Collection of Children's Project Writing

Nice find from Vicky in A2: A collection of children's written projects from four years, sourced from a school in Lancaster.  They date from mid-90s but have been updated.  A good set of example texts to use in a project or to analyse when we're studying child language development. Includes scanned images and transcripts, and some markup of grammar too.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/lever/index.htm

Grappling Grammarians

Review of a book about the history of grammar rules and prescription - most relevant to A2 students when their research project is done, so pop back and read it later. They did get cross about their linguisticals.

Grappling Grammarians
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204224604577028243560830070.html

Phonemic chart and app | Onestopenglish

Here's a new free web-based clickable phonemic chart, and for the Appley among you, a free iOS app, based on Adrian Underhill's excellent phonemic chart design - the one we use in class.
There's a paid version of the app too - which adds test words and activities. Worth a couple of quid...
http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/pronunciation/phonemic-chart-and-app/

WordNet

This database collects words with their lexical relationships. There's a clickable dictionary with hyponyms, hypernyms, synonyms, and other lexical relationships. You can even get a hypernym tree which builds all the way up to 'existence' or 'entity'. Click the bottom link for info about the page, or try this link for a test example: http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&s=Test&i=7&h=1100000010000000000000000#c
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

Lost Generation by Jonathan Reed

Clever poem that plays with sentence structures. In particular it uses nested sentences and conjunctions very carefully.
http://wp.me/p1deI-CN

BT's All Talk site

I was a little cynical about this at first, but the activities and ideas seem interesting. This website has several activities to encourage students from 14-19 to explore their langauge use and local dialectal usages. its style is a bit 'GCSE' but the content is relevant for A2s and interesting for AS too. See what you think at the link below.

All Talk

A sign of the Times’s? (grammarphobia.com)

This issue came up in both AS and A2 classes this week. Even professional publications meet difficulties deciding on a rule in some cases, and there's disagreement at the top. 

This doesn't, of course, mean you can ignore all rules of apostrophes. ;)

A sign of the Times's?
http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2011/11/times.html