An exceptional website for English students and teachers

If you are new in the UK and you are wondering if the weather is usually this bad, the answer is ‘Yes, it is!’ The poor weather has coincided with my time off work – surprise, surprise! However, it did not rain at the Lord’s cricket ground which meant that England beat Australia at the home of cricket for the first time in seventy years. The rivalry between England and Australia in sport is intense – if you are reading this in Australia make sure you ask your teachers how the Ashes cricket tournament in England is going and watch their faces fall. (We are used to losing in the UK, but the Australians are not, and they just hate it.)

For some reason I have never posted about Ted Power’s ‘English language learning and teaching’ website. This is one of those very rare things – a very high quality website from an individual. I say that because in my experience the top websites often come from universities or organisations like the BBC. This website covers so many areas about learning and teaching English that it should definitely be in your list of favourites and you will come back to it time and time again. Ted Power’s website is here.

The Academic Word List at the University of Plymouth

British sports fans will have been following the Wimbledon tennis championship over the past few days. It is a very ‘British’ event (with strawberries and cream) and it is traditional for a British player to do quite well and then get beaten. It was no different this year only our current best player is really pretty good and people thought it might be different this time – which is what everybody says every time the tournament comes round! Our current best player is Scottish – which means he has far more chance of winning than if he was English!

One way or another you have to expand your vocabulary to have a good command of English. If you are studying at university it is probably a good idea for you to be aware of the Academic Word List and you can see a few VOCABULARY posts about the AWL if you scroll down the page a little on the right. My colleague Ricky Lowes at the University of Plymouth has been doing some work on academic vocabulary activities. Ricky says:

This is a new website, developed by a teacher, Ricky Lowes, and a technical expert, Mark Pannell, who both work at the university, to help international students to learn academic vocabulary.
We know that vocabulary learning requires a lot of time and effort. We know you need to work consistently, little by little, day after day. We provide advice, information and exercises on academic vocabulary to guide your learning.
The website is designed by teachers and is structured to support your learning. You can think of it as being like a book, only more interactive. It is designed to be simple and easy to navigate. It has many links to useful resources on the internet as well as pages which have been designed by us.
Enjoy the site and please let us know what you think of it by using the Contact Us link. The site is still being developed and your ideas are important to us.

The activities are here.