Digital Delights for Learners

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Learn Natural English Daily at PhraseMix

This site looks like fun and comes highly recommended for learning idioms for speaking

Welcome to PhraseMix! Improve your English ability by understanding and memorizing common English phrases. Learn useful, real world phrases.

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Learn Natural English Daily at PhraseMix.com

Tell Your Stories Through Writing

“One can’t believe impossible things” said Alice. “I daresay you haven’t had much practice” said the queen

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The post continues, "Writing has always been a challenging and an overwhelming task," but identifies children as the group having difficulties. Adult and young adult learners often find writing even more difficult. Would you as older writers and L2 learners, find the storytelling tools a help to writing or another obstacle, this one technical?

Take look at the ones reviewed here. Try them out. Let us know what you think.

• Writeboard is web based document that you can work on alone or with others.
• OurStory tool uses a timeline to help you write your stories and adds pictures, videos and text. Send it others via mail or share it on different social networking sites.
• At StoryBird, create your own stories using existing drawings.
• TheStoryStarter has more than 1 million story starters and prompts for all ages. This tool is great to start a narrative story. Choose a starter that interests you and write your own.
• WhatifQuestions asks you “What if?” questions to generate your own story.

And more...

“You are not the same as you were before. You are much more… muchier now” said the Mad Hatter to Alice.

Tell Your Stories Through Writing, Ozge Karaoglu's Blog

Guide to Grammar and Writing

Still the best and most comprehensive English grammar and writing resource online for writers, English teachers and any English learner whether ESL/EFL/ESOL or NS.

Guide to Grammar and Writing is sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation, a nonprofit 501 c-3 organization that supports scholarships, faculty development, and curriculum innovation.

Using Spell-checkers

Should spell-checkers be allowed in tests? is not just about tests but offers sound general principals for using spell-check programs. At the The Spelling Blog, Johanna Stirling writes about,

Spell-checkers

You have to be a halfway decent speller anyway to be able to use a spell-checker. Your attempt has to be close enough to be recognised by the software and where there is an option, you have to be able to choose the right one. You also have to cope with homophones and other real-word errors on your own. See Spell checkers, how useful are they? for more on spell-checkers and an activity to train learners to use them well.

Autocorrect is more of a problem for both learning and meaning. This "corrects" your spelling automatically without you noticing it. So there is no opportunity to learn. Autocorrect may even turn it into the wrong word - not the meaning you intend - but it will be spelled correctly!

For fun and examples of spell-check correction problems, read Ode to a Spell Checker. Can you find and correct all the mistakes spell check made?

Mobile ESL

Mobile ESL from Athabasca University

Introduction

This is a course of lessons and practice on the system of English. It is divided into eighty-six sections.

Each section covers an area of basic grammar and contains a number of exercises. The exercises are not all the same length. Some exercises have only five questions, but others have up to nine questions. This is because some areas of grammar are more important than others.

his course tests your knowledge of English grammar and, more importantly, it gives you practice in using your knowledge to make correct and appropriate sentences. When you do the exercises, you will see that grammar is not just a game. Grammar has meaning - if you change some of the grammar in a sentence, you also change its meaning."

Poetry Pairing

Japanese Defense Ministry, via Associated Press There was one bright moment the Sunday after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan as Japanese naval forces rescued a 60-year-old man who had been riding the roof of his house for two days. The man, Hiromitsu Shinkawa, was found nine miles south of his hometown and nine miles out to sea.

Go to related slide show » 

In our weekly “Poetry Pairing” series, we collaborate with the Poetry Foundation to feature a work from its American Life in Poetry project alongside content from The Times that somehow echoes, extends or challenges the poem’s themes. Each poem is introduced briefly by Ted Kooser, a former United States poet laureate. 

This week we put three pieces together: the poem “The Word That Is a Prayer,” a photograph, above, from a Times slide show of over 100 images of the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and a March 11 blog post by the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, “Sympathy for Japan, and Admiration.”