Saturday, March 23, 2013

Love teaching language / American Corpus!

Hi all,
It has been a couple of years since I've taught language and after the first day of teaching three weeks ago, I remembered just how much I truly enjoy it.

This is a reminder for you all to use the American Corpus as much as you can when you have a question about the difference between certain synonyms as well as when you have a question about whether something you wrote is frequently used by native speakers or not.  This is a super valuable tool for you as learners and for me as a teacher!  I am so very grateful to all those linguists who have put this valuable resource together for us!

Enjoy your weekend and see you soon.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

IPA for Standard American English with sound bites!

Yay!  So happy - found the site with sound bites for you to listen to.  Enjoy!

Time flies, especially when you're having fun!

Hi everyone,

We are already in our third week together at the school.  The sessions are short and next week is our last together at the school, at least for now.  Today I told the students I would look for a Standard American International Phonetic Alphabet website with sound bites for you to hear how to pronounce sounds correctly.  I am about to look for this now.  In the meantime, I will post the website that we looked at today, at least you can see the symbols of the sounds.

Here is the website we visited today.  I will create a link for us on the blog too!

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/IPA/SSAE.html


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Using the American Corpus

Hi everyone,

Using the COCA site is a bit complex, but for now, create an account for yourselves, it is free and I will show you how to navigate this site in class.  It's so fun and exciting and hopefully very helpful!

Welcome ELS students of San Francisco!

Hi everyone and welcome to the blog.  If you have a gmail account I can invite you to write on the blog.  If you don't have a gmail account, it's easy to get one.  If you're checking the blog today, browse around the dictionaries and the American Corpus site!  See you tomorrow.