Seven excellent language reference books

These are seven of the most loved / used language books on my shelves. All are useful for my work, but they’re also worth having in their own right; either as an everyday reference book, or for exploration of the English language in more depth.

Roget’s Thesaurus. The best thesaurus in my opinion. I have a few but none of them compare to Roget’s. Mine’s a much-used and battered 1984 Penguin edition. I should probably buy a new copy but this one and I have history – 25 years of it!

The Penguin English Dictionary – my ‘everyday’ dictionary. I’m a big fan of Penguin books and this is another much used, and now scruffy, book. I’ve used this one a lot in my lessons because it has very clear and straightforward definitions and my higher level learners find it easy to use (The Cambridge Essential English Dictionary is more appropriate for lower level learners).

Cassell’s Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins by Nigel Rees. A down-to-earth look at over 1200 words and colloquial phrases; both historical and contemporary.

Cassell’s Foreign Words and Phrases by Adrian Room. Over 5000 foreign words and phrases with definitions, pronunciation guide, word history and etymology. This is a great book – it covers everyday expressions such as bon viveur, petits pois, clique and exit, but also things like lupus in fabula (a person who appears just as they were being spoken of (Latin)) and persiflage (banter, raillery, frivolous treatment of a subject (French)).

The Oxford English Reference Dictionary – a huge dictionary so certainly not an everyday one, but an excellent reference book.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. A manageable, but serious, book covering a massive subject. If you’re interested in the origins and development of English words then this is a useful and interesting book. From the back cover…..did you know that in the thirteenth century nice meant foolish or stupid, but came to mean wanton in the fourteenth century, and coy or shy in the fifteenth?

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language by David Crystal. Probably the most comprehensive, fascinating, readable and accessible book on language available. Enough said

I’d love to know which language books other teachers find invaluable and would recommend.

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English language in the news

Just a small selection of English language related items that appeared in various online news sources last week.

Australian authors defend local language

An article relating Australian authors’  understandable alarm about a proposal to allow overseas, culturally translated, editions of their work to be imported – with the risk that these imports will override the original text in Australia.

I have to say, I was surprised at the level of this cultural translation that Australian literature is subjected to.

From the article:

“Kate Grenville, who won the UK’s Orange award for her novel The Idea of Perfection, says that Australian expressions have always posed a challenge to foreign audiences and that before she earned international recognition she was effectively forbidden from lapsing into antipodean idiom.

“They wanted me to de-Australianise a lot and if I had said no, I would never have been published overseas,” she said. “There was a blind cultural assumption that American English was English and I was speaking a very different sub-category which needed subtitles.””

Breaking the language barrier

A language centre in Turkey is looking to the British community to provide accommodation for their English language students; enabling them to learn English in Turkey and save money on “expensive language courses abroad”, and on visa requirements, flights and accommodation. British families offering accommodation would be paid for providing lodgings and “could learn Turkish quicker.”

This seems like a potentially effective and mutually beneficial project. Alternatively, Turkish students wanting to learn English could avoid the expense of visas, flights and accommodation in the UK by learning English online from their homes in Turkey

China launches new English-language newspaper

China’s Communist Party is publishing a new English language newspaper – Global Times - in an attempt to build its global reputation and reveal a “complete and true picture of China.”

UK seeks to export better teachers

A Guardian Weekly article about the increasing numbers of under-qualified people considering taking up English language teaching jobs abroad, in order to avoid the economic recession and scarcity of jobs in the UK – and the response to this from various UK based English language teaching institutions who are advising people thinking about becoming teachers to seek accredited and reputable training in order to acquire the skills they need.

John Norrish, from the Association for the Promotion of Quality in Tesol Education (QuiTE) says that ” the profession has a name for amateurism and a number of courses on offer at the moment only serve to underline this, for example there is a course advertised on the internet that offers recruits the chance to ‘learn to teach in English in a weekend’.”

It’s not exactly inspiring to read that one’s profession has a name for amateurism but I agree with John Norrish’s comment. It’s a great pity that this reputation still applies. I, and my peers, spent a great deal of time studying to become qualified teachers and specialist Tesol / ESOL teachers, and subsequently on our continuing professional development, and it’s high time this sector of the teaching profession has the professional recognition it deserves. I hope QuiTE’s attempts to establish a set of standards for effective training for people considering teaching English abroad is successful, and that this in turn will go some way to change the perception of Tesol as ‘amateurish’.

And finally,  Esperanto is still getting tongues wagging

Not English language news of course, but I think this is an interesting article about UK based Esperanto speaker Roy Threadgold. Roy communicates with fellow Esperantists around the world, “breaking down barriers created by language, geography and culture” and demonstrating that Esperanto is very much alive today.

Image by bradipo on Flickr

Wordle in the English language classroom

Wordle creates word clouds from any piece of text. The image above is the word cloud of this blog; created by entering the blog’s RSS feed URL into Wordle. The resulting word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently, and it’s possible to change the font, layout and colours of your word cloud to suit.

Nik Peachey has created a short video “How to create a Wordle” which explains the process.

For those interested in their blog content from an SEO / marketing perspective, Wordle can give a useful insight into the keywords being used, as Bill Gaffney’s post “Wordle as an online marketing and SEO tool” demonstrates.

Wordle was originally designed as a ‘toy’ but people are finding a variety of  interesting uses for it and there are many ideas in the following blog posts, and the subsequent comments, that can be used, and adpated for use, in the English language classroom:

Top 20 uses for Wordle from The Clever Sheep blog;

Digital Storytelling Part IX – Wordle from the Langwitches blog;

and Wordle: using word clouds in a lesson from Box of Tricks.

So far, I’ve used Wordle three times in my lessons. I created word clouds of news articles for students to read and to then put forward suggestions for the main topic/s of the article. The key words in the word cloud helped them to get the gist of the article, and its intent, and to then write their own news article based on the key words; and finally to compare their writing to the original. This procedure could be used for other genres of text and I have used it fairly successfully with short poems.

In another lesson I elicited from each student words they associate with their home countries, and words they associate with life in the UK. We then created word clouds for each set of words and compared them – with interesting results.

Accents and dialects of the UK

The British Library Sounds Familiar? site is an excellent source of sound recordings and short audio clips of accents and dialects of the UK, and as such could be a very effective way of demonstrating to English learners how pronunciation varies across the UK.

From the site:

“Do you call a ‘bread roll’ a cob, batch, bread cake, barm cake or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat at this computer? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’ s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century.”

When I first searched the site I was a little disappointed to find there weren’t any recordings available from my local area of the UK (Cornwall), nevertheless, it’s such a good site that I shared  the link on my Twitter account; mentioning, as an aside only, my slight disapointment that Cornwall did not feature on the site. To my surprise I quickly received a Twitter message from Richard Ranft on the @soundarchive British Library Sound Archive Twitter account saying that I was in luck and “we have Cornwall accents on our Archival Sound Recordings site”.  Richard is obviously monitoring mentions of the British Library on Twitter, hence his speedy reply to my message, and in my opinion this is a good example of one of the many useful aspects of Twitter. However, I digress!

The Archival Sound Recordings site is a very interesting and useful site with many recordings of the spoken word, as well as music and human and natural environments, and so is also useful for demonstrating the different accents and dialects of the UK. Recordings include over 350 extracts from the Millenium Memory Bank, “one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe”, and from the Survey of English Dialects, “a collection of 288 extracts taken from recordings made between 1951 and 1974, representing a survey of the vernacular speech of England.”

Podictionary

On Podictionary, Charles Hodgson delivers a daily short podcast describing the history of  a common word. Each podcast is approximately 3 minutes long and is accompanied by a transcript in the form of a blog post.

The site now has an archive of hundreds of podcasts and although Charles says “it’s all for fun”, he clearly goes to a great deal of effort when writing these interesting ’stories’ about words and their histories.

Readers can add their own thoughts and information by leaving comments on the entries; and can also subscribe to the podcasts in iTunes or Zune, or the blog posts via RSS, or by email.

Teaching English with stories

Short stories are a particular favourite of mine and I like the idea of using them as a resource for teaching English. I have to say though, my attempts so far at integrating short stories into my lesson plans for adult ESOL learners haven’t been as successful as I’d like. Reading activities based on short stories have gone fairly well, and been effective I think, but many of the students don’t seem to particularly enjoy story writing or telling activities.

I recently bought Once Upon a Time: Using stories in the language classroom by John Morgan and Marion Rinvolucri. According to the blurb on the back of the book; “Stories can provide a highly motivating, engaging and realisitic source of genuine language interaction in the classroom” – I agree, in theory, but in my experience many adult English language learners aren’t quite so enthusiastic.

For many of the English language learners I teach, their motivation for learning English includes priorities such as improving their employment prospects; entering a UK university; and integrating into, and coping with, day-to-day life in the UK. Genres likely to be identified as important by them are  job advertisements, application letters, reports and presentations, essays and projects, and formal letters of enquiry and complaint.

Based on this, I can understand why they don’t feel the need to have English language skills in story writing / telling in their linguistic repertoires. However, Bruner (1986) suggests that conversational storytelling  is the major way we account for for our actions and the events we experience. We frequently tell stories in our conversations with others;  from brief anecdotes to detailed descriptions of mishaps, encounters, and adventures.

An important element of being fluent in English entails being able to share one’s stories of every day life, and I feel this is where the use of stories in the English language classroom may be useful; for helping learners gain the informal social conversational / storytelling skills essential for integration in any environment: workplace, academic, or social. I think in future I will concentrate more on story telling in its spoken form, and on helping the students see that conversational storytelling is a relevant genre for them.

The Once Upon a Time book I mentioned earlier contains over 70 story outlines, or ’skeletons’, and a wide range of classroom activities that the authors hope are engaging and rewarding. I haven’t used any of the activities yet, but I intend to give some a try in my crusade to bring the joy of the short story to my students!  

 

Image via Flickr

 Bruner, J. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, London: Harvard University Press.

Maybin, J. (1996) ‘Everyday Talk’, in Maybin, J. and Mercer, N. (1996) Using English: from conversation to canon. London: Routledge.

Using Nibipedia in the English language classroom

 According to Nibipedia ’s Twitter bio  Nibipedia is “an online learning/teaching software powered by Youtube and Wikipedia. Kid tested, mother approved”

Under each video on Nibipedia is a series of links or nibs. A nib is a visual bookmark on a video’s timeline and these bookmarks link to Wikipedia articles and suggested related videos. This approach adds depth to the video content enabling learners to learn more about its content, and to explore related content.

The videos on Nibipedia are currently authored by a beta group of educators, and educators interested in signing up for the test should contact Nibipedia’s developers via the Nibipedia site. I signed up for the beta test and now have a Nibipedia playlist that I’m gradually adding videos to whilst exploring how to use it effectively.

I’m still thinking about the best way to use the unique tools offered by Nibipedia but I’ve made a brief list of a few initial thoughts I’ve had about using Nibipedia in the English language classroom:

• the videos and associated articles could be used for the introduction of new vocabulary, perhaps as a supplement to syllabus work being carried out in the classroom
• topics already introduced in the classroom could be developed with Nibipedia videos and associated articles; allowing for different perspectives and the addition of new information
• learners could be asked to listen for specific vocabulary or topics; find related information on Wikipedia, and then add these articles, or nibs, to the video timeline – this will identify whether the students can confidently use the vocabulary in question and check their understanding of topics  
• alternatively, students could find an article on Wikipedia in their own language, relating to a reference or topic in the video, and then write a short article in English based on this article (i.e. translate the content)
• the videos and associated articles could be used a stimulus for group discussion or debate.

Lower level English learners could use Simple English Wikipedia  instead of Wikipedia.  An English language learner has written a blog post on the TechXav blog  (online tips by a teenage blogger) about how they find it much easier to understand ”the simple words, simple grammars and short sentences” of the articles on Simple English Wikipedia, than those on Wikipedia.

Simple English Wikipedia currently has only 55,250 articles compared to Wikipedia’s almost nine million articles and I think there’s an opportunity for English language teachers to usefully contribute to the development of Simple English Wikipedia by writing new articles and developing those already there.

 My home-educated son loves Nibipedia.  He’s found some great educational videos to watch and articles to read, and will happily spend time exploring the nibs and linked videos.

Are there any other English language teachers out there using, or considering using,  Nibipedia in your lessons? I’d be very interested to hear any suggestions about how it could be used as an aid to teaching English.

English Tongue Twisters

The 1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters has an excellent list of English tongue-twisters.

I used a selection of these tongue-twisters in a lesson where the focus was on pronunciation, and they were an engaging way to practise the sounds many English language learners commonly find most difficult to master.

For example, the two following tongue-twisters were an entertaining challenge for my group of Polish and Hungarian students:

Something in a thirty-acre thermal thicket of thorns and thistles thumped and thundered threatening the three-D thoughts of Matthew the thug – although, theatrically, it was only the thirteen-thousand thistles and thorns through the underneath of his thigh that the thirty year old thug thought of that morning..

and

I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish, but if you wish the wish the witch wishes, I won’t wish the wish you wish to wish.

The site is also a very good source of tongue-twisters from many other, diverse, languages; from Albanian to Zulu, and Bengali to Yiddish. In the spirit of fairness I gave the students tongue-twisters in their native languages to read to me and, to the amusement of everyone in the lesson, I then made truly awful attempts to repeat them.

Image via flickr

Business English dictionary

BusinessDictionary.com is a useful online dictionary for English language learners wanting to improve their business English.

This dictionary lists over 20,000 business-related terms and definitions, with over 150,000 links between related terms. Audio files enable users to hear each term being spoken (with an American accent) and there’s the option to subscribe by email to a daily definition of an important business term. BusinessDictionary.com has an integrated search tool and can also be browsed by subject; e.g. shipping, currency trading, training and advertising and marketing.

Wordia visual dictionary

Wordia is great fun and a creative and engaging way of introducing new vocabulary to English language learners.

It’s a visual dictionary with a difference; it’s “a democratic visual dictionary. A place where anyone with a video, webcam or mobile phone can define the words that matter to them in their life.” To take part simply think of a word, perhaps one that has a significant meaning for you, and record and upload a video defining your word.

The site is run by a team of language enthusiasts who are working with the National Literacy Trust,  HarperCollins , The Open University and Michael Birch, founder of the Bebo.com social networking website.

There are some excellent video definitions on Wordia and it’s well worth spending some time browsing the site. 

If you use  Twitter you can follow Wordia and receive updates when interesting new videos are added to the Wordia site.