This simple and easy-to-use Verbal Stratagems website offers a robust collection of phrases for specific purposes, such as agreeing, checking for understanding, expressing gratitude, or making a suggestion. These phrases have been collected and maintained by Dr. Brenda P. Imber of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan and Carson Maynard, a Michigan […]
Read More »CALI, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, offers hundreds of online lessons and tutorials, many of which focus on writing in legal genres. Because legal writing organization, logical structure, and vocabulary can differ dramatically from other academic and professional writing, this focus on writing specifically for legal purposes is particularly useful. For example, one 45-minute […]
Read More »Do you want to work on vocabulary, fluency, pitch range, or interpreting technical content to a lay audience Scientific American is a long-established magazine that publishes articles on a broad range of scientific topics for non-specialists. One of my students led me to the groovy “60-Second Science” daily audio podcast, which always starts with the […]
Read More »MICASE is a searchable collection or “corpus” of the transcripts of real-life spoken language on the University of Michigan campus. Most of the audio files are available for free download too. MICASE represents language as it is actually spoken on one university campus, which differs dramatically from how language looks in English textbooks. In MICASE, […]
Read More »Thanks to guest contributor Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos for this review of VoiceTube. Do you spend a considerable amount of time watching videos, movies, and TV shows? It’s not a secret that consuming audiovisual content in a foreign language can help us improve easily. This technique is effective for many people because videos and movies are […]
Read More »MICUSP, the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers, is composed of papers with a grade of A from the University of Michigan written for upper undergraduate and early graduate courses. This searchable database makes it possible to see disciplinary differences in academic writing, to observe the various ways that a particular word or phrase is […]
Read More »Just The Word is a powerful tool for figuring out how a word patterns with other words: what are possible grammatical phrase structures for a word, and what words go with your search term? Just The Word uses a subset of 80 million words of the British National Corpus, a database of published written language and transcribed […]
Read More »L’Université de Franche-Comté in Besançon, France has a prominent “Applied Linguistics” program. Part of the way this program shares its expertise on language learning with the world is to host “English Online France” http://cla-tice2.univ-fcomte.fr/eolf/, a website with dozens of free interactive games, exercises, and tips for learning English independently.
Read More »“Common Errors in English Usage” represents one retired Comparative Literature professor’s effort to document the types of written errors that frequently appear in the writing of native speakers of American English. The content of the site is now available as a Kindle e-book, as a Twitter or podcast feed, as a long text list, and […]
Read More »Sandra Tsing Loh hosts a 90-second radio show called the “Loh Down on Science”http://www.lohdownonscience.org/–the show is dedicated to finding humorous ways to introduce the general public to interesting science. Every episode is transcribed with about 95% accuracy.
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