How I stopped spending evenings grading ESL writing & speaking

I teach ESL in a public high school with 30+ students per class. Like many of you, I hit the same wall every term: there’s never enough time to hear everyone speak, and grading writing quietly takes over the weekend.

I ended up putting together a very lightweight, browser-based workflow for my own classes that focuses only on student active output — short writing + short speaking tasks.

The grading side uses AI-assisted feedback, not to replace judgement, but to speed up the boring parts (grammar mistakes, sentence structure, making answers sound more natural), so I can focus on actual teaching decisions.

A few things that genuinely surprised me:

• Shy students participate more when speaking isn’t live in front of the whole class.

• Speaking becomes gradable — speech-to-text transcripts mean I can assess speaking almost as fast as reading text, instead of replaying audio over and over.

• Low friction — because it’s browser-based, it works well as homework or a quick extension task on basically any device.

What didn’t work (and still doesn’t)
Some students do use AI to help with the writing part. That’s not ideal — but since they also have to record their answers, they still practice speaking, pronunciation, and fluency. In practice, it’s been more AI-assisted learning than pure copying, especially at A2–B1 level.

Separately, I started publishing the lesson materials I use as a free library, since that part turned out to be useful on its own.

Definitely not a replacement for teaching — just a way to stop drowning in paperwork.

If you’re experimenting with AI-assisted grading or async speaking, I’d genuinely like to hear what’s working (and what isn’t) for you.

(For anyone curious, the lessons + tool are here: englishdee.com)