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Между нами is a free, web-based textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to Russian language and culture. It is organized around the experiences of four American students, each spending the academic year in a different Russian city. Their interactions with host families, roommates, fellow students and teachers create a universe of contextualized information that motivates the use of the target language in the classroom. Добро пожаловать! Между нами is a free, web-based textbook that provides a comprehensive introduction to Russian language and culture. It is organized around the experiences of four American students, each spending the academic year in a different Russian city. Their interactions with host families, roommates, fellow students and teachers create a universe of contextualized information that motivates the use of the target language in the classroom.

Tool that provides common context for words as you write or edit. Choose from general, academic, overuse, or learner writing. Limitations: English only.

Using English for academic purposes: A guide for students in higher education

This site allows you to see detailed information on the top 60,000 words (lemmas) of English, based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). You can see the overall frequency for each word, as well as the frequency of words in different kinds of English -- spoken, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic writing. For each word you can also find the 20-30 most frequent collocates (nearby words) and see 200 or more concordance lines (words in context). You can also see a list of synonyms and (from WordNet) words with more specific and more general meanings, and in all of these cases you can click to see the entries for those related words as well.

You can enter any text that you would like in the form at the left -- for example, a paper that you've written, or a newspaper article that you've copied from another website. After inputting the text, you can then see useful information about words and phrases in that text, based on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). First, it will highlight all of the medium and lower-frequency words in your text and create lists of these words that you can use offline. This frequency data can help language learners focus on new words, and it can allow you to see "what the text is about" (i.e. text-specific words). You can also have it show you the "academic" words in your text. Second, you can click through the words in the text to see a detailed "word sketch" of any of the words -- showing their definition, and detailed information for the word from COCA -- collocates (which provide meaning into the meaning and usage of the word), re-sortable concordance lines, and the frequency of the word (overall, and by genre). Finally, you can do powerful searches on selected phrases in your text, to show related phrases in COCA. In this way, this resource is like a "collocational thesaurus" to see what related phrases are most likely in different styles of English. For example, if you click on the words potent argument in the text that you enter, it will suggest alternate ways to express this (e.g. powerful or convincing argument), and it will show you the frequency of those phrases in COCA -- overall, and by genre. This will help you use "just the right phrase", based on a huge collection of native English texts.

Web-based grammar and spelling checker. Limitations: English only

Innovative 3-column writing application that allows you to outline on the left and add details in the middle and right columns. Limitations: 3 "trees" for free

Continuously updated corpus of American English with useful search interface. Genres are spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper, and academic.