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 »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 »Andy Gillett’s UEFAP site, Using English for Academic Purposes, supported by BALEAP (the British Association of Lecturers in EAP) offers a deep set of resources for academic communication in all skill areas. The best segments of the site offer an introduction, strategic advice and practice exercises, and sample phrases for very specific communicative purposes. The advice […]
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 »Whether you are interested in economies, personal finance, business, inequality, social and political movements, or how money impacts our daily lives, the Marketplace suite of podcasts has an episode for you. The context is primarily from the point of view of the United States. The style is largely conversational, interviewing expert guests and everyday people […]
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 »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 »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 »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 »