to the students and can create the appropriate vocabulary and phrase lists to share with them. You can also encourage students to create their own lists with MyEntry or My Playlists based on both the exercise and the presentations the other students make.

The problem solving presentations also make for a great opportunity to test your students on what they learned during the exercise, and Encore!!! is a great testing tool for language teachers that will let you create tests that cover the presentations, as well as directly testing students on the words and phrases featured in their specific assignment.

Going On A Field Trip With Encore!!!

Encore!!! is a great app for getting out into the real world to do some learning. It is especially a great form of high-intesnity interval training for language learning where you can get a very intense session in one trip. Even teachers who teach languages online can assign these field trips and then communicate with the students about how it went and what words and phrases the students need to focus on.

Conclusion

If you are a teacher who teaches in person or if you teach online, it is important to get your student’s some real world interactions. Real world interactions get them out of the mode of just studying words, and instead they get to put the lessons into use in real ways. Simulations, problem solving exercises, current event discussions, and field trips are all great ways to give students real world experiences, but teachers can also use their creativity to find more methods as well.

Encore!!! is there to enhance any lesson plan for language teachers. If you teach in person or if you teach language online, you can use the My Entry or My Playlist features to create lessons for any student or situation. Encore!!! also lets teachers create custom tests and give them to students. These make Encore!!! an essential tool for every language class.

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