ESL materials are often improved with the inclusion of high-quality recordings. Unfortunately, producing such recordings can be expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. Moreover, when recordings are included, they have typically been limited to Standard accents, even though non-Standard English is a natural part of ESL listening. Not only does this limit the students’ familiarity with non-Standard accents, but it also promotes accent discrimination.

AI speech models have improved dramatically and now have many expressive and naturalistic features. Moreover, these are available in a wide range of voices and languages with fine grained control over speed. Interestingly they can produce English speech in typical foreign accents. Finally, all of this is generally available to anyone producing language materials.

In this presentation, I introduce a set of these models, demonstrating what they can do and what we can do with them in ways that promote equity, diversity, inclusion and good language learning.

Presentations are essential in the real world, and developing presentation skills is fundamental in ELT. This workshop features two distinct approaches to presentations utilized by two colleagues from the same department, who both teach Communicative English. Despite having the same student numbers and departmental requirements, each presenter may capitalize on individual strengths to maximize pedagogical goals and student learning outcomes. Ultimately, their students have engaged with two highly different presentation formats: 1) individual with traditional presentation structure, and 2) group with the highly structured framework of PechaKucha. During this workshop, each co-presenter will briefly describe how student presentations are integrated into their lessons. Then attendees will break into small groups to discuss their experience with student presentations and consider potential applications of the methods explained. Ideally, attendees will leave the workshop with a clearer understanding of why and how they incorporate student presentations into their curriculum.

Over the past forty years, the use of English corpora in the English-language classroom has increasingly become prevalent. Given the pedagogical importance of corpora, this workshop aims to showcase how the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) can be creatively used in teaching English collocations. In the workshop, participants will first be introduced to the concept of mutual information (MI), an important measure of associational strength of the collocations. Research has shown that non-native speakers of English tend to overuse collocations with low MI scores, while natives favor less frequent collocations with high MI scores. Following this, participants will learn how to interpret the MI scores of the collocations found in COCA. The workshop ends with three hands-on activities showing how teachers can increase students' awareness of collocations with high MI scores. The activities presented in the workshop would be the most beneficial for upper-intermediate students.

Teaching classes online has enormous benefit, though it comes with challenges. One important challenge includes how educators can implement assessment items for students in assorted and remote locations. In the case of final examinations, how can educators do so while maintaining test reliability? Using one well-known learning management system, and using a TOEIC-preparation course as a model, this presentation will outline an approach to effectively administering end-of-term examinations. After having formulated the appropriate assessment items, educators are encouraged to split examinations into meanable but separate parts specifically for online delivery. Educators must make use of question-order randomization and limit access times of their students. Importantly, educators must generate backup duplicates of the examinations in advance, backups that may be executed immediately as needed. As will be demonstrated, whether synchronous or asynchronous, observing such procedures and guidelines will ensure that both teachers and students are satisfied with the online examination experience.