Sometimes, a gift arrives by email. I received one just before the new year: a link to Reading and Writing Tools for Academic English, a site designed by Eoin Jordan and Andy Snyder, instructors at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. This site offers a suite of nifty tools, games, and practice for academic reading, writing, and vocabulary. Let’s […]
Read More »A student introduced us to Netspeak, a project of Bauhaus Universitat of Weimar, Germany. The point of this website is to help writers select words and phrase structures when writing in English. Netspeak uses a huge Google database (corpus) of 1-word to 5-word phrases or “NGrams” that appear frequently in publicly-available web pages in English.
Read More »What does “funky” mean? According to vocabulary.com, it can mean “offensively malodorous” or “stylish and modern in an unconventional way.” www.funkyenglish.com appears to embrace the second definition by developing an online social community for English language learning. Ironically, however, language instruction itself on the site is quite traditional and conventional. Nonetheless, Funky English may be a useful […]
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