Study English : Talking About Holidays and Leisure

Online reference tools

 *Dictionaries and thesauruses

*Concordances and corpuses for language analysis

*Translators for language analysis

*Encyclopedias for research and project work

1.     Dictionaries and thesauruses

Dictionaries

Whether your students are using bilingual, semi-bilingual or monolingual learners dictionaries in paper or electronic form, there is no denying that there is a far greater range of dictionary reference tools available than was the case even ten years ago.

Virtually all of the major monolingual learners’ dictionaries are sold with a CD-ROM. These CD-ROMs often have some or all these features:

·        Search ability (which is not alphabetically based).

·        Audio recordings of the words, often in both British and
         American English.

·        Games and exercises.

·        Information on typical errors.

·        The ability to bookmark and personalize.

·        Thesaurus functionality.

·        Corpus informed information on frequency.
 
Thesauruses

While electronic dictionaries can be used at all levels, it is worth bearing in mind, initially, that thesauruses are more suited to the intermediate and advanced levels than to the elementary or pre-intermediate levels, where much more language is new to the learner. For higher levels, they can be used to enrich and extend your learners’ vocabulary, whereas lower-level learners might find the variety of language on offer too overwhelming to be of any direct use.
 
A thesaurus can do wonders for writing projects. It can encourage learners to be more adventurous in their creative writing at the same time as helping them to analyse their output more critically. The activity below can be used as an introduction both to what thesauruses look like and to how they work.

Concordancers and corpuses for language analysis

A concordancer is similar to a search engine in many respects. Essentially, it is a small program that can examine large quantities of text for patterns and occurrences of particular words or phrases. Concordancers are often considered to be the domain of the language researcher or the kind of tool used by writers of grammar references and weighty linguistic tomes. And indeed they are primarily used in this domain. However, they have played an increasingly large part in the lives of materials writers in ELT over the past few years. Being able to make informed decisions on the frequency of words and structures, their collocates and particular positions in the language now influences the writing of much of the printed materials we see in our daily teaching lives, and has transformed textbooks beyond all recognition.

Projects such as COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database), which started in 1980 under the auspices of Professor John Sinclair, have created vast databases of contemporary text which, in the case of COBUILD itself, led to the creation of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, which was based on

an exhaustive study of the created database, the corpus. Such projects have led to better dictionaries and reference works, but they are also widely used by other writers, and their effects can be clearly seen in the coursebooks we use today, as we have said. But they also have a part to play in the classroom. Let’s turn now to examine how a concordancer works, and what it does. Concordancing involves the use of the program itself (the concordancer) and a corpus, or large body of text, to be analysed. Corpuses are compiled from a variety of sources: written collections such as newspapers or journals, or spoken collections taken from radio and television sources, or gathered on the street in audio format. The corpus of text is tagged, meaning that each word is described by its location, its position in relation to other words in a sentence, its frequency, and so on. The concordancer searches the corpus, asks it about a particular word and how it is used, and then you get a screen of results from a part of the corpus showing the word and enough text either side to be able to understand the context in which it is used. Here we are looking at when the words since and for occur in a corpus of spoken English

Translators for language analysis

Translation software is still in its infancy and at the time of writing remains unreliable and in many instances of dubious quality. However, it is worth mentioning, if only to point out to your learners the dangers it poses if they use it inappropriately, for example to carry out a translation assignment into their own language. The AltaVista site, Babel Fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com/), leads the way in offering quick web-based translation, but you shouldn’t expect great results from anything other than single words or very simple phrases. Nothing you will find on the web will be able to cope with the famous Groucho Marx one-liner, Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

By now you may be asking yourself why we are discussing translation sites at all. The simple answer to that is that it is precisely their fallibility and simplicity that make them interesting vehicles for getting learners to notice the language they are working with, to recognise structures and to process language in an engaging and often amusing way.

An intermediate translation class

Apart from being a fun activity, this involves quite a lot of language processing, and also highlights the problems of relying too heavily on technology.

While the translation back into English opposite isn’t perfect, Babel Fish Translator was never intended to go backwards and forwards between languages like this. The original translation into Spanish was good enough to be understood, and we have used the site a few times to get an idea of the content of certain web pages in languages we do not speak, or even to engage in text chat with speakers of other languages.

Encyclopedias for research and project work

It used to be the case that having access to an encyclopedia meant also needing to have a large set of shelves on which to store all of the volumes. This collection of volumes then became a small CD-ROM sitting next to our computers, and these days is more likely to be a collection of web addresses to useful and authoritative sources online. Informational reference sites based on printed material are a good starting point and here we would include paper-based volumes such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as Microsoft Encarta, which was originally published on CD-ROM.

Do check out how often the content is updated. Microsoft Encarta is updated regularly, but more regularly for premium subscribers than for the free version. Wikipedia is updated every minute of every day, but then we have to bear in mind that it has thousands of editors worldwide, with varying degrees of experience. All this must be weighed up when deciding which to use. In the end referencing a variety of sources may help. Sites such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta and the Columbia Encyclopedia can safely be considered both accurate and fairly comprehensive, but with some this may not be the case. It is worth remembering the caveat made in Chapter 7 about Wikipedia being user-produced, and therefore potentially prone to inaccuracies.

The wealth of information contained on these sites opens up the world to our learners in a way that more traditional collections of classroom objects simply can’t. Project work, biographies and other fact-based lessons become less arduous for our learners, leaving them free to concentrate on the language side of things, and able to access the information they need for any particular task from a reliable source. On the next page is an example of a fact-finding activity which involves lower-level learners using encylopedias to find out information about a country they are interested in.

Conclusions

considered the use of online dictionaries, thesauruses and translation services.
 

examined the role of concordancers and corpuses in lesson planning and teaching.
 

examined the use of online encyclopedias, and considered how they provide access to

a much-needed ‘world knowledge’ in the classroom.

taken  from HOW TO.. teach english with technology

Nicky Hockly & Gavin Dudeney

Narrative text ( CINDERELLA )

Cinderella

Once upon a time, there lived an unhappy young girl with her stepmother and two step sisters who didn't like her. All the nice things, kind thought and loving touches were for her own daughters. But, for the poor unhappy girl, there was nothing at all. For she had to work hard all day, and only when evening came was she allowed to sit for a while by the fire, near the cinders. That is how she got her nickname, for everybody called her Cinderella.

It was quite true. Cinderella, even dressed in rags with a dusty gray face from the cinders, was a lovely girl. While her stepsisters, no matter how splendid and elegant their clothes were still clumsy, lumpy, and ugly.

One day, a ball was to be held by the royal family of the kingdom to find the prince's spouse. Cinderella's stepsisters ordered beautiful new dress for the ball. Cinderella wanted to go to the ball but her stepmother asked her to stay at home.

"You? My dear girl, you're staying at home to wash the dishes, scrub the floor and turn down the beds for your stepsisters. They will come home tired and very sleepy." asked her stepmother.

Cinderella only nodded her head and began to work. Suddenly something amazing happened. In the kitchen, where Cinderella was sitting all by herself, there was a burst of light and a fairy appeared.

"Don't be afraid Cinderella, I know what you feel, my dear. Do you want to go to ball?" asked the fairy.

"Yes, I do. But look! How can I go to the ball with this dress? Cinderella replied.

Then the fairy turned Cinderella's dress became the most beautiful dress and with beautiful slippers, the loveliest ever seen in the realm. The fairy also turned a pumpkin into a parking coach and turned the mice become six white horses.

"Now, you can go to the Court and go to the ball. But remember my dear Cinderella, you must leave the ball at midnight and come home. For that is when the spell ends. Your coach will turn back into a pumpkin, the horses will become mice and you will be dressed again in rags with clogs.

At the ballroom, Cinderella amazed everybody there include the prince. When the prince set eyes on Cinderella, he was stuck by her beauty. Walking over to her, he bowed deeply and asked her to dance. Cinderella had a wonderful time at the ball. But, all of a sudden, she heard the sound of a clock, the first stroke of midnight.

Remembered what the fairy had said, Cinderella ran back to the coach and went home. But he lost one of her slippers in ballroom. The prince who was now madly in love with her, picked up her slipper and would search for the girl whose foot fitted with the slipper.

In the next morning, the prince began to search everywhere in the kingdom but no girl whose foot fitted with the slipper. Until he found Cinderella house and asked Cinderella's stepsisters to wear the slipper. But none fitted with the slipper. The prince began hopeless.

"Is there any girl else here" Asked the prince.

"Yes, there are. But she is very ugly and I think she is not the girl that you are looking for." replied Cinderella's stepmother.

"Call her here!" Asked the prince.

Then Cinderella's stepmother called Cinderella to come out who was dressed in rags and wore clogs like usual. The prince began to wear the slipper into Cinderella foot, and it was fit.

The prince believed that Cinderella was the girl he met in the ball. Then the prince asked Cinderella to marry him. And at the end, Cinderella and the prince lived happily ever after in the kingdom.

source: Google.com/search:narrative text for senior high school

Future Simple Tense

I will sing

The future simple tense is often called will, because we make the future simple tense with the modal auxiliary will.

How do we make the Future Simple Tense?

The structure of the future simple tense is:

subject	+	auxiliary verb WILL	+	main verb
		invariable		base
		will		V1

For negative sentences in the future simple tense, we insert not between the auxiliary verb and main verb. For question sentences, we exchange the subject and auxiliary verb. Look at these example sentences with the future simple tense:

	subject	auxiliary verb		main verb
+	I	will		open	the door.
+	You	will		finish	before me.
-	She	will	not	be	at school tomorrow.
-	We	will	not	leave	yet.
?	Will	you		arrive	on time?
?	Will	they		want	dinner?

When we use the future simple tense in speaking, we often contract the subject and auxiliary verb:

I will	I'll
you will	you'll
he will she will it will	he'll she'll it'll
we will	we'll
they will	they'll

For negative sentences in the future simple tense, we contract with won't, like this:

I will not	I won't
you will not	you won't
he will not she will not it will not	he won't she won't it won't
we will not	we won't
they will not	they won't

How do we use the Future Simple Tense?

No Plan

We use the future simple tense when there is no plan or decision to do something before we speak. We make the decision spontaneously at the time of speaking. Look at these examples:

• Hold on. I'll get a pen.
• We will see what we can do to help you.
• Maybe we'll stay in and watch television tonight.

In these examples, we had no firm plan before speaking. The decision is made at the time of speaking.
We often use the future simple tense with the verb to think before it:

• I think I'll go to the gym tomorrow.
• I think I will have a holiday next year.
• I don't think I'll buy that car.

Prediction

We often use the future simple tense to make a prediction about the future. Again, there is no firm plan. We are saying what we think will happen. Here are some examples:

• It will rain tomorrow.
• People won't go to Jupiter before the 22nd century.
• Who do you think will get the job?

Be

When the main verb is be, we can use the future simple tense even if we have a firm plan or decision before speaking. Examples:

• I'll be in London tomorrow.
• I'm going shopping. I won't be very long.
• Will you be at work tomorrow?

taken from: Google.com/search : future simple tense article

Learn about Causative

Let / Make / Have / Get

The following is a mini-tutorial on the use of the causative verbs "let," "make," "have," and "get." After you have studied the tutorial, complete the associated exercises. If you already know how to use these verbs, you can skip the explanation and go directly to the exercises.

Let

FORM

[let + person + verb]

USE

This construction means "to allow someone to do something."

Examples:

• John let me drive his new car.
• Will your parents let you go to the party?
• I don't know if my boss will let me take the day off.

Make

FORM

[make + person + verb]

USE

This construction means "to force someone to do something."

Examples:

• My teacher made me apologize for what I had said.
• Did somebody make you wear that ugly hat?
• She made her children do their homework.

Have

FORM

[have + person + verb]

USE

This construction means "to give someone the responsibility to do something."

Examples:

• Dr. Smith had his nurse take the patient's temperature.
• Please have your secretary fax me the information.
• I had the mechanic check the brakes.

Get

FORM

[get + person + to + verb]

USE

This construction usually means "to convince to do something" or "to trick someone into doing something."

Examples:

• Susie got her son to take the medicine even though it tasted terrible.
• How can parents get their children to read more?
• The government TV commercials are trying to get people to stop smoking.

Get vs. Have

Sometimes "get someone to do something" is interchangeable with "have someone do something," but these expressions do not mean exactly the same thing.

Examples:

• I got the mechanic to check my brakes. At first the mechanic didn't think it was necessary, but I convinced him to check the brakes.
• I had the mechanic check my brakes. I asked the mechanic to check the brakes.

Source; Google.com/search article about causative

Song for kids

Twinkle twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
like a diamond in the sky

twinkle twinkle little star..
how I wonder what you are...

Learn about Conditional

English Lessons

Play Simon Says

Article about subjunctive

Subjunctive

The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred – the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is an irrealis mood (one that does not refer directly to what is necessarily real) – it is often contrasted with the indicative, which is a realis mood.

Subjunctives occur most often, although not exclusively, in subordinate clauses, particularly that-clauses. Examples of subjunctive use can be found in the English sentences "I suggest that you be careful" and "It is important that he stay by your side." (The corresponding indicative forms of the bolded verbs would be are and stays.)

Subjunctive may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation sjv or sbjv. It is sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood, as it is mostly found in clauses introduced by a conjunction.

Learn about nouns

UNIT 1: NOUNS

              Lesson 1: Identifying nouns

             Nouns are commonly defined as words that refer to a person, place, thing, or idea.

             How can you identify a noun?

                  Quick tip 1.1

                If  you  can  put  the  word  the  in  front  of  a  word  and  it  sounds  like  a  unit,  the  word
                is  a  noun.

             For example, the boy sounds like a unit, so boy is a noun. The chair sounds like a unit, so

             chair is a noun. Compare these nouns to *the very, *the walked, *the because.Very, walked,
             and because are not nouns.While you can easily put the and very together (for example,

             the very tall boy), the very, by itself, does not work as a unit while the chair does. So, chair is

             a noun; very is not. (There is one kind of noun that cannot always have the in front of it;

             see Lesson 6 later in this unit.)

Test yourself 1.1

Which of the following words are nouns? See if they sound like a unit when you put them here:

the           . Check the appropriate column.

                           Noun        Not a noun

Sample: always
                           .............

Getting started (answers on p. 20)                                       More practice (answers on the website)

1.  tree                                                                   6.  slowly
                        ...................   ...................                                  ...................   ...................

2.  when                                                                   7. factory
                        ...................   ...................                                 ...................    ...................

3.  beds                                                                   8.  ticket
                        ...................   ...................                                  ...................   ...................

4.  glass                                                                  9. boxes
                        ...................   ...................                                 ...................    ...................

5.  said                                                                 10.   almost
                        ...................   ...................                                  ...................   ...................

Test yourself 1.2

Underline the nouns in these phrases. Test each word to see if it sounds like a unit when you put it
here: the             .

Sample: all my friends

Getting started (answers on p. 20)

1.  your red sweater                                                     4.  many digital photos

2.  those boxes                                                          5.  his very interesting article

3.  a few men

Introducing

Hello everyone,
My name is Abdul Kholid Wira Pati, you can call me "Wira".
I am a teacher in Elementary school, exactly in state school named SDN Jatikramat I in Bekasi.
And now I study in University of Indraprasta, Faculty of Language and Art, English Department.

This is my blog.
Enjoy your tour.
Cheers..