Group items tagged

"The main part of this website, the History, can be read as a kind of story, in chapters, following the development of the English language from its Indo-European origins, through Old English and Middle English to Early Modern English and Late Modern English, before a brief look at English Today. But there is also section on Language Issues (including How New Words are Created, Language and Geography and English as a Global Language), a Timeline of important dates in the development of English, a Glossary of some of the technical and historical terms used, and a list of Sources and Links." (Introduction, ¶5)

Aparta, Krystian. (2014, November 4). How to learn a new language: 7 secrets from TED Translators [web blog post]. Retrieved from http://blog.ted.com/2014/11/04/how-to-learn-a-new-language-7-secrets-from-ted-translators/

"[T]his review will focus on the iOS iPad version of Duolingo, Apple's 2013 App of the year (Duolingo, 2014) in English (L1) with French as the target language (L2)" (Overview, ¶2)."

"[T]his review will focus on the iOS iPad version of Duolingo, Apple's 2013 App of the year (Duolingo, 2014) in English (L1) with French as the target language (L2)" (Overview, ¶2)."

In this post, Oli introduces a four-step guide to becoming fluent in additional languages. The first step focuses on sound and writing systems; the second, on basic lexis and syntax; the third, on what is personally relevant; and the fourth, "coming soon," on communication.

In this blog post (2014.09.30), Sabio Lantz (pen name) represented the history of the English Language in a single diagram. The main source of info. for that diagram was another website to which there is a link at the end of the post.

"The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers" (About page, ¶2, 2012.04.10).

"UsingEnglish.com provides a large collection of English as a Second Language (ESL) tools & resources for students, teachers, learners[,] and academics" (deck, ¶1, 2011.11.11).

"Developing strong listening skills in a second language can be difficult for students. In fact, teaching listening skills is a challenge for teachers, too. One reason for this is that the actual process of listening, or what we mean by "listening skill" is not very well understood. "

This is "a collaboratively edited question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It's 100% free, no registration required (Welcome! 2011.02.02).

"First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre.  It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world" (¶1, 2014.03.11).

"This is the official Website for the Fukuoka chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT)." (Welcome to Fukuoka JALT, ¶1, 2010.09.30)

"Rhetoric is the ancient art of argumentation and discourse. Thus, rhetorical devices would be the devices used to manipulate the language to effectively transmit the author's message to a reader" (Devices you say..., ¶1).

Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus has launched an innovative new tool called VocabGrabber (http://vocabgrabber.com) that helps teachers and students target the key vocabulary from a text within seconds. Powered by the award-winning Visual Thesaurus software, VocabGrabber intelligently extracts words from any document and demonstrates how those words are used in context. It's a boon for language arts teachers, students of English at all levels of proficiency, or anyone who wants fresh insights into how language works. VocabGrabber is easy to use. Simply copy a passage (up to about 100 pages) into a box on the VocabGrabber web site (http://vocabgrabber.com), click the Grab Vocabulary button, and an interactive visualization of vocabulary words and phrases immediately appears. Or add a VocabGrabber button to your toolbar, and you can grab vocabulary words from a web page with one click. What makes VocabGrabber especially useful is the way in which the words are organized. VocabGrabber compares how often words appear in the text with the frequency of these words in standard written English overall. Grabbing the vocabulary from the United States Bill of Rights, for instance, highlights significant legal terms like probable cause and cruel and unusual punishment. Grabbing the opening of the Charles Dickens classic Oliver Twist, meanwhile, will quickly zero in on words like workhouse, gruel, and pauper.

"This is the front page of the Simple English Wikipedia. Wikipedias are places where people work together to write encyclopedias in different languages. We use simple English words and grammar here. The Simple English Wikipedia is for everyone! That includes children and adults who are learning English." (About Wikipedia, ¶1)

"The Academic Word List (AWL) was developed by Averil Coxhead at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The list contains 570 word families which were selected because they appear with great frequency in a broad range of academic texts. The list does not include words that are in the most frequent 2000 words of English (the General Service List), thus making it specific to academic contexts. The AWL was primarily made so that it could be used by teachers as part of a programme preparing learners for tertiary level study or used by students working alone to learn the words most needed to study at colleges and universities." This page gives a compact listing of all the word families in the AWL, divided by sublist, each word linked to a simple definition page.

"Though Crusan (2010), Ericsson and Haswell (2006), and Shermis and Burstein (2003) offered a more thorough treatment of machine scoring in general, in this article, I concentrate on one program―MY Access! (Vantage Learning, 2007)―briefly describing it and discussing a small study conducted in a graduate writing assessment seminar at a midsize Midwestern university in which graduate students examined second language writers' attitudes about using the program as a feedback and assessment tool for their writing in a sheltered ESL writing class" (¶2).

This page at the College Writing Center at Potsdam, the State University of New York, has links to numerous writing websites. For example, there's link to the Purdue OWL resource page for students and teachers of English as a second language.

"Scholarship on L2 Writing in 2011: The Year in Review, References Tony Silva, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, Crissy McMartin-Miller, and Mei-Hung Lin"

SLWIS Newsletter - November 2012: Scholarship on L2 Writing in 2011: The Year in Review Tony Silva, Carolina Pelaez-Morales, Crissy McMartin-Miller, and Mei-Hung Lin Crissy McMartin-Miller