BBC Learning English - let your students be autonomous learners

 To be a successful learner, apart from depending on in-class activities, it is also important that learners is autonomous. "Genuinely successful learners have always been autonomous." To let your learners become autonomous, you can use attractive materials, for example, materials with interesting topics, interactive media in order to arouse their interest on the topic, develop a positive attitude towards learning and thus, they will choose the materials that fit their learning patterns.

Recently, I have taken a look on this interesting website - BBC Learning English. I found that the materials inside can achieve the above purpose. That's why I want to introduce to all of you.

Home Page

In this website, the materials are authentic because they're produced by BBC - which is a national media in the UK, thus you don't need to question the accuracy and the quality of the materials.

Vocabulary

Specific topic - British Chat

On the top of the website, you can see the website is divided into different categories, for example, Grammar, Vocabulary etc. with different levels. It can encourage students to choose suitable exercises according to the area that they want to improve, or their own English levels. If they have specific interest in certain aspect of English, e.g. English in News, British Chat, there are related topics they can choose as well.

YouTube

Podcasts

iOS app

BBC Learning English also provides a wide range of interactive resources for learners, for example, mobile apps, Podcasts, social media etc. Students may have different learning styles - some students may be more effective if they learn through audio materials, while some of them may have better learning performance through watching videos. This tool allows them to choose the resource that best fit their own learning preferences.

The Teachers' Room

Apart from students, this website is also suitable for teachers. "The Teachers' Room" provides a lot of teaching tips and techniques based on different situations that you will meet in your language classes, for example, the techniques on giving instructions, the essential things that you need to do when teaching a new class etc. When you have perplexity on improving your class, I'm sure you will benefit from reading this session - at least for me as a novice teacher, I got some tips from here and it works in my class!😉

Overall, I think this is a good tool as it provides a broad range of resources for language learning. It is suitable for majority of students as the materials covers students with diverse English proficiency. However, if you want to use this tool in your teaching, you may need to do the following preparations beforehand:

1) You need to let your students know which level of English they're in.  (You can advise students to use the "Test Your Level" function in the website.)

2) You may only focus on one topic in a board category each time, since there are loads of sub-topics in each category.

3) You need to bear in mind that some topics are only suitable for specific levels of students (e.g. "Drama" is only suitable for Intermediate level students or above.)

4) You may need to spare some time on designing tasks to students - some topics do not contains exercises.

Hope you will find this tool useful for your teaching.😊