Category: updates

Wow! We are approaching the end of the year, and it feels like time flies with each passing year.

Last year, I shared these holiday-related listening activities on my site. Enjoy. You might find some of them useful for your language study or teaching.

• Black Friday
• Christmas is Coming!
• Happy New Year
• Holiday Traditions
• New Year’s Resolutions
• New Year’s Goals
• The Christmas Gift
• The Christmas Season

Here are some newer ones:

• The Uniting Power of Christmas: A Heartwarming Story
• Gift Giving – Interview
• Gift Suggestions – Interview

Also, here is a broadcast I did with several educators from around the world (Tunisia, Ukraine, Brazil, and Mexico) about end-of-year traditions in their countries. You might find something to add to your classroom curriculum.

Fall is in full swing now in Utah, and my wife and I recently enjoyed the beautiful changing colors on a trail run into the mountains. Besides the pleasurable activities, I continue to develop the Interviews section of my website where teachers and students can watch a wide range of videos on daily topics that face us every day.

With each interview, teachers and students will find a wide range of learning activities that build their language skills and their critical-thinking abilities.

Give them a try.

I am also making numerous changes, additions, and revisions to a number of activities on my website. Some of these are fixing minor mistakes; others deal with adding content to support existing lessons.

Finally, I am expanding the number of lessons that have a feature to control the playback speed of the audio recordings. This process will take time, but you can see this feature in action on a number of my activities in the easy section on my website.

As always, thank you for your support during the past 26 years of online learning.

Randall

School is in full swing in many parts of the world, and I want to suggest resources on my website to help in your teaching and/or learning.

1. Watch my video tutorials on how to use my Website more effectively. Often, people tell me, “Oh, I didn’t know that I could do that on your site!”

First-Time Users

2. Download and share my instructional handouts in PDF format that can help inform others about the site’s content. These are very helpful in spreading the word on how to learn English online. Post them to your social media feeds if you like.

ESL Study Handouts

3. Visit the different sections of my site for audio and video listening practice. Some of these areas include:

Culture Interviews – https://www.esl-lab.com/interviews/
Easy Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/easy/
Intermediate Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/intermediate/
Difficult Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/intermediate/
Life Stories using AI technologies – https://www.esl-lab.com/stories/
Academic Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/academic-english/
Culture Videos – https://www.esl-lab.com/english-culture-videos/
Basic Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/basic-english/

4. Try over 300 vocabulary quizzes that recycle the topics and vocabulary from my listening activities.

ESL Vocabulary Quizzes

5. Watch over 50 broadcast episodes with teachers and students worldwide, where we discuss language and culture. Each episode contains learning activities to extend your learning.

Live Broadcasts

6. Enjoy language games that engage learners in fun ways.

Language Games

7. Watch my video lessons on useful English idioms.

English Idioms

8. You can also visit my other online channels for learning content and information:

YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/esllab/
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/esllab/
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/listeninglab/
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/randall-s-davis/

My other Websites:

DailyESL.com – https://www.dailyesl.com
Trainyouraccent.com – https://www.trainyouraccent.com
EZslang.com – https://www.ezslang.com

A lot has happened over the past two months, including presenting at the TESOL 2024 International Convention in Tampa, Florida. It was an interesting conference in which everything seemed to revolve around the use of AI technologies in the language classroom and its application in materials development. A colleague and I gave our own presentation on how to leverage AI in language teaching, and we reported on research that we had done on teachers’ perceptions of AI.

I also continue to create content on this website that includes authentic and unscripted video interviews on a variety of topics. Now, I have organized the interviews by topic to help teachers and learners find content that supports their areas of interest. I have many other videos that I am editing, and I will continue to build these lessons throughout the summer.

I also am preparing for some upcoming presentations during the summer on technology, and I am planning on some family activities that often serve as the springboard to new ideas on my websites.

Wishing you all the best in your teaching and learning.

Randall

Hi everyone,

In addition to a busy month of creating new content, I also experienced a challenging time when my websites (I have 5 main ones and one dealing with mental health) went down for three days and 11 hours. It wasn’t due to the site being hacked or anything like that, but it was the result of an unplanned, unexpected, and immediate need to switch to a new server. Normally, people migrate from one server to another, the transition is almost seamless because there is no downtime at all. This was not the case.

There are too many details to explain the process of website migration and DNS propagation (the process of updating domain name system records across the Internet, which can take a couple of days itself), but I routinely back up my entire websites regularly to restore them in such situations. Perhaps, I will explain this more at some point.

However, for the moment, I will spend the next few weeks dealing with the hiccups of such migrations which often include missing files, quirky server behavior, and system modifications. With this in mind, I invite and strongly encourage you to use my sites as much as you want and then contact me when–not if–you discover something that needs to be fixed. I expect this.

Perhaps, my main website was trying to tell me something; in the past 26 years of existence, I can only remember a few times when the sites were offline for more than a few hours at a time. There have been times when there have been issues that affected performance or the pages have not loaded properly or as quickly as I would hope, but in a way, the site said, “Hey, after 23 years, I deserve a few days break!”

Will such events happen again? Certainly, websites back in the 1990s were so simple without SQL databases, PHP coding, and the multiplicity of elements that go into sites today. However, I’ve learned a lot as well.

Thanks for being a part of this learning community. Your kind comments are what makes this work exciting.

Randall

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Realizing that everyone experiences highs and lows throughout the year, I wish you all the best in your life’s journey in 2024. May you find meaning in every challenge that you encounter along the way. Relish in your success and seek out others who need physical and emotional support to achieve their own.

I am in the 26^th year of developing my main Website, Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab (https://www.esl-lab.com), and I never imagined that I would still be developing it in new directions.

Here are some of my plans in 2024:

1. Engaging Video Interviews- https://www.esl-lab.com/interviews/

Continue creating lessons involving critical thinking and discussion by interviewing native speakers in natural, spontaneous conversations. Such lessons for intermediate to advanced learners include pre-listening learning tasks, key vocabulary, a video, comprehension questions, and post-listening discussion topics.

2. Innovative Content Development with AI Technologies – https://www.esl-lab.com/stories/

Develop and expand upon my Life Stories section of the Website that makes use of different AI technologies, including an advanced AI voice generator, to create new accents and voices for my listening content. Using such technologies can expand on language-learning content that focuses on critical thinking, a needed skill in today’s world.

3. Facebook Live Broadcasts – https://www.esl-lab.com/broadcasts/

Record new live broadcasts with educators and students from around the world on topics ranging from language learning to tips on understanding other cultures. Contact me if you are interested in participating in such an event.

Here are other resources on my Website that you might find useful:

1. Watch my video tutorials on how to use my Website more effectively. Often, people tell me, “Oh, I didn’t know that I could do that on your site!”

• https://www.esl-lab.com/first-time-users/

2. Download and share my instructional handouts in PDF format that can help inform others about the site’s content. These are very helpful in spreading the word on how to learn English online. Post them to your social media feeds if you like.

• https://www.esl-lab.com/esl-study-handouts/

3. Visit the different sections of my site for audio and video listening practice. Some of these areas include:

• Culture Interviews (Randall’s NEWEST section)  – https://www.esl-lab.com/interviews/
• Easy Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/easy/
• Intermediate Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/intermediate/
• Difficult Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/intermediate/
• Academic Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/academic-english/
• Culture Videos – https://www.esl-lab.com/english-culture-videos/
• Basic Listening – https://www.esl-lab.com/basic-english/

4. Try over 300 vocabulary quizzes that recycle the topics and vocabulary from my listening activities.

• https://www.esl-lab.com/esl-vocabulary-quizzes/

5. Watch over 50 broadcast episodes with teachers and students worldwide, where we discuss language and culture. Each episode contains learning activities to extend your learning.

• https://www.esl-lab.com/broadcasts/

6. Enjoy language games that engage learners in fun ways.

• https://www.esl-lab.com/games/

7. Watch my video lessons on useful English idioms.

• https://www.esl-lab.com/idioms/

8. You can also visit my other online channels for learning content and information:

• YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/esllab/
• Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/esllab/
• Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/listeninglab/
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/randall-s-davis/

My other Websites:

• DailyESL.com – https://www.dailyesl.com
• Trainyouraccent.com – https://www.trainyouraccent.com
• EZslang.com – https://www.ezslang.com

With Christmas approaching, I want to point out all the holiday-related listening activities on my site. I realize that there are many other wonderful end-of-year holidays as well. Enjoy. You might find some of them useful for your language study or teaching.

• Black Friday
• Christmas is Coming!
• Happy New Year
• Holiday Traditions
• New Year’s Resolutions
• New Year’s Goals
• The Christmas Gift
• The Christmas Season

Also, here is a broadcast I did with several educators from around the world (Tunisia, Ukraine, Brazil, and Mexico) about end-of-year traditions in their countries. You might find something that piques your interest or ideas to add to your classroom curriculum.

In addition to several ongoing projects with my interviews with my adult children and life stories using different AI technologies, I participated in a broadcast on the transformative power of AI technologies in language teaching and learning. Take a look: