How to Teach IELTS: Webinar
James Heywood (head of content) from Off2Class recently delivered a webinar on how to teach...
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Now when you press ‘Assign Test’ on our Placement Test page, you’ll have the option of adding (all or individually) Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking components to the assessment. As previously, your students start with our 100-question grammar diagnostic. We then use your student’s results to drive the level of difficulty for the other components you’ve selected.
Here’s a brief overview of what your students find in the new sections of the Off2Class ESL Placement test:Listening Section: 12 multiple choice questions based on a short audio recording (20-minute time limit, no pausing). Provides the teacher a result that supports the candidate’s CEFR proficiency level, or alerts you to a discrepancy with it.
Reading Section: Between 9 and 12 multiple choice questions based on a written text (20-minute time limit, no pausing). Provides the teacher a result that supports the candidate’s CEFR proficiency level, or alerts you to a discrepancy with it.
Writing Section: 1 question to which the candidate provides a written response (15-minute time limit, no pausing). Provides the teacher with an example of the candidate’s writing that may assist you to determine the proficiency level.
Speaking Section: 1 question to which the candidate records a spoken response (5-minute time limit, no pausing). Provides the teacher with an example of the candidate’s speaking that may assist you to determine the proficiency level.
One of the most popular features of Placement Test V1.0 is that our system proposes Individualized Curriculums based on your student results. We’ve taken the existing Learning Plan system and given you the ability to customize the plans:
When you click on a Student Learning Plan tab in your student management panel you now see a ‘Customize Learning Plan’ link:
If your students sit our full placement test, we’ll even recommend lessons to add to their Learning Plans!
This way you’ll be able to blend our technical (grammar-based) recommendations with our non-technical (topic-based) recommendations, to create learning plans that are a perfect fit for your students.
And of course, you can re-edit and adapt the learning plans as you work through them with your students!
Pro account holders on Off2Class can now print Student Achievement Certificates based on their students’ placement test results! You can learn more about all the benefits of Pro here.
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29 Comments
Exciting! Can’t wait to try!
Hi Theresa, can’t wait to hear what you think!
Excellent
we use at the beginning & end of 10 week blocks
can’t wait till try new additions at the end of next week
will hopefully be a great guidance indicator improvement
thanks & well done
Fantastic Lou! Please do report back on what we help you uncover about your latest intake!
Kind Regards,
Kris
Great work. I feel this test will be a wonderful for students who want IELTS training. The components will help give the teacher a better understanding of the level the student is at and what areas we need to do extra work on.
Absolutely Sharon!
this is just too good to be true! Thank you guys! Looking forward to the webinar.
I am very excited to use that. Thank you guys!!!
Cheers Natalia, we hope you enjoy and would love for you to report back your thoughts!
Waiting to start a new semester with first year students . This will be really useful i feel to assess the level of individual students at the starting stage itself.
Thank you! Very useful. Now I don’t have to work from an external spreadsheet to organise my student’s study plan like I’ve done so far.
Cheers Simone, yes and the idea is that the Learning Plans are fluid (just like teaching is) you can adjust them and re-edit them as you’re working with your students and discovering new things about their own goals and challenges.
I have used this program to supplement my work with intermediate students. So I can’t wait to see what the 2.0 is going to show. Has it been made available for use yet?
Hi Pamela, yes the test is live for all now. We’ll be hosting our webinar information sessions and announcing them here in the coming weeks!
Kind Regards,
Kris
We’re looking forward to sending this test to our new students! 😀
Great guys! I think the learning plan editor will be a great fit with IGK’s approach!
Looks like a great step forward for assessment and student plan management. Once you have assigned one section of the test to a student (grammar) and they complete it, can you assign one or all of the other parts later? I have had problems with students who come back to me a semester later and want to do the test. They never did the original one that I sent them months ago and have lost the email with the link. I can’t figure out a way to give them the assessment again other than to change their email address and start fresh. This would not be a good thing with students where you want to test all four skills eventually. For the casual nature of what I do with some students, the testing procedure gets to be too long. Once they have more buy-in I feel I could come back later and do more testing.
Hi Catherine,
Thanks for the encouraging words!
When you’re assigning the test, you can select whichever sections you’d like to assign but all tests must include the grammar portion.
If your students come back to you months later without having taken the initial assignment you can just re-assign the test. We’ll wipe out the initial assignment (which they didn’t complete anyways) and we’ll post them the new assignment.
You can also re-assign the test to the same student as a progress check as we pull the questions from a very large database.
Kind Regards,
Kris
Can you tell me if this is suitable for Business English classes? Is it based on the CEFR?
Hi Janet,
Thanks for stopping by!
The Placement Test is a general English test based on the CEFR. The test is not aimed at a particular subset of English learners and does not use language specific to Business English. Rather, we have created the test as a starting point for teachers with new and prospective students.
We have a Category of Business English lessons on the site.
Best wishes,
James
Where was this when I had students? Right now, I don’t have any students to teach and this would have been an excellent tool to use. Hopefully, I will find some students to teach trial lessons to so I can use it.
Hi Nicole,
Well, the new Placement Test will be here for you when you do get your next students!
Thanks for dropping by,
James
Wow, Congrats!!! you guys are really moving forward, these new tools are wonderful!!! I’m proud of you guys.
Thanks Juan! We’d love to welcome you back to the new and improved Off2Class Placement Test and Learning Plan system!
Kris
I’ve just assigned the new Placement Test with all of its sections to a new student! Can’t wait to have the result back! I’m slightly worried as my student seems to be on the pre-intermediate level and do not want to scare her 🙂
It seems to be an amazing tool for starting with new students. Thanks for all your hard work!
Cheers Eva,
We’re looking forward to hearing how it goes!
Kind Regards,
Kris
I don’t know if anyone has suggested this before but since the lesson library is divided into levels (from beginner to advanced), I think it would be good to have a level test to assess how well students have learned the studied contents. I have students who started as real beginners and perhaps taking a test at the end of each level would be more motivating for them. This could go along with Student Achievement Certificates for each level too. What do you think?
Hi Laura,
That’s a fantastic idea. We’ve got a similar idea in the works that will hopefully be launched in the 4th quarter of this year. I definitely agree that re-sitting the placement test, although useful as gauge, is not ideal for boosting motivation so a level test (or something similar) is a great idea!
Kris
That’ll be great, Kris. I’ll be looking forward to that. Thanks.
Laura