Cheshire Cat Contest 2010. Tasks 7-8.pdf. 23. Explain: “He was parted from his parents”

This phrase is obsolete. I checked it out in Google Books. It was used earlier than the 20th century, also in the Bible. Maybe they just used a translation of The Black Hen by Pogorelsky. Then again, why do they want the new generation to learn an obsolete phrase?

Advanced. Twelve. ◉‿◉ I hope you already use the lexicographer tools I mentioned earlier. There are some more out there on the web. Feel free to try out the tools we love using here in Foki for our words research: http://ow.ly/9ytET. I recommend Google Trends, Insights, What Do You Love; and Neoformix, Trendistic and Visual Tweets for Twitter.

Your comments go to tumblr.

ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ Google’s nGram Viewer is an amazing tool that lets you search word frequencies over the history of publishing. It searches Google’s collection of 5 million books (about 500 billion words) and calculates how many times a word appears in any given year. The tool tracks the change in the use or popularity of different words or terms over time.

Intermediate. Ten. ah hope yer still lovin' mah blog, acco'din' t' th' code o' th' heells! Wordnik is a website for the word nerds. You can join the community, just browse, or sign up for an email “Word of the Day.”  However you play with the site, you’re bound to find a great resource for writing, education, and mind-honing in general.

Aaron Peckham, founder of Urban Dictionary, sees new words emerge every day. The standards for Urban Dictionary definitions, which users submit themselves, aren’t very high. But Peckham prefers it that way. “I think reading people’s definitions makes  them more entertaining and sometimes more accurate and honest than a heavily researched dictionary definition.” And they show that language is constantly evolving, sometimes minute by minute. Sometimes nsfw.

WordWeb is a free dictionary for your MS Windows computer. It sits in your system tray and works with your MS Word and other applications.

Here comes the Swiss knife of dictionaries, OneLook. Try their wildcards and reverse search. It’s like a dictionary on steroids!

Comment here.

Visuwords is an online graphical dictionary where you can look up words to find their meanings and associations with other words and concepts. The tool enables you to produce diagrams and learn how words associate.

Your comments are welcome here.

Intermediate. Eight. Te@ch3Rs h@V3 cl@ss. To keep up, American students need to learn at a rate of 2,000–3,000 words per year. Can wide reading really be enough to help students learn so many words? Yes, it can. The cumulative effects of learning from reading can be large. What kinds of reading are necessary to produce such vocabulary growth? To help students get the most out of reading, you should encourage them to read at a variety of levels—some text simply for enjoyment, which should benefit their fluency—and some text that challenges them. Many people like reading Simple Wikipedia.

You can evaluate a text you found for reading by your students with these two online tools. The Oxford 3000 Profiler will highlight the words out of their list and show you  what percentage of the words in your text are part of the Oxford 3000. The BlueCentauri writing sample analyzer calculates the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of your text. More about it, readability, and how we used it in one of our projects is here.

You can comment here.

Intermediate. Seven. Now some serious business for serious EFL teachers. EFL students should start with the most common words. By knowing the 2000 words with the highest frequency, they would know 80% of the words in common written texts. You can check out the General Service List. I use a list by Mark Davies (American English) for my class. You might like WordCount for British English. For a teaching period, I take two or three words from Mark’s list, write sentences with each word and create a word cloud for my students to unscramble it.

word cloud: Luke 6:39

Bonus. The 100 Most Beautiful Words.

Basic. Six. Teachas, welcome back to school. Don't chat, jus’ does yo’ work. Students need to know how a word functions in various contexts. Often a synonym or antonym is all students need to understand a new word in context. A good way to be sure students understand a word’s definitions is to have them provide example sentences in which they use the word. Asking students to use more than one new word in each sentence they create can force them to look for relations among words. You might invite students to make up a story in which a new word features prominently. You might have students pair new words and use each pair to make a silly question. For example, if you can skip breakfast, can you skip a disease?

One variation of the Word Map is called the Four Square activity. In this activity, each student takes a sheet of paper and folds into four sections. The students write a word (such as soothing) in the upper left hand section of the paper, then write an example (soft music), a non-example (crying babies), and a definition (having a calming effect) in other sections.

Semantic Mapping involves a web-like graphic display. To begin instruction, students are presented with a concept that is central to understanding a subject. They then brainstorm words that are related to that concept. Check out this dictionary.

See you here.

Basic. Five. Ahoy! Did ye heartly enjoy th' shore leave? On average, American students add 2,000–3,000 words a year to their reading vocabularies. This means that they learn from six to eight new words each day.

What does it mean to know a word? We usually mean knowing its definition. But knowing a word’s definition is not the same thing as being able to use that word in speech and writing. To know a word, students need to encounter it in context and see how its meaning relates to the words around it. For example, look at changes in meaning for the word gave, as it appears in different contexts:

Josh gave Nick five dollars.

Tyler gave Hannah a kiss. 

Not surprisingly, abstract words are more difficult to learn than are concrete words. Some words represent not just a new term, but a new concept. For example, a concept such as logarithm needs to be learned in the context of other mathematical concepts.

See you here.

Basic. Four. I’m loving my Anki decks and I need to share my joy with my students. Where? On the internets, stupid. Enter Quizlet. And ... it doesn’t rock, sort of. I couldn’t import a Pauker deck into Quizlet. Instead, I created a small sample deck or set, just for you to peek through. I definitely need some time before I feel comfortable with Quizlet. I am going to create a group for my students to help them learn the vocabulary from their textbook, chapter by chapter.

Comments are not possible in this blog, but you can comment here.

Basic. Three. Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone. Just kidding. Last week, I was tired of installing JRE and started playing with Anki (暗記 Jap. memorization). It is cross-platform, free and, bingo,  you don’t need JRE on your computer. It uses the spaced repetition study concept. I imported a deck from Pauker to Anki on my Xubuntu.

Why should we use Anki for sentences and not just vocabulary? Because we don’t speak in words, we speak in sentences. Learning sentences teaches us grammar with words at the same time.

Your first 1000 sentences should be in Russian and English before you switch to English-English. Do not translate the sentences to Russian in your head.  Your goal is to understand the sentences, not translate them. Example sentences from dictionaries are simple but bland. If you use Twitter you’ll read tons of tweets before finding your perfect example.

Basic. Two. Many people who want to go an extra mile in learning a language swear by word cards. See here: goo.gl/qS65l.

There are many studies showing the effectiveness of learning vocabulary from cards. The problem for beginning learners is getting to the threshold where they can start to learn from context. We need a vocabulary of about 3000 words before we can efficiently learn from context. The word cards can give a sense of progress, and a sense of achievement. See here: goo.gl/qFEVU.

I believe 7th graders (6th graders in gymnasium schools) and older students should use more complicated cards. They should have a word and an example sentence on the first side of a card, and the word’s definition on the other side. Some students and I used to play with jMemorize. Then I created several word sets for myself in Pauker. Both apps are cross-platform and free. They are written in Java. I like testing different Linux distributions on my computer, and I am now tired of installing the Java Runtime Environment again and again. Both programs use Leitner flashcards. I encourage you to try them out. See also my Tumblr blog.