Super online lexical tools

Last semester one of my colleagues, who is working on a linguistics PhD sent me a link for a concordancer that he found to be useful. I gave it a look, and it wasn't just a concordancer, there are several of them along with 22 other tools.

I have used, and was using today, the vocab profiler. It is great. Just type or paste in some text and get a full accounting of the vocabulary included. I am doing a presentation at a speech contest on Monday next week and used some of this data in preparation.

In the past I pasted in a movie script for a feature length film and generated a word list for my students that shows them all of the words in the film according to the frequency of their occurrence. It was also a great lesson, because it showed them that the individual words aren't so difficult, but that difficulty in understanding comes because they are not used to listening.

The site is the Compleat Lexical Tutor (not my spelling). Give it a look and enjoy!

Great sites for students and teachers

Went to a reunion in Nagoya a couple of weeks ago for West Virginia University grads in Japan. It was a great event, and ended up meeting a whole bunch of people that I hadn't seen for upwards of 20 years. Two grads who I had actually never met before maintain a couple of great sites that I have recommended to my students.

The Kelly Brothers at Aichi Institute of Technology and elsewhere have set up http://www.manythings.org for students, with www.manythings.org/j for students who want the same content in Japanese. They also have a site, a4esl.org, which is a site with other various activities for ESL students.

For teachers they maintain the iteslj.org site, the Internet TESL Journal.

"English has arrived. What now?" Wish I'd written it

Here's a really good article on English teaching from the Daily Yomiuri Online. Sure wish I had written it.