This review is by guest contributor Emmanuel Orozco Castellanos. Learning English on Youtube may not seem like a new idea. There already exists a virtually infinite amount of videos to learn English or any other languages. You can find anything from grammar lessons to tips to perform better at job interviews. But sometimes all you […]
Read More »VocabGrabber, a tool from Thinkmap’s Visual Thesaurus, allows users to paste in up to 100 pages of text, and then see a visual display of the most frequent and most relevant vocabulary. If you have a transcript of something you want to listen to, you can also grab the spoken vocabulary in the same manner, […]
Read More »“NPR” stands for “National Public Radio,” a not-for-profit radio network that emphasizes high quality, in-depth, long-form news and conversation. Most radio shows are available as podcast episodes, and there is some content only available via podcast. For advanced English language learning, the NPR website and apps are a gold mine for working on listening, vocabulary, […]
Read More »The terrific website Vocabulary.com has been out for several years now, and it just keeps getting better. This is a product of Thinkmap, the group that created Visual Thesaurus. You might call it a dictionary with witty definitions. You might call it an advanced vocabulary game that can quiz you on up to thousands of words by […]
Read More »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 »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 »“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 »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.
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