Clark English School

09/06/2025

Finally started blogging. :D

The Phonics Promise—and Its Limits

08/07/2024

🌐 The Effectiveness and Outcomes of Online vs. Face-to-Face Learning Post-COVID 🌐

As an educator, I firmly believe that face-to-face learning is the best way to fully engage students. The immediacy of interaction, the ability to gauge body language, and the ease of fostering a collaborative environment are unmatched in traditional settings. While I do engage in online teaching and recognize its benefits, I believe face-to-face learning provides a more comprehensive educational experience.

Recent studies support my perspective. For example, research indicates that while online learning can be as effective as face-to-face education for theoretical knowledge, the latter excels in practical and interactive components, such as language labs and in-person conversation practice. Immediate feedback and personal interaction play crucial roles in enhancing practical skills and conversational fluency.

Many students miss the social interaction and direct support from teachers that face-to-face learning provides. The sense of community and collaborative learning experiences are harder to replicate online. A survey from Politehnica University of Timisoara revealed that students strongly prefer face-to-face learning due to the ease of communication and the in-person support they receive.

Blended learning, which combines online and face-to-face methods, seems to offer the best of both worlds. It provides the flexibility of online learning while maintaining essential in-person interactions and hands-on practice. Blended learning models have shown promise in maintaining student engagement and improving learning outcomes by leveraging the strengths of both methods.

While online language learning post-COVID has proven effective and flexible, traditional face-to-face learning remains superior in providing interactive and practical learning experiences. Blended learning emerges as a potentially optimal solution, combining the advantages of both approaches.

Read more in these detailed studies:

Springer Study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-021-10570-8
MDPI Study: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/19/12812

The COVID-19 pandemic has left a mark on education as it had been known before. Beyond his, attention needs to be paid to the transition back to face-to-face learning and its implications. Within this context of change, the present research focuses on identifying the students’ preferred aspects of...

21/06/2024

Unlocking the Mysteries of Reading: The Four Processors

Did you know that reading is a complex process involving multiple parts of our brain? The orthographic, phonological, meaning, and context processors each play a crucial role:

Orthographic Processor: This handles the visual recognition of letters and words.
Phonological Processor: This deals with the sounds of letters and words.
Meaning Processor: This helps us understand the meanings of words.
Context Processor: This confirms word meanings based on the context of the sentence.
Together, these processors enable us to decode and comprehend written language efficiently. For a detailed exploration of this fascinating process, check out the paper “Understanding the Reading Process” by Edith Cowan University.

📘 Read the full paper here: Understanding the Reading Process
https://www.ecu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/663696/SA-DECS_-Understanding-the-Reading-Process.pdf

Understanding how we read can greatly enhance teaching methods and improve literacy skills. Share this knowledge and contribute to a more literate world!

02/10/2023

Just over halfway through the Letter Sounds video series on YouTube. Check them out now on our YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/spWsr47Di04

05/10/2022

In our high school / adult classes, the students are constantly deepening their understanding of grammar through mentally engaging activities.

03/10/2022

A lot of my methods have been refined by David Paul's teachings. David is the President of Language Teaching Professionals, and has recently produced a lot of great content to share with EFL teachers. I very much recommend his videos, to give English teachers insights into the wonders of child-centred teaching and learning in the EFL classroom.

Child-centered Learning 1: Some Key PrinciplesThis is the first of three videos on how constructivist psychology can be applied in the classroom to make lear...

01/10/2022

Investigating diphones using the THRASS tool.
😊🤘🏻

30/09/2022

https://twitter.com/CESJapan/status/1575269261848608768?s=20&t=z1Eq_It12eKQV9v_-PPcJg

“Facilitation means to create a wonder in children. Capture the wonder, capture the ability to learn. ”

28/09/2022

https://clarkenglish.com/2022/09/28/hello-world/

Finally getting things moving online. On the agenda for CES: developing the website, creating learning videos (for teachers and students), and developing resources for use in the EFL classroom.

Finally Getting Started! September 28, 2022September 28, 2022 Clark English SchoolClark English School 0 Comments 2:28 am Dear English Students and English Teachers, Well I’m finally getting started on the Clark English website. This has been a dream of mine for some time, and now I am very excite...

26/06/2021

Learning in our Playtime 1 class (3-4 years old).

15/05/2021

Learning to break down a word into its phonemes and graphemes, using the THRASS approach.