Turn-Taking

Good source on turn-taking here, with some practice and testing. Interesting framing too, though a little incomplete in some of the sections elsewhere.


https://www.sedit.org.uk/learn/styled/styled-3/styled-11/index.html

Machester University Dialects project

Fanbtastic resource for exploring how dialect and accent variation occurs across the UK. Interactive maps and tests!


http://projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/ukdialectmaps/

Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

A cool site which can help confirm your knowledge of word classes, or aid you in tackling large amounts of text for a research project. It colour-codes a text you paste in according to the *most likely* part of speech (word class) each word would statistically represent.

BEWARE! It's just an algorithm, and it's not as clever as you! It will make errors, and needs a human to check each suggested tag.

https://parts-of-speech.info/

Passive Form

Okay, cringey video, but some good advice and interactive practice to help get to grips with the passive form. It's very easy in fact -- it's just a verb form! -- as long as you don't try to make sense of it through the everyday meaning of the word 'passive', or try to take short-cuts in identifying it.


The page here helpfully discusses alternatives that might serve similar purposes, too.


http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/grammar-vocabulary/grammar-videos/passive-forms

Short TED Talks

You can search TED talks by length -- and the 0-6 minute talks are about the word count (600-750 words) that you're asked to produce for your Task 1 presentations.


Each talk has an interactive transcript, so you can see how the talk looks on the page (and click the transcript to hear how it sounds when delivered). You can also check the word count for a given speech. Around 5 minutes is approximately right -- but much depends on the pace of the speaker.


Loads of subjects covered here -- watch several! Pick up tips and good ideas on how to present!


https://www.ted.com/talks?duration=0-6&sort=newest

Twitter search and analytics

Great find from A2 student Jess: this site enables you to search Tweets and other social media posts, and gives automated graphs of changes in usage over time. Great tool to gather language data, though remember that you need to do the thinking and choose your searches very carefully -- and this stream of data is always-changing.


http://topsy.com/

European word translator

Amazing. Try a range of English words in the box here and it'll show you translations from around Europe. A vivid way of seeing which language group a word comes from -- if you see it to the east, it's Germanic; to the south, it's Latin or French. 

http://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/?word=dwell

Wordflex Touch Dictionary

This is the semantic network dictionary I showed on screen when we were doing word networks. Download it - it's pretty cool!

Wordflex Touch Dictionary - English visual dictionary and thesaurus created exclusively for iPad in association with Oxford University Press

An idioms and formulaic language quiz

Interesting.

An idioms and formulaic language quiz
http://blog.oup.com/2013/07/idioms-formulaic-language-quiz-greatest-thing-sliced-bread/

Exercises in Pronouns

Excellent find from A2 student Rachel: a series of exercises to explore your personal pronoun usage and beliefs. Part of an Internet-based research project stemming from a book, The Secret Life of Pronouns.

http://www.secretlifeofpronouns.com/exercises.php

Reed-Kellogg Diagrammer

This is fun to play with. It only handles short, and complete, sentences. Try it out with these.

I suspect it'll have difficulty with this one, because there's a hidden 'that'.

http://1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/default.aspx

MyEnglishgrammar.com

Aimed at students of English as a foreign language, this website has lots of clear and simple discussion of core elements of English grammar. The practice exercises are mostly about remembering the words (so native speakers will find it easy) but they're still good practice and should help you remember what words are what class and which tenses are which.

http://www.myenglishgrammar.com/home.html

Google Ngram Viewer

The Ngrams web viewer has been updated. This amazing tool allows you to search for word frequencies in Google Books' huge archive of digitised text. You can choose British or American English, choose what period of English you're interested in, and search for several terms which will appear as different coloured frequency lines on the same graph.

New to the search engine is the ability to search by part of speech (word class), as well as other special functions as explained in the link below. They've updated the data to 2012 as well — but you can still find the old 2009 data. Choose your preferred data set from the drop down menu.

There's lots more advice and tips in the blog post:

http://books.google.com/ngrams/info

Sound Comparisons

Oh my goodness. More accent material than you can shake a schwa at. This site collects pronunciations and full phonetic transcriptions of a range of words from accents around the UK and the world, in hyperlinekd and clickable charts. /ɔ:səm/.

http://www.soundcomparisons.com/

The Great Vowel Shift

Melinda Menzer's very handy GVS site from Furman University - with sound files and widgets as well as diagrams and explanations of the GVS. You don't need to memorise every detail for A Level study - but an awareness of its existence can help explain orthographic changes in texts over time, especially Middle and Early Modern texts.

http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/index.htm

Timelines: Sources from History

The British Library's Timeline site is a rather groovy way of exploring the history of English.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/timeline/historytimeline.html

I just rediscovered this in my iBooks collection. Other ebook readers which can handle the standard .epub format should be able to read it too, though it's got some snazzy features that might not work. 

The material in this short, free, electronic book from the Open University bridges our work on grammar and introduces some of the issues we'll be learning next term at AS; good revision material therefore for A2s, too. 

Check out this collection on iTunes U:

English grammar in context - for iBooks The Open University English 13 Ratings View in iTunes

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/

TAPoR text analysis tool

For A2s to consider: got loads of text you'd like to analyse?

The awesome TAPoR website has tools that will give you word counts, frequencies, charts and more to enable you to manage very large amounts of data, like many magazine articles or speeches, or entire movie scripts.

It doesn't do the thinking for you, but it helps expose interesting patterns by showing you them in a pretty way.  More on this to come in class, but have a play - try putting the PLB address into the Your Web Page text box and choose Explore with Voyeur.