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

Park Language Lesson Blog

Experimental: I'm going to keep a blog of this term's work on A2 Language Change lessons, to see if this offers useful support for learners. Let me know how you find it.

http://parklang.wordpress.com/

The pun conundrum

Go on, take a 'pun't! 

That doesn't even work. 

The pun conundrum
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21011778

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

English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU

A good source of core statistics on English language letter, word and sequence frequencies. Shame not to have overall two-, three- and four-word phrase frequencies too.

http://norvig.com/mayzner.html

12 English Letters That Didn’t Make the Alphabet

Stretching the definition of 'letters' slightly at times, but still interesting for A2s.

12 English Letters That Didn't Make the Alphabet
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/156077

An Introduction to Functional Grammar on Vimeo

A series of videos — 15-30 mins each — talking through Halliday's systemic functional grammar. Really friendly and accessible with a nice Prezi presentation.

http://vimeo.com/46732234

10 Smart Language Errors Kids Make

Or, 'virtuous errors'. 

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/153742

Picturing Metaphors for Reading

This one's a bit long, but it's a great example of an academic paper and uses Lakoff & Johnson's metaphor theory, which I know some A2s use for their research. 

It explores people's (drawn) metaphors for the process of reading, at home and at school; so it's telling about education as well as people's engagement with language.

The Believing Body
http://www.theillustratedprofessor.com/?p=3801

11 Weirdly Spelled Words

Phonology and history, in one orthographic package.

11 Weirdly Spelled Words—And How They Got That Way
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/151416

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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

Reinventing the book with Shakespeare

Ebooks can become rich collections of resources incorporating text-crunching computation. Here's an example using Shakespeare texts. 

Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/why-a-17th-century-text-is-the-perfect-starting-point-for-reinventing-the-book/263034/