Hello everybody! How are you?
Last week we explored a very useful tool: social bookmarking. As Sarah told us, it gives the possibility to store our favourite websites online and to share them with other people who have similar interests. What an excellent resource for our studies! Furthermore, Del.icio.us gives you not only the titles of the websites, but also short notes which allow you to know their contents. In this way you can immediately decide if a website interests you or not; you don’t need to visit all of them. I had never heard of del.icio.us before and I used to search the Web using GOOGLE, but this search engine gives you many websites which may or may not interest you and your resources might become really complicated and confusing. Using the new tool, we can also create our personal network of people who share our same interests.
This week we were asked to search Del.icio.us in order to find 5 websites concerning English learning, listening, teaching, blogging… The websites that I chose are:
- English Language Listening Lab Online (ELLLO): it includes about 1000 listening activities which deal with various topics. Students can listen to them free via internet and learn many new idioms and words thanks to the different activities offered.
- English for specific purposes: it is the world online journal about English for specific purposes for teachers. It includes the articles of many teachers who tell their experiences in ESP teaching.
- How to use English punctuation correctly: it explains the correct use of English punctuation.
- British National Corpus: it contains a collection of 100 million written and spoken words and it gives the opportunity to find the frequencies and the concordances of words in different registers not only considering the whole corpus but also searching in parts of it.
- ESL lesson plans and materials for communicative English lessons: it is addressed to teachers who want to find useful materials for communicative English lessons in classroom.
The members of my group chose some interesting websites: I noticed that Sara chose ‘How to use English punctuation correctly’ as well and that 9 websites concern grammar, 5 listening activities, 2 vocabulary exercises and explanations and 2 dictionaries online. They are all extremely useful for our studies, but the following drew my attention:
- English Pronouncing dictionary with instant sound free online (Sara): it gives you the correct pronunciation of words.
- Listening Lab (Anna): ‘you can listen to everyday conversations and improve your listening skills.’
- Common errors in English (Nicola): you can find the list of the 2008 common errors in English usage and their grammar explanations.
- Cambridge Dictionaries online (Davide): a useful monolingual dictionary online which gives you the opportunity to listen to every words and to avoid typical mistakes.
I would also include another nice website chosen by Nicola, which I consider very useful when you write since by making a fight between two words you can see which one is the most used in English:
I really enjoyed Del.icio.us and social bookmarking,
See you soon
Elisa
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