Keep Organizing today use http://www.eslflow.com

ESLFlow.com
There is just too much data, too much information in life. How can you keep organized? Let's try using our blog(s). That way it will "never" disappear. The added advantage is other people may benefit from it as it won't be locked up in a personal account. With that thought in mind, let's share this website for future reference. It is ESLFlow.com http://www.eslflow.com

This site organizes topics in a usable manner, e.g.:

Business, Collocations, Complaints, Culture, Describing people, Describing places, Environment, Food/eating, Giving directions, Health & the body, Housing, Imagining & wishing, Jobs & careers, Money & spending, Movies & celebrities, Personality, Public Health/Safety, Relationships, Slang & Idioms, Sleeping & dreaming and more.


It has topics that are important for everyone to know. This is a topic on safety that uses more advanced language yet with the included pictures, could serve most any ESL class if adjusted to the class:
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/talkingsafety/states/ms/handoutsMS.pdf

(BE7) Wrote an email to my main English teacher today. Part of it said:
"When we teach students to find the meaning of a word, one of the first things they should do is ask "what part of speech" (POS) is it? It is not rare for these words "dog", "hound", "bug" to be used as nouns, but they are just as valid as verbs."

After providing those three examples it seemed a better list could be found on the web. So did a quick search for and hit this other Blogspot entry:
http://thyeoh07.blogspot.com/2008/03/words-that-act-as-nouns-and-verbs.html

That link provided some great explanations. It started out with:
"Words that act as nouns and verbs

There are words in English that belong to two Parts of Speech, that is nouns and verbs. By the way, Parts of Speech refer to eight categories of words, namely nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections.

Examples of such words are as follows:

Example 1: race

The race will be held tomorrow. [noun]

My race is Chinese.[noun]

They usually race to the bus station so as not to miss the bus.[verb]

Example 2: shower

I had a shower when I reached home.

[noun]
Modern parents usually shower their children with love. [verb]"...

So, always keep searching... and don't forget to share what you've learned.

(BE6)This link takes you to a wonderland of images useful for many things. They can invigorate your spirit, make you want to travel -or serve as a starting point for teaching a great lesson.

Please see http://tinyurl.com/d74sp6

Why learning new words is a Challenge

(BE5) Rob Waring's web site (http://www.robwaring.org/) provides some interesting and sobering facts concerning how much reading is necessary to encounter new words. A quote will be given, then the link to the site will be given.

"...the most common word in English is the. It appears so frequently that it appears on average every 17th word and covers about 5.83% of the total volume of English (1). The next most frequent word is the be verb and its inflections (was, were, are, am, is etc). be appears once every 20 words (you would have also met the of course). If you want to meet all the top 25 most frequent words in English statistically speaking (but of course not in reality) you'd have to read about 225 of text. To meet the first 1000 most frequent words in English you'd need to read 8533. The and be would have been repeated hundreds of times in this volume of text but it would take you 8553 words just to meet the 1000th word once. To meet the 2,000th which occupies 0.00432% of the volume of English or occurs once every 23,1003 words. However, you are only meeting the 2000th word once. If you want to meet it again, you'd have to read another 23,103 words" The bolding is mine for emphasis. More of these statistics are in the link below.

http://www.robwaring.org/er/ER_info/how_much_er.htm

Rob's site covers more than vocabulary. Please take a look.

(BE4) Just ran into this web site below -thanks Mike! Last month I took a BBLEP (Blog Based Lesson and E portfolios) class. As usual, learning one thing lead to another... so here is a website useful about teaching English. It is:
Six things to know:

While we are at it, let's look at a wonderful website that translates text to speech in multiple languages. In the upper right hand box on this web page, type in, or paste in English, and the speaker will speak what you typed in. Type in, or paste in Japanese or Chinese script, select the Japanese or Chinese speaker respectively, and the speaker will speak what you typed in. This is very useful. Give it a try. Text to Speech Translator

(BE3) This dictionary described below is very useful to discover related words:

http://exploreourpla.net/languages/english/

" 203,147 English Words

WordNet is a semantic lexicon for the English language. It was created and is being maintained at the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under the direction of psychology professor George A. Miller.

The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications."

I personally like it because of its unique features. You may perform wild card searches (Put in part of a word and put an asterisk in the word which means replace the asterisk with any set of letters). For example, enter into the search box:
abbreviat* and these are the results you will see

abbreviate, abbreviated, abbreviation, abbreviator,

This shows you words that are spelled similar and thus often may be related to your search word. Additionally, you can click on the linked word (when you actually use the dictionary)

This dictionary can also perform other searches. Search for three letter words (use m?n) that start with "m" and end with "n" and you'll get man, men, Min, Mon

That is for an example to point out its flexibility. Try it, you'll like it.

Language help is out there

(be2)
The BBC web site contains many resources for learning so many languages. This site below is very intriguing. Where else can you quickly see essential phrases in 36 languages? They have extensive information for the core languages. I have improved my Spanish and Chinese by using the BBC web site. This site also has wonderful pictures for each geographical location. Please take a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/quickfix/



Here are a couple of interesting language facts from the site. I never knew Urdu was such a widely used language with almost a half billion speakers, including a million in the UK.

Why learn Urdu?

It is a living language spoken by 490 million people around the world.

The Urdu community in the UK numbers about one million speakers.

It is not just a practical language spoken on a daily basis, but one that produced great scholarships and poetry.

Learning Urdu will also help you recognise words in Arabic and Persian since many words are common in all three languages.

People will respect the fact that you make an effort to speak to them in their language, whether abroad or in the UK.