Thursday 13 May 2010

Web tools for vocabulary building and help with pronunciation

There's now a whole series of online resources to help students to build up their vocabulary and improve their pronunciation. There's no end of the ways you can use them. I'll suggest a few but I'm sure you can come up with more. Why not add them as comments or in a new post?

So here goes:
lingro - thanks to Andrew M for finding this one. If you paste the URL (address) of a website into it, it will load the page and make all the words clickable. When you click on a word, it offers you the definition of it or a translation into the language you select. Many words also come with a sound file so that you can hear the way they are pronounced.

If you register (which is immediate) you can save your own word lists and play games with them to help you remember them. I've got my students, who are currently working on projects, to learn 10 new words related to their project topic per week using lingro as part of their homework.

Seeing is believing - so check it out!

wordnik - type in a word and it not only gives you  a series of definitions but shows you how it has been used in context - offering you links to the sources plus examples of how it is currently being used on twitter! You can also click on"Pronunciations" to see how the word breaks down phonetically and to hear it being said.

forvo - type in a word to hear it pronounced by different people from all over the world. If you register with the site you can also request for people to upload the pronunciation of the word you want.

wordia - this is a site where people upload videos to illustrate a word (have a look at "filch"  for a good example).

wordreference - a good place to quickly translate a word into a range of languages.

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