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

S#*@ scientists say (boingboing.net)

Scientific language is full of technical terms that sound like everyday terms - and so can be seriously misunderstood when scientists speak in public. (Compare 'subject' or 'particle' in linguistics.)

S#*@ scientists say
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/18/s-scientists-say.html?dlvrit=36761

From Riddle to Twittersphere

The prolific David Crystal has another book out - looks like a readable approach to the history of English. Details in the article, including the full list of words he picks out.

From Riddle to Twittersphere: David Crystal tells the story of English in 100 words
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8824676/From-Riddle-to-Twittersphere-David-Crystal-tells-the-story-of-English-in-100-words.html

How not to represent accents...

The Australian had to apologise rapidly for this basically racist representation of the speech of an Irish airline boss. The respelling is pretty broad even at the start - and when you come across the 'dialect' idioms later on, you realise this isn't your normal (or acceptable) reporting...

http://www.irishecho.com.au/2010/12/01/full-transcript-of-the-insulting-article/5822#.TpcbXjPoqGU.mailto

Why Concrete Language Communicates Truth

The article stretches the concept of 'concrete' a little with verbs, to favour active over passive form for example, but this is still convincing stuff. 

Why Concrete Language Communicates Truth — PsyBlog
http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/06/why-concrete-language-communicates-truth.php

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.

Poster Presentation from Sussex Uni

Found this in the UofS library: the focus is to find whether rhyming in children's books helps children to learn new words, or to follow the plot. The results are perhaps surprising.

Apologies for the poor quality of the photos - low light and a mini camera. Let me know if you're interested and I'll aim to return with a better one. Or go and visit the library yourself - it is awesome.

Giving an academic conference paper

From the doctoral blog at University of Sussex - some advice on presentations. For A2s.

http://wp.me/pNwt4-9g