Group items tagged

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.

One of many spelling, vocabulary, and writing resources on the Vocabulary and Spelling City site, this page explains, "Asking a child to write about something that matters to him [sic] right now is a powerful motivator. This is where writing prompts come in. Writing prompts are simply ideas or subjects offered as a foundation for students to build a writing assignment on" (¶3, 2011.07.25). It includes tips for preparing writing prompts as well as examples for elementary, middle school, and high school students.

"Named 'Outstanding Resource' by WebEnglishTeacher.com" (sidebar)

"LitReactor has three goals. To become: * A destination for writers to improve their craft. * A haven for readers to geek out about books. * And a platform to kickstart your writing goals." (http://litreactor.com/about) The site showcases essays in nearly two dozen categories (2012.03.01): Abstracts (1) Character (15) Cliche (2) Dialogue (9) Grammar (10) Literary Devices (8) Live Reading (3) Narrator (7) Objects (4) POV (3) Phrases (3) Plot (18) Poetry (1) Research (9) Rewriting (2) Setting (1) Similies (1) Structure (14) Theme (8) Verbs (1) Vocabulary (5) Voice (16) Word Play (2) Workshop (2) (http://litreactor.com/essays/categories) 

Peter M. Nardi, Skeptic's Cafe, 2012.03.22

the official AWL site

a couple of posts in Japanese on the Academic Word List

"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.

"For the exercises given in this website, the word families for each sublist have been further divided into six groups for ease of study, with three separate gap-fill exercises for each group" (¶2).

For learners of English, sports posts in various categories: adjectives, grammatical expression[s], grammatical word[s], idioms, phrasal verbs, and the difference[s] between words (Categories, 2011.02.02)

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).

"... Jacki Lyden talks to the senior editor of the American Heritage College Dictionary, now in its fourth edition, about the list of 100 words their editors think all college students (and their parents) should know" (September 17, 2002).

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.

"A capitonym is a word whose meaning changes based on whether or not it is capitalized" (n.d.).  Thanks to Sandra Nelson for pointing this out to the LearningwithComputers group way back when!