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How do you reach language learners who feel they know enough English to get by and are not motivated to take another English course?
First, put them at the centre of their learning. Second, give them field-related reading and listening materials that catch their interest. Third, encourage them to do interesting real-world, communicative tasks and projects. Fourth, give them corrective feedback showing ways to improve their speaking and writing. Finally, use Actively Engaged in Communication, a classroom-tested multimedia online course that helps learners improve the four language skills.
Learner-centered approach: the course challenges learners to do their best. It engages students by having them do a short talk, a short audio-visual presentation to classmates related to their field of study. The course also encourages students to be creative in designing and contributing regularly to their own blog, which serves as a personal archive of all their course work.
Field-related materials: the course focuses on eight field-related subjects which may be part of students’ technical or pre-university program: education, film studies, psychology, sociology, music, anthropology, health and food as well as business. Most students actually relish the opportunity to talk about a specific topic – in a short talk – related to their field of study.
Communicative tasks and projects: Actively Engaged in Communication gives learners the opportunity to express themselves in three stimulating classroom-tested projects. First, the film project is a highly successful activity that puts learners in the shoes of a film reviewer. In a mini-job search project, building on the film project, students write a CV as well as cover letter for a job in the film industry related in some way to their field of study. In the debate project, students prepare a debate leading to summative speaking and writing evaluations.
Opportunities to practice and to receive corrective feedback: The course provides self-correcting online formative quizzes and automated writing assessments. With other helpful resources – a writing workshop for example, extra writing activities, and model essays, students know just what to do.
Contact frank@frankbonkowski.com for details and access.
Actively Engaged in Communication (102B – focusing on field-related materials, project-based learning, automated corrective feedback on writing)

Are you looking for materials to energize your teaching and motivate your students to join you in an exciting journey? Do you want a turn-key solution to online teaching?
Actively Engaged in Critical Thinking brings the real world into the classroom with teacher-created instructional videos, provocative reading and listening materials, and stimulating projects. A multimedia course with an online companion, it includes 20 original videos, running over two hours, and accompanying transcripts. High-intermediate to advanced non-native speakers of English will bring their English language skills to another level.
The course is built around three components: critical thinking, different essay types, and project-based learning. For critical thinking, there are seven videos that explore the timely concept of critical thinking and show its application to students’ lives. Each topic has two or three comprehension and/or production activities - with accompanying suggested answers for teachers.
The course examines eight different types of essay: narrative nonfiction, expository writing, critical literary analysis, comparison-and-contrast writing, business writing, persuasive writing, definition writing, and argumentative writing. Each essay type is defined in an informative text. There is also lively reading or listening material accompanying each essay type.
Actively Engaged in Critical Thinking engages learners in three stimulating, classroom-proven projects: a family story, job search, and debates, Students become engaged in building the course with classmates and the teacher.
Other features include engaging students in a short talk, a brief audio-visual presentation to classmates related to their field of study. Students also create and design their own blog at blogger.com. It is their personal archive of all their coursework which they can share instantly with classmates and the teacher. Both communicative activities are classroom-proven opportunities for speaking and writing.
Contact frank@frankbonkowski.com for details and access.
Actively Engaged in Critical Thinking (103B – focusing on critical thinking, analysis of different essay types, and project work)

Years of experience reveal that upper-intermediate and advanced A-block students enjoy innovative, well-designed, and engaging projects. That’s why Actively Engaged in Academic Writing (AEAW) aims to provide students with a project-based approach that is two steps ahead of anything they have ever seen before. Students are sure to discover new uses for English that will spark their curiosity, harness their creativity, and gamify an irresistible impulse to revise every draft. With a foolproof but flexible 14-lesson sequence, every experienced and novice teacher can start their semester with new levels of confidence.
Flipping the traditional academic classroom with step-by-step online video lectures, the AEAW invites students to actively participate in every lesson by constructing and collaborating on three stimulating projects. First, a film project frees the literary analyst inside students with meaningful research and reflection about a film based on a novel. Second, a songwriting project activates students’ inner poet with the literary toolkit that they have always been aching to use to express themselves. Third, students fuse their research skills and literary moxie to become their family’s very own English language biographer, interviewing a cherished family member and writing a nonfiction narrative.
With a customizable online companion website to stitch these projects into a cohesive whole, AEAW maximizes learning and motivation while simplifying the life of the teacher. The online audio-visual lectures keep even the busiest students from falling behind, and clear textbook explanations and collaborative projects accelerate learning for the rest.
Timely feedback can make a big difference for struggling students, so the AEAW’s self-correcting online formative quizzes and automated writing assessments have been designed to keep students focused on meeting their potential. With the other helpful resources, extra writing activities, and model essays, students know just what to do. AEAW is the ground-breaking textbook and web companion that students and teachers have been waiting for. Ask for your free evaluation copy today.
New Edition available in January 2020.
(ISBN 978-0-9938308-7-7)
CEGEP teachers, send an email to BokomaruPublications at Gmail dot com for your free copy.

Actively Engaged Together is designed for the students with low-proficiency, anxiety, and a limited repertoire of practice strategies. A such, it focuses on basic interpersonal communication skills through storytelling and an automatically scored 8-topic pen pal writing project using the Virtual Writing Tutor grammar checker. Students at this level enjoy exchanging messages each week with peers at the same college or at other schools.
Instead of giving these at-risk students more of what did not work for them in their high school English classes, grammar and vocabulary practice is story-based. Grammar and vocabulary are embedded in short narratives with illustrations, with a variety of oral practice strategy drills in each lesson to make new structures stick. Rather than try to memorize decontextualized rules and verb paradigms, students acquire the language directly as formulaic chunks in obligatory contexts.
Download sample units of Actively Engaged Together
(ISBN 978-0-9938308-6-0)
CEGEP teachers, send an email to BokomaruPublications at Gmail dot com for your free copy.

Currently sold out. Please check to see if this title is available through your college bookstore.
Ideal for college low-intermediate B-block students (604-101B) , Actively Engaged Online was developed to make program-related ESL courses at the college level more relevant to the modern workplace and academic fields by incorporating digital literacy training into reading, writing, listening and speaking tasks.
Different from other textbooks with their separate volumes for grammar and skills, Actively Engaged integrates reading and listening with grammar lessons, card games, information gaps, simulations, and a multi-week hypertext narrative writing project. During the course, language structures are taught and practiced step-by-step for meaningful use in complex speaking and writing tasks. Students have access to a companion website, complete with self-correcting and easy-to-correct online tests and assignments.
Students love the liveliness and cohesiveness of the lessons. Teachers love how manageable their workload becomes with the complete set of online evaluations and integration of the Virtual Writing Tutor to provide instant corrective feedback on writing errors. In short, Actively Engaged Online is a pedagogically sound alternative to the formulaic course books on the market.
ISBN 978-0-9938308-5-3


