Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

A rule of thumb for learning idioms is that you can’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Just when you think a student has mastered the strange elements of idiomatic language, along comes a phrase that has your student barking up the wrong tree. Is it time to have them think outside the box? The IdiomDictionary is an online source for learning about idioms. With a simple interface, the site gives you not only the definitions, but also some historical background on the phrases and examples in a sentence.

The site claims to have more than 5,000 idiom phrases on hand for search. Certainly for second language learners, the understanding of idioms can be a struggle. But with the IdiomDictionary and a little help from the teacher, students should be able to hit the nail on the head and get a better sense of our language and its all of its quirks.

Idiom Dictionary

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Go beyond basic Spanish vocabulary at Speak Like a Spaniard

Great resources for teaching ESL/EFL at ESL Basics

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

It’s not till I tried (pretty unsuccessfully) to learn a foreign language that I learned how little I understood about the nuts and bolts of linguistics. In particular, conjugating German verbs still gives me a painful flashback to a dark, distant time. But the fact of the matter is that in order to really understand how a language works, conjugation in all of its “present perfect continuous” glory is just something you have to know. As a native speaker you don’t really even think about it — you simply know that “I have been walking” is the way it’s said, not that it’s the present perfect continuous conjugation of the verb “to walk”.

But for English language learners this can be a daunting task, and something that needs to be mastered if their goal is fluent, conversational English. At Conjugation.com, a free English verb conjugation tool, simply type in a verb and the site will give you every possible conjugation under the sun. Conjugation.com couldn’t be simpler to use and is a great resource for anyone who is an ELL or ESL student working on their verbs.

Conjugation.com

Related stuff

Help your English Language Learners stay current with Breaking News English

Great resources for teaching ESL/EFL at ESL Basics

Escuchen la One Semester of Spanish Love Song

BY AARON FOWLES

A few years ago I spent some time in Poland teaching English. While there, I created a simple website to help my students learn English. It wasn’t anything special by today’s standards, but back then it was reasonably popular. It was called Englishweb. I know, very creative.

I remember getting an e-mail from Sean Banville telling me about his brand new website, Breaking News English. This was in 2005. Since then, this website has been cranking out fully-featured lesson plans every 1-3 days (with a brief hiatus in 2006). Each plan is based on current events and includes audio support and extra activities.

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BY AARON FOWLES

I imagine that most people reading this are familiar with Last.fm, an online streaming music site. I taught ESL social studies last year with a focus on geography, and while my students were working on a project about Poland, I had the idea to play some music from that country.

Somehow, it worked. Rather than choosing jazz, as highlighted in the screenshot, I just entered the word Polish and let last.fm do the rest. My students were immediately immersed in the aural spectrum of a country of which they had no immediate knowledge. Talk about meaningful.  “What are they saying?”  “They like hip-hop, too?”  “What’s this music about,” my students kept clamoring. Yes, clamoring.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

The origins of words and phrases from the English Language gets a nice twist with Etymologic, a fun online quiz that can be difficult to master. The site consists of a series of questions with two to four possible answers, most of which seems plausible. You have to show an uncanny knowledge of English (or be incredibly lucky with your educated guesses) to get all the questions correct.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re teaching English-language learners in your class — which includes pretty much every teacher in every school — then you need to check out the great resources at ESL Basics. English is an incredibly frustrating language for many to learn, what with its hundreds of synonyms, and spelling and grammar so complex that even most native speakers can’t master them. Well, for those trying to learn English, ESL Basics is a great free resource to try and make sense of the oddities of the language.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Do your students need to study for that upcoming geography test? Perhaps the SATs are coming up? Well, flashcards are so 1994. It’s time to head over to Smart.fm. Smart.fm is a free learning and review system that is like your own personal study partner — a study partner that happens to have a super-slick multimedia review system in her backpack.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

In response to the overwhelming need for resources for English language learners, ESL- and ELL-based websites and web-based resources are popping up like mushrooms after the rain. If you’re thinking about putting together an online resource or just blogging about your experiences in ESL and ELL environments, you might want to check out ImagineLearning’s free Widgets dealing with translating and other language-based resources.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Last year we reviewed Xtranormal Text-to-Movie, a free computer animation app that lets you create your own cartoons. The folks at Xtranormal have made an even more impressive program called State, which adds characters who can walk around, advanced camera movement, movies with multiple scenes, and the ability to record your own voiceovers to your movies for free.

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BY BILL FERRIS

You can easily find an online dictionary or thesaurus. Lexipedia, however, presents an interesting combination of the two. Type in a word, and you’ll get visual array of related words, each with a listing of its definition and usage, and an audio file of the word’s pronunciation.

If you’re looking for a fancier way to say…well, “fancy,” for instance, then Lexipedia will break down the possible contenders by nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, as well as find related words. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

As the perpetrator of some of the worst handwriting in a fifty mile radius, I’ve grown to love choosing the right font. The right typeface can produce the sort of artful lettering my hands can’t. Or so I thought. FontStruct lets me use my hands (by way of my mouse) to create my own fonts that I can download and use. Oh, okay, so it’s not exactly handwriting, but it’s the most legible thing my hands have ever produced.

FontStruct works via a grid method. Simply fill in the grid with blocks of various shapes to form each letter. Some of the existing fonts on the site allow you to clone them, so you can get a better look at how the magic happens. There are a lot of shapes to try out on the grid, and creating an entire alphabet will take some time, but isn’t it worth it to have your own custom-built typeface?

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BY NICK YINGLING

Lately, during my lunch break, I usually sit at my desk and drop crumbs of food into my keyboard. That’s a terribly boring way to pass your lunch hour. So, naturally, I started watching my favorite show, The Golden Girls, on a streaming TV site. The main problem now is that most sites don’t have full episodes, just the excerpts. So I dug deeper. One site that streams shows is based somewhere in Asia. There are all sorts of foreign characters bannered across the top of the screen and the subtitles can sometimes take up one-third of the screen. How cool would it be if I managed to learn to read Chinese from passively exposing myself to the subtitles on my streaming episodes of The Golden Girls during my lunch break?!

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BY BILL FERRIS

This week’s MBTN features an express flight to Mars, Web 2.0 project ideas, alternatives to book reports, and online sites where you can learn a new language. Read about all of it after the jump.

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BY EMILY JACK

If you teach Spanish, you’re probably very familiar with sentences like, “Juan es muy guapo.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but this sort of phrase gets muy boring — both for you and for your students. We all know that every culture expresses itself with more color than such pedestrian sentences indicate. Help your students experience some of that color with the Speak Like a Spaniard blog, a compendium of idiomatic phrases, slang, and colloquial speech commonly used in Spain.

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BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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