My Favourite ESL Resources

-
Are you finding it hard to learn English? Learning a second language can be difficult and therefore in class or when doing homework, it's always tempting to open Google translate and let it do the work for us. However, if we constantly rely on this tool, it will be much harder to improve our language skills. 

In class, I like to teach my students to use Wordreference. It's a great online tool (and app) that has many functions to help us with vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. I strongly recommend watching this tutorial and playing around with the app for yourself. It won't do the work for you, but it will certainly help! Here is another tutorial in Spanish, just in case!
Another online resource I find very helpful for learning a second language is Linguee. This awesome tool gives you examples of the word, collocation or expression you are looking for in real contexts. It's very useful for checking to see how certain language is used, what preposition follows verbs or how idioms are translated (by actual people, not a computer). Here is a tutorial (in Spanish). 

Good luck and happy learning! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FINAL TASK (6.5. Foro "Interaction")

-
Image
I have spent some time looking at Luis Alberto´s blog ( Five Ways to Improve Your English ) and the task that I like the most is his most recent one which makes use of Genially. I love doing tasks with the kids that require them to use their imagination and this task requires exactly that. I also like the fact that Luis Alberto asked his students to peer evaluate as it’s a good way for students to reflect on their work and also to get them to focus on something while listening to their classmates’ presentations. I would most likely create a similar task, though I would provide students with the rubric I'll use to evaluate them beforehand and possibly focus on different grammar.
Read more

My Reflections On Reading

-
Image
My Reflections On Reading Have a look at the images and think about your own reading habits. Have they changed? What kind of books or texts are the people reading? Did they choose the books themselves or did someone else choose for them? In most of the pictures, it seems people are reading books (either in a paper or a digital format). While people read books for many different reasons, I think most of the reading we generally do on a daily basis tends to be shorter texts, things like reading Tweets, posts on social media, the information we see displayed in our surroundings, instructions, subtitles and so on. Though part of this reading may be for pleasure, there is also a lot we do out of necessity. It is difficult to fathom whether the people in the pictures have chosen their own reading material, although it is likely that the children in the classroom did not choose their book given that all the kids have got the same one. Like with most things, everybody has different tastes and
Read more

Using Storyjumper

-
  Here is my story created on Storyjumper . In the previous activity, I realised that I rarely use the process approach to writing in my English classroom and so I thought I would try to come up with a sequence following this approach while also incorporating the tool Storyjumper. I had a look at both Pixton and Storyjumper before getting started and I found the scenes and props were much more limited on Pixton leading me to opt for the latter.   Given that we are towards the end of the first term, realistically I have not got time to carry out the sequence explained below with any of my groups, therefore I will have to explain it from a hypothetical point of view.  The sequence would be carried out during the Halloween period with a group of students in their 3rd year of CSE, and the story in Storyjumper would be the final product. While there would be cooperative activities in groups of four leading up to the final product, the final product in Storyjumper would be an individual task
Read more