Blog Review

Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻 In this blog, I would like to introduce a new website YouGlish .  YouGlish is a very useful tool for practising pronunciation and new word expressions. It looks through Youtube videos for examples of the words, namely, how English is spoken in the real context. The following is the interface of YouGlish. Here is the link:  https://youglish.com/ Step 1 General Intro YouGlish serves not only English learners but also other languages like Chinese, French, Spanish, etc. Click on the green area to select a certain language. Click on the blue area to choose different English language varieties such as British English and American English. Type in what you want to search for and click on "Say it" to start retrieving. Step 2 Pronunciation practice with  YouGlish   Do you have experience that students asking you about the pronunciation of "neither"? Did they wonder why some people pronounce it as  [ˈnaɪðə(r)] while others pro...

  Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻 Last week, I displayed how to utilize the corpora to improve students' writing with Sketch Engine (i.e. Word Sketch and Concordance module). T his week, a s promised,  I am gonna introduce another two modules on the dashboard (i.e. Word Sketch Difference and Thesaurus).  Here is the link to Sketch Engine:  https://app.sketchengine.eu/#dashboardcorpname=preloaded%2Fbnc2_tt21 Now let's begin! ✌✌ Step 1 Open the Sketch Engine Step 2 Intro to Word Sketch Difference The  Word Sketch Difference serves for comparison consultation by contrasting collocations. Let's take "deeply" and "closely" as examples. Students often mix the two words in their writings such as "deeply related to", the more natural expression of which, however, is "closely related to". Then how can we check which collocation is more suitable? That is how this module plays a role. Following are the analysis results. The green a...

 Hello, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻 Last week, I displayed how to utilize Vocabprofilers by Lexical Tutor to improve students' vocabulary richness in compositions. This week, I want to introduce the other powerful platform, Sketch Engine. It contains 600 ready-to-use corpora in 90+ languages for the users to explore how language works, especially for concordance.  Here is the link to Sketch Engine:  https://app.sketchengine.eu/#dashboardcorpname=preloaded%2Fbnc2_tt21 The interface design is clear and friendly to beginners, and teachers do not need to build up very professional knowledge for corpora. So do not worry about technology issues! You will find it simple through this blog. The following is the homepage of Sketch Engine.  Now let's begin! ✌✌ Step 1 Choose an appropriate corpus  Choose an appropriate corpus for your students in the following area. In this blog I choose British National Corpus ( BNC) as an example for its authentic English. If y...

  Hi, everyone! Your lovely BP is back! 👻👻 Do you often feel undoubted about the appropriateness of certain reading passage?  For example, you may worry that it contains too many difficult words that beyond students' comprehension.  Do you want to promote the lexical richness of your students' writing products?  You will gain insights into the above questions through this blog. Vocabprofiler by Lexical Tutor ( https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/ ) is adopted as a powerful tool for measurement of lexical performance  in English written production. Following is the i nterface of VocabProfilers. Vocabprofiler calculate  word frequency of four levels, including: 1)  K1: the 1000 most commonly used words in English 2)  K2: the 1000 next most commonly used words in English 3)  AWL: Academic Word List 4)  Off-list words: other words not on any of the lists (often infrequent or non-academic) It is not unusual that students  repeatedly use K1 word...