My best (not free but worth every penny) apps and sites to support EPI

I have written a few posts on the apps and digital tools that I extensively use to deliver my lessons and support Sentence Buillders and the EPI methodology, led by Gianfranco Conti. However, so far the vast majority of these apps were free ones such as Flippity, Wheel of names, Genially, LearningApps, DeckToys, Loom or Canva. 

Today, I would like to talk about the sites and apps, which are not free, but that are essential in my MARS EARS approach to teaching Spanish and are worth every penny! Of course, budgets vary massively from school to school, but hopefully this list will help you decide which ones you could try and start using within your budgets.

Modelling and Awareness-raising

Sentencebuilders.com

This is the first stage of the learning process via a lexicogrammar approach to learning languages. Although most of the process will involve the teacher providing live models for students via a Sentence Builder, which can just be displayed into an Interactive Board, using various repetition techniques and activities such as Syllabing, Spotting the missing word, Dictation, Delayed Dictation or Sentence Puzzle, to mention but a few, the site Sentence Builders, can really add an element of fun for whole class activities at this stage.  

This site is super affordable and it is evolving by the day!  It operates around the concept of Sentence Builders. You can use pre-populated Sentence Builders, under Premium Resources, in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Welsh! or, and this is what makes the site so special, you can create, using the site itself, your own Sentence Builders, which you can share with your school or the whole community! Once created a Sentence Builder will look like this, and will generate endless online activities:

It is great for this Stage as you can display it on the board, do repetition as needed, as you would normally do with a PPT or Smartboard slide, but most importantly, after repetition, if you click on the little beret cap icon at the bottom (teacher tools) you will have many choices to display your Sentence Builder: with just initials, with just consonants, with the English translation, without, with the word shape etc.. and now the fun starts!!

After a few repetition rounds with all the words displayed in both languages, I tend to show the Spanish version, firstly, without vowels, then 50/50, finally just initials. I involve the whole class but doing choral repetition to start with and moving to cold calling after a few rounds, working in teams to get points! As this is the modelling stage, students just say the Spanish, but with the added difficulty of having to remember some of the missing letters. I love it, as it avoids me to create a PPT with different slides and it makes the lesson super engaging!  For information on how to use the teacher tools in the Sentence Builders site, have a look at this blogpost.

If you click on Random Spanish prompt, in the yellow box, the site will create random Spanish sentences, based on your Sentence Builder, which you and your students can read, incorporating Phonics into your lesson in context, and translate into English to help memorising.

At this point, I will point out grammatical structures, without explicitly explaining them: Raising Awareness, and will elicit grammatical rules already studied: For example for this Sentence Builder, about holidays in the past, I would ask students to transform the Spanish sentence at the bottom, to the present and would practise the verb IR in the Present tense, followed by "de": voy de vacaciones/ voy de compras/ voy de paseo or just the verb SER. The site will also allow you to print out your Sentence Builders or any Premium, pre-populated ones, which is great to make your own Sentence Builders Booklets! 

Receptive Processing 

This stage is very much linked to the previous one, as it involves to create high-intensity processing practice via listening and reading tasks, (controlled input). At this stage, the Sentence Builders website is great too, as it will create, automatically (once your Sentence Builder is created), a wide range of classic EPI activities such as Dictation, Delayed Dictation, Read and translation, Listening to Translation, Delayed Copying etc.

The site allows you to create your own classes, very easily, and will provide login details for your students. At this stage, I assign a pre-defined path of activities, based on receptive input, which students may carry out during the lesson, as all my students bring their own device to lessons, or as Homework Tasks. 

Structured Production

Sentencebuilders.com and Textivate

At this stage, where students will be required to produce their own sentences via careful planned scaffolded practice, based on the studied Sentence Builder, I use, the Sentence Builders site again. Now, I pre-select activities within the Translate to Spanish option, which will give a lot of  scaffolded opportunities for pushed output: from Word gap (click) to Type all (no clues). Students get points and immediate feedback and you can check progress from your classes section. 

Textivate, another super affordable site by the same creator as Sentence Builders, Martin Lapworth, is another great site for Structured Production activities. The concept is very similar to Sentences Builders, but activities are generated from a text you previously add to the site, rather than a Sentence Builder.

EARS (Expansion, Autonomy, Routanization, Spontaneity)

The Language Gym, Languagenut and This is Language

This is the latest stage of the process and the most difficult to reach! At this stage, the structures have been extensively learned by the students and are practised, interleaving past structures from old Sentence Builders and requiring students to start manipulating the language to create their own output. Scaffolding will still be needed, though! Activities such as creating presentations, freer translations, open questions with limited time constrictions, work well at this stage. Other classics include: speed dating, the spider game, group talk or speak bingo. 

At some point in this stage I will cover grammar via an inductive process, see this blogpost here and will use another of my favourite sites, The Language Gym. The Language Gym allows you to practise the language, via a wide range of pre-populated activities. The site is the digital version of the popular The Language Gym books, authored by Gianfranco Conti, Dylan Viñales and the Language Gym team! So if you use the books in your lessons, this site is a must, and again super affordable! Similarly, using the pre-populated activities in the site, although they don’t coincide entirely with my sentence builders, is priceless to start learning new vocabulary on a given topic, as I explain below.

At this stage, my favourite activity is the Verb Trainer. The verb trainer, does what it says in the tin! It will help students memorise conjugation of verbs. In the Language Gym you can, very easily, create classes and assign assessments from any of the 8 types of exercises above. I love the Verb Trainer because, it helps students drill verb endings in a fun way, especially if you carry the activity live, where all students compete against each other and provide some prizes, like my scratch Bitmoji cards!  It is a winner every single time and students will start using the Verb Trainer independently to revise different tenses, before oral and writing tests. You can practise up to 9 verb tenses, making it ideal from KS3 to KS5!!! My Alevel students use it too!

At this point, together with lots of productive tasks, I also carry out many listening and reading activities moving away from our Sentence Builder.  This process is important, as I want to train my students to learn more vocabulary than just that practised in our Sentence Builders, in preparation for their GCSE exam. I wrote a post on vocabulary learning and how I distinguish between Productive and Receptive vocabulary. Click here to read that post.  To learn Receptive vocabulary, which ideally I would expect to become productive as the students become better linguists and independent in their learning process, I use The language gym activities but also the following sites:

Languagenut and This is Language.  Both of these sites will require the creation of classes, which is very easy to do, and log in details and both of them will be based on pre-populated activities.

This is Language is a site designed to practise listening skills from authentic videos, recorded with native speakers, based on typical GCSE questions and topics for French, German and Spanish. I love it because it allows me and my students to practise exam-style listening content, in a very engaging way, far away from the boring, constricted exam listening tasks and audio files.  The site also allows students to practice grammar and vocabulary aimed at AQA and Edexcel, which makes it a great independent practice tool at KS4!

Recently, the site has also added a Speaking type of activity, which looks great! You can choose a topic, a type of question within that topic and before students record themselves with a suitable answer, they are encouraged to watch some videos with model answers and activities to inspire and enhance their pre-learned oral questions. I love this task, as it practises listening for oral productivity, a key aspect of the EPI approach. As part of the learning process, while carrying out the activities, students are encouraged to add any learned new vocabulary into their Random Quizlet and learn it as part of strategic homework tasks. 

My students really like This is Language and the videos! They are designed, as all the activities in the site, for KS3 and GCSE. You can choose videos per topic for KS3 or by board for GCSE, and within that per theme/topic. Once you select a topic you have a few videos to choose from. I love the fact that you have different accents to choose from, ranging from different regions of Spain to South America. The stars represent the difficulty of the listening, and once a video is selected and assigned, students can slow down the audio as needed in order to carry out some really good activities, which exploit the video resource fully!  

I have found that using This is Language in the last stage of learning on covered topics, expands my students vocabulary and trains them to listen to unknown, unprepared words/structures. The fact that they have access to the full transcript and they are encouraged to look words up, makes it a very powerful tool, which can then be used independently by my students in preparation to their GCSE or just internal exams. 

Languagenut can be used from Primary to GCSE level, with plans to extend it to Alevel! It is available for French, German, Mandarin and Spanish. I love it because we can use it from Y7 to GCSE, under the same subscription. It has a very wide range of pre-populated activities to choose from which are assigned to your classes. 

The activities I mainly use for students to learn new vocabulary via reading and listening, are those under Exam Skills. The texts range from different level of difficulties, which I can assign to specific students. Students will complete the activities and when encountering new key vocabulary, they will add it to their random Quizlet, as done with This is Language. Every so often, my students need to learn this personal random quizlet and when carrying out productive tasks, I always encourage them to use some of such structures/vocabulary. 

Languagenut will also allow students to practice writing and speaking, using the GCSE exam framework. This is great to promote spontaneity as students cannot prepare a given set of questions and writing titles, making it the perfect GCSE revision tool! Students can record their answers and submit them for you to listen to! 

I am lucky that my department can afford these subscriptions! However, there's something for all pockets and focus! When used within a planned sequence of lessons, all these sites can be extremely powerful in the MFL classroom to achieve fluently and develop independent skills in students!