Home » March 2012

The spiralling costs of the Olympics and an online dictionary of collocations

by · 2 Comments

Did you know that the lastest cost of the London Olympic Games 2012 is £11 billion! Wow! Now, that’s a big number! Do you have any idea of what the original cost was? It was £2.4 billion! And we thought that was expensive! I’ve been reading a bit about the cost of the Olympic Games and every time I read an article I come across the same word to describe the cost of the Olympic Games. What’s the word? SPIRAL. Look at these sentences I’ve found:

The spiralling cost has more than doubled…
The Olympic Games cost has spiralled since 2005…
London security cost spiral…

Advanced learners of English will need to learn what words go together – collocate – naturally in English and ‘spiral’ and ‘cost’ are examples of words that go together. That makes me realise again that learners need to see new words in whole sentences, not just to read the definition of a word in a dictionary. That brings me to today’s link which is an online collocation dictionary. The GDEX Demo Dictionary allows users to enter a word, hit SEARCH, and get lots of examples of that word in sentences. But better than that, it also shows what part of speech the word is. The other day in class we were talking about the word PLUMMET. If I put plummet into the GDEX Demo Dictionary I get this page of examples of how it is used: plummet. Now with those sentences to read learners can really get a feel for how the word is used in context. Advanced learners should be bookmarking the GDEX Demo Dictionary which you can find right here!

Meanwhile back to the Olympics. One of my students today asked me how he could get some tickets! I had to laugh because I am one of the disappointed many who tried but failed to get tickets. Does anybody have any to sell??

Filed Under: Academic vocabulary

A call to EFL and ESL teachers!

by · Leave a Comment

I don’t usually post for teachers but it seems that there are a lot of teachers who use the site, so here goes! The following post is written by Tay Omojukun.

Here’s a call to EFL/ESL teachers by EmbedPlus lead developer, Tay Omojokun. It serves as a follow up to a post from this past weekend that revealed a new English word pronunciation dictionary that integrates videos for more authentic and natural pronunciations.

A CALL TO EFL/ESL TEACHERS

Our service is actively implementing a crowdsourced video-submission solution to provide as diverse examples as possible. While this means anyone with a public YouTube channel can submit videos as examples, we are particularly looking for contributors with high-quality channels to maximize pronunciation accuracy and user-experience. Even more, the service is focusing on face-to-face pronunciations to allow learners to directly see the facial gestures that are used of speakers to produce pronunciations.

Currently, the dictionary consists of videos that are primarily from a variety of well-known YouTube channels. Our team, however, recognizes that there are a significant number of EFL/ESL teachers with high-quality YouTube channels that would likely make for prime examples. In fact, we believe that videos from these sources could offer learners a learning experience that’s richer than the current videos, since learners are not only able to experience the benefits of video, but also watch something that is actually within the context of English learning. Given the significant number of pronunciation requests that are made on the web a day, we think that the dictionary can be a new and interesting way for teachers to gain new viewers of their videos. As the service matures and grows in popularity, the amount of the views could be considerably large.

Our team is ready to prioritize submissions of any English teaching professional with a YouTube channel. Before submitting channels, however, we suggests getting a good gauge on what is available by carefully exploring several of the current channels that are already used. The following short list provides links to a nice distribution of videos from many of the channels in the database:

How to pronounce apple
How to pronounce cat
How to pronounce comfortable
How to pronounce genre
How to pronounce hair
How to pronounce hello
How to pronounce house
How to pronounce live
How to pronounce miscellaneous
How to pronounce schedule
How to pronounce submit
How to pronounce though
How to pronounce thought
How to pronounce three
How to pronounce through
How to pronounce water
How to pronounce world

If you’re an EFL/ESL teachers and you feel you can offer videos beyond the kinds that you see in the above, simply send an email to submit@epronounce.com with your channel information.

-Tay

Filed Under: Pronunciation, Speaking

A free online Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation

by · Leave a Comment

OK, I know you’re thinking that I haven’t posted very much recently – and you’d be right! That means that things have been very hectic with the day job! Right now things are hotting up at university as students realise that a lot of their coursework is due to be handed in over the next few weeks. When things get busy it is really important for you all to plan your work so that you don’t forget something, or something isn’t left to the last minute. Just the other day a student came up to me and told me that he had forgotten to hand in his coursework! He had done it, but had just forgotten to submit it. Get an academic planner and write in ALL your assignments on it and put it on the wall of your room so you don’t get caught out. Get the easy marks first of all by handing in your work on time!

Last time I posted I talked about a video-based pronunciation dictionary (and as James pointed out is no good at all for China based folks because Youtube is blocked for them!!) and this week I am going to mention another pronunciation site howjsay.com. This is a free online Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation and I have been having some fun with it. The title ‘Howjsay’ is a good one because it shows the difference between written and spoken English. The words How do you say spoken at normal speed come out as three syllables – how/dja/say – and this is something that many students need to think about. What I like about Howjsay is that it also has some phrases in it too. You can type in a word and hear the word pronounced. Try ‘What’s the time’ and you’ll get it, and lots of other similar phrases as well. Check out howjsay.com here.

Filed Under: Uncategorized