Fun with grammar? Road to Grammar

 

Yes, there is a fun way to study grammar! Road to Grammar is a website specially disigned to offer fun exercises to practice any grammar difficulty you may have. All activities are adult orientated so you will not find them too childish. There you can find online quizzes, extra practice and games, they also do printables if you like to work on paper. If you have children learning English at school, there is a junior version that you can use with them and enjoy learning together. Thank you Antonio Jiménez for the tip. 

 

More help to improve your writing: writingfun.com

When learning a foreign language writing and speaking are the two most frustrating skills students have to deal with; the former being a real stone in the shoe that may lead to quitting. There are many reasons for that, but the basic problem is that writing is a very demanding skill, it needs to be highly organized and structured. On top of that the person(s), whom the piece of writing is meant for, are not present, what implies an extra effort in providing the information in full, nothing can be left aside. I bet you are already yawning or put off just with the thought of it. Well, it is time for you to take a look at the website I am introducing today Writing Fun. Jenny Eather has gathered all the basic types of writing and made a useful presentation using the latest technology in order to help ESL students with their writing skills. There you will find explanations, exercises, printables and examples of how to write and organize your ideas in formal and informal pieces of writing. By the way, I must thank Laura Martín (ESL teacher at EOI Las Palmas) for the tip.

 

Linguee: a new way of searching for meanings

 

 

In this post I would like to introduce you to a new tool which would be of great help with your writing. As you can see in the picture, the name of the tool is Linguee.com and it is a search engine for words and expressions in multiple languages and their translation in various contexts. It also provides the user with helpful information and examples. Although specifically meant for translators, Linguee.com can be used by students of English as a kind of thesaurus. You type the word you want to know the use of and the engine will bring you a set of different sentences with the specific word in a variety of meanings and contexts. One thing to bear in mind, Linguee.com is not a dictionary. Here you have a link to their about-us page.

Is the Internet Hurting Our Environment?

Larry Ferlazzo and JJ de Haro, two twitter users I devotedly follow, have posted about this infographic which can help us understand the growth of the Internet and its influence on the enviroment. A good way to learn about statistics and vocabulary related to enviroment and  internet. Tank you to WordStream for making it and 2ndgreenrevolution for sharing.



Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing

Phrasemix: vocabulary in action

Here is a very useful site if you are a vocabulary fanatic!! Every day, the guys of Phrasemix give their readers an assortment of every day sentences together with the explanation about how and when to use them. The site is easy to use, very neat and the stuff they post will always be very handy, especially for students of more advanced levels. If you are of those who find it difficult to visit the page everyday, they have a profile on facebook or twitter so you can have their updates on your wall or time line. In case you're not that geeky and you have a reader follow this link to add it to your feed reader. Now is time to pay a visit to the website and start improving your English. 

Xmas and New Year's Greetings

Here it goes my Xmas for all the readers of this blog. It is a word cloud created with imagechef.com. It allows you to do amazing clouds with almost any kind of picture. Although wordle and tagul are still my favourite, imagechef is an option to bare in mind for its originality. The only downside is you have to pay if you want more advanced features.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY 2011

Congratulations ELLA (English Language Lab Asturias)

They say no news is good news, but this time there is news and very good ones. ELLA (English Language Lab Asturias), a site devoted to integrate language learning and new technologies, has been awarded the European Seal for  innovative initiatives at foreign language teaching and learning by the European Council. 


This award means an institutional recognition to several years of hard work and passion on the grounds of English teaching. With this post I would like to pay a tribute to the ELLA team who are not only very good friends, but, most important, a model to follow for those who are trying hard to make from technology a fundamental tool in ESL/EFL teaching.


Very well done guys!!! 


PD: Here is the link to a previous post on ELLA.

English Central: A fun way of dealing with pronunciation.

http://www.englishcentral.com/en/videos

First of all, I must thank Maria from EOI Santa Brígida for the tip. English Central is a new attemp to make English Learning fun and effective. The idea is to watch a video, record your own voice repeating  the lines on the screen, then their speech recognition technology will analyze yours and give inmediate feedback. The aim is to help ESL students with their   pronuntiation by comparing their speech with that of a native. If you are a group of students who enjoy on-line gaming, you can also set a challange for your group and compete to see who is the best.  There are more features to this brilliant site, but I'd rather let you discover them by yourself. 

ENGLISHCENTRAL

CONDITIONAL SENTENCES

Recently I've made this presentation to help my students to understand conditional sentences. Hope it is of help for you as well:

CONDITIONALS on Prezi

Useful links

Hi again. It's been a long time since the last entry but it has been a hectic two months. Anyway, I'm back and here goes this first post of the new academic year.

Recently I have created a visual presentation with many of the links to the resources I have talked to you about and some I have discovered but haven't had the time to post here (will do soon, though). The novelty of this presentation is that you don't need to click on links and open windows, everything is displayed on the slide itself.

It`s called Useful Links and the contents have been arranged in tabs for each of the  four common skills, plus some additional ones for grammar and dictionaries.

This project is open to contributions from all of you, so don't be shy and tell us about any other resources you think are worth including. Click on the icon below and get started.

Useful Links