EFL WEB EXPLORER (3)

This week we will have a look at Wordplays.com. It is a tool originally designed to help people solve word games. It might also work well with the average language class to do some vocabulary and spelling practice. There are a couple of games, especially interesting to work with pre-intermediate or intermediate students:

• If you use Words in a Word you will have three minutes to find all the words contained in a word given.
• With Word Morph you must change one letter in a setting word to form a new one, then you have to repeat the same process until you spell the ending word.

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EFL WEB EXPLORER (1)

I’d like to begin a series of posts to review some educational sites which I consider good resources for EFL teachers and students alike.

The first site I will mention has been developed for native speakers of English, but it might  well workfor EFL teachers and students, as far as they make a good choice of  places to visit and consider integrating their practice into their own curriculum. It is FUNBRAIN.COM. There are a few pages with some quizzes or rules for language practice which could as well work with students whose mother tongue is not English. Check these interesting sections and have fun while you learn:

• Grammar Gorillas is a secion where students need to identify parts of speech. If you click on the right word in the sentence, our friends the gorillas get a banana. There are some quizzes for beginner students (nouns and verbs only) and also for advance students. On  you will get the door to all the quizzes they have developed some flash games to do some reading and writing practice. The section contains the
• Spell Check: Spelling exercises
• Translator Alligator: Translation exercises. Easy. Spanish-English
• Scramble-Saurus
• Spellaroo: Spelling for beginner and intermediate
• What’s the Word: Reading and vocabulary for beginners (match pictures and words (alphabet, animals, fruit, tools, machines, shapes)
• Sign the Alphabet
• Word Confusion
• Word Turtle This is a custom seek and find word search game
• 2Bee or Nottoobee Present and past verbs to commplete sentences
• Rooting Out Words
• Stay Afloat
• The Plural Girls

SOME WEBS TO PRACTISE WRITING (1)

The blue book of grammar and punctuation is a site developed by Jane Strauss with plenty of rules and quizzes to practise these areas of language learning. Although there is a subscription service to get all the content on-line, you can also access some very interesting activities to practice Spelling / Vocabulary / Confusing Words, Grammar Rules, Punctuation & Capitalization, Rules for Writing Numbers,Keystrokes for Signs and Symbols, More than Two Dozen FREE Quizzes in interactive format with answers
SPELLING, VOCABULARY AND CONFUSING WORDS is a site

SOME WEBS TO PRACTISE VOCABULARY AND SPELLING (2)

I’d like to share a great tool for practicing spelling and learning new words, that I’ve just come across.

At spellingcity.com you can practice and enhance both your vocabulary and spelling, by listening to lists of words which are pronounced alone or in a sentence and spelt out.

This free tool, which can be used as a refresher on the overhead projector or at a language lab for individual work ,  contains over 30,000 words including plurals, contractions, past and future tenses. You must register to make the most of it. Then you can make your own word list to do sound and sentence practice, some tests and play computer games. It uses a real person’s voice to represent the individual words after which they give you a whole sentence.

– The pick a game section let you practice games with your own word lists or other peoples’ lists. You can play Word Search, HangMouse, Unscramble, Audio Word Match, Which Word?, Missing Letter or Unscramble Sentence

Angeles Hernandez
Computer Assisted Language Learning: Theoretical backup and practical issues