For many learners and teachers, English second language courses can seem a little tired. Many big name publishers offer a familiar buffet of teacher-centered, chalk-and-talk lessons, with paper-based and online drill-and-fill exercises. They’ll do in a pinch, but nobody’s really thrilled with any of it. Why? Because the types of pedagogy that really accelerate learning are conspicuously missing.
Really effective teachers want social-brain boosting classroom activities, mastery-model (best-of) scoring, flexible deadlines, peer-teaching, collaborative project-based learning, and AI-powered scoring and feedback. Bokomaru Publications excells at all of that. It’s our speciality.
Our textbooks and paperless courses provide your students with automatically scored…
- writing assignments
- pronunciation exercises
- webcam orals
- chatbot conversations
- virtual roleplays
- talking flashcards
- movie clip duets
- and live conversations between students
Because activities are automatically scored, you can relax your deadlines and penalties so that a diversity of students can pass and even thrive.
With Bokomaru Publications, you can teach essays, collaborative storytelling, and email exchanges–and your corrections are done for you. You can finally enjoy your evenings and weekends.
How do we do it?
Since 2012, we’ve been innovating with physical textbooks…
The Actively Engaged Series is a project-based collection of textbooks that are different from the same-old-same-old. By the end of their ESL course with one of our books, students will have collaborated, developed skills, and invested new knowledge into the creation of something tangible, meaningful, and expressive of their own personality and creativity.
With companion courses…
Labodanglais.com is a companion Moodle website on steroids. We asked teachers what they wanted and then built AI-powered tools to make their dreams come true.
And with new types of activities never seen before…
ConverSolo.com hosts AI-powered conversation activities that integrate perfectly into any course. Students love ConverSolo activities because they replace drill-and-fill form focus with meaningful communication skills.
What’s with the feet?
The word Boko-maru comes from a Kurt Vonnegut novel called Cat’s Cradle. It describes how kids sitting at either end of a sofa often press the palms of their bare feet against the feet of the other in playful and collaborative movements. In the novel, Boko-maru is part of a larger benevolent fiction called Bokononism, invented to help people live peaceful, productive, and happy lives.
Such an image of unguarded playful experimentation, trust and cooperation is a fitting symbol for a homegrown publishing company such as Bokomaru Publications. We imagine, collaborate, invent, and share. Join us in our journey out of the ruts of the same-old-same-old and onto a path that accelerates learning and sparks joy.
Our Products
At Bokomaru Publications, you can order textbooks, online courses, custom-made courses, and Moodle course hosting with your own materials and our AI-powered activities. Each has its advantages.
However, the stars of the show are the textbooks. We’ve brought together more than a decade of experience designing courses that students and teachers enjoy, and built interactive companion websites to support each lesson in a cohesive and coherent sequence.
Are you looking for a book for a particular level? Jump to the descriptions for each physical book in the Actively Engaged Series.
All of our physical textbooks are 8.5″x11″ high contrast ink on recycled paper. They are spiral bound to lie flat when open. Pages are photocopiable for classroom use. Support the Quebec economy by buying locally. All of our books are printed in LaSalle, Quebec.
📧 Send me samplesSave with PDFs!
Go paperless! PDF versions of the textbooks are available on Labodanglais.com for teachers who would like to go paperless. Many students have laptops and tablets these days, and perfer to go paperless. It’s cheaper. Teachers can ask their co-ops to order registration codes. The bookstore will print the code and sell them in-person for the $40 CAD wholesale price plus their usual markup–about $55-$65 taxes included.
If you want to help students save money, you can forgo the co-op and ask students to buy access online from Labodanglais’s payment system for $40 CAD + 14.975% (GST + QST). Digital products incur both taxes in Quebec.
Labo-Only Plans and Prices
Here’s a summary of our Labo-only plans:
| Price | “LABO15” $15 | ** “LABO20” $20 | ** “LABO40” $40 |
| AI evaluations | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Plagiarism detector | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sharing cart | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| ConverSolo | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Basic support | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Additional support | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Custom activities and units upon request | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
**A 15% discount is available for bulk purchases by co-op bookstores for these plans: LABO 25 and LABO 40.
Plan Details
“LABO15” is for the autonomous teacher. If you are familiar with Moodle and you are comfortable using a search engine and how-to tutorials to answer questions for yourself, you won’t need much support. You want to build your own course on Labo ? You have two options. You can build your course with only occasional urgent support. It’ll only cost each student $15 CAD (+14.975% tax) for 20 weeks of access. It’s our cheapest option. For more support, see below.
📧 Set me up with the $15 plan“LABO25” is for the autonomous teacher plus weekly support. Urgent support is always available for all plans, but if you want the peace of mind of knowing that you can get weekly support by email, go for the $20 CAD (+14.975% tax) per semester. You’ll also get non-urgent support by email on optimzing AI settings, help setting up rubrics, help removing the quiz timer for special-needs students, deadlines for separate groups, extended deadlines for students who missed an evaluation, navigation icon changes, etc.
📧 Set me up with the $20 plan“LABO40” is for the imaginative teacher. If you have an idea for a course and would like a custom-made unit built for you with self-scoring quizzes, flashcards, handouts, automated writing and speaking activities, let us know a month in advance, and we can build it for you. The price is $40 CAD (+14.975% tax) per student, per semester (20 weeks). We have created courses with custom units on Animal Farm and The One and Only Ivan with everything needed to teach your course your way.
Wait! There is a minimum requirement of 50 students for this option.
📧 Set me up with the $40 planFree?
FYI, if a student pays for a textbook/Labo and fails your course but then comes back the following semester, we can provide another semester of access free of charge.
Also FYI, if you have one or two students in financial distress, we can provide free compassionate access per teacher per semester.
And, yes! There’s a 100% free option (no ads!) for teachers and their students. You can’t make changes and there’s no support. Try it here.
🚀 Use Labo for free!What can Labo do?
To try the range of activities that Labodanglais.com can provide, visit the AI-Revolution demonstration course on Labodanglais.com. If you don’t have an account, you will have to create one.
Your students can enjoy automated corrections and learning accelerations on Labodanglais for less than $1 CAD per week.
Students can pay online or can buy a registration code in-person at their college co-op. They gain instant access to your course when they create an account at the beginning of the semester, and they get a 2-week grace period (15 days) to try before they buy. There’s no risk. And students can have continued access for 5 weeks after the end of the semester. In total, that’s 20 weeks of access for as low as $15/semester. See the plans below.
🚀 Explore Labo nowActively Engaged Together (100A)
by Nicholas Walker (ISBN 978-0-9938308-6-0)
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. By the end of the course, students can write short emails on a range of topics with confidence.
Instead of giving these at-risk students more of what did not work for them in their high school English classes, language 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. There are no decontextualized rules and verb paradigms to memorize. Students acquire the language directly as formulaic chunks in obligatory contexts.
📧 Send me samplesActively Engaged on the Job (100B)
by Nicholas Walker (ISBN 978-0-9938308-1-5)
Ideal for your college beginner B-block students, this award-winning textbook and companion course was developed to address the problem of low motivation in high beginner ESL courses at the college level.
Over the course of 10 weeks, students work form writing groups and collaborate to create a 7-chapter narrative about a fictional workplace related to their field of study. Grammar and vocabulary are presented just-in-time. Reinvestment of the lesson’s target structures in their writing productions and oral presentations is automatically evaluated in seconds. Hardworking students inevitably score higher, as only the best scores count.
Students love the liveliness and cohesiveness of the lessons. Teachers love how manageable their workload remains throughout the semester.
📧 Send me samplesActively Engaged at College (101A)
by Nicholas Walker (ISBN 978-0-9938308-0-8)
Ideal for your low-intermediate college students, this award-winning textbook and companion course was developed to address the problem of attrition in ESL courses at the college level.
Actively Engaged at College is different from what teachers are used to—but exactly what students need. Instead of essay writing, students master first-person narratives. They work together in groups, collaborating to develop dramatic stories about living in a house together.
Each week, the just-in-time grammar and vocabulary lessons are reinvested in the next chapter in the story. Students want to look good in front of their peers and avoid looking bad, so each week students are motivated by social pressure (not points or penalties) to impress each other with their stories. The writing groups provide the social motivation many students need to persist in English.
Students can submit and revise as many drafts as they wish to get the score that they want. The teacher need only coach and encourage. The final exam consist of a summary of their story in writing and in conversation.
Actively Engaged in Persuasion (102A)
by Nicholas Walker (ISBN 978-0-9938308-8-4)
This course book trains students to be persuasive in English. Students learn to write and revise an argument essay and persuasive techniques when giving a talk on a controversial issue. It leverages the automated AI scoring system to automatically evaluate argument essays as a source of formative evaluation, activities to help students set performance goals, and five lessons for reciprocal teaching.
Typical high intermediates at colleges in Quebec did well in their high school English courses because of considerable contact with English outside of the classroom. They usually haven’t had to work very hard in the past, but a more focused intentional approach to learning would benefit these students enormously in their future careers. Massive childhood exposure to English is not the most time-efficient way to make progress in the language. This course aims to help students become more efficient learners as they enter a busier adulthood.
Based on research findings from Educational Psychology, Actively Engaged in Persuasion accelerates learning. Here’s how.
- Goal setting–Getting students to predict their score on upcoming evaluations is equivalent to them setting a goal and making a commitment to achieve it. These are the most important steps a student can take to maximize his or her performance on an evaluation (Hattie, 2009). Educational research reveals that a simple and effective goal setting exercise accelerated students’ learning by 75%. Actively Engaged in Persuasion asks students to predict their score on every evaluation.
- Reciprocal teaching–Students learn much more when they teach each other than when the teacher does all of the teaching (Hattie, 2009). Students teaching each other is called reciprocal teaching, and it has the second biggest effect on student achievement of all the classroom processes, accelerating learning by 37%. Actively Engaged in Persuasion asks students to take turns teaching their group about one of the five topics in the course.
- Formative evaluation–Students who do formative evaluations outperform students who don’t 76% of the time, and doing formative evaluations accelerates learning by 45% (Hattie, 2009). Actively Engaged in Persuasion makes formative evaluation easier through mastery model scoring (only the best scores count) and through automated essay scoring. Students can write an essay and get a formative score in two seconds, maximizing revisions and time on task.
- Flashcards–Memorizing new vocabulary using flashcards is a fast, social, fun, and efficient strategy for learning new vocabulary in your second language. Students who use flashcards performed significantly better than the students who learn vocabulary using traditional classroom methods (Komachali & Khodareza, 2012). Actively Engaged in Persuasion accelerates vocabulary learning by including a set of flashcards with every topic.
Actively Engaged in Persuasion trains students to use these and other strategies (oral practice, essay outlining, deliberate practice, etc.) to learn faster. Students not only learn English, they learn how to learn and how to communicate more effectively.