Languagelab.com Blog

I was reading through the some of the replies to my blog the other day.  Some people directly responded to the blog.  Most people wrote ‘I wanna learn’ and left it at that, which is a little frustrating.  The point of the blog is for readers to learn and what they were saying what ‘I’m not learning.  I wanna learn.’

I was on http://www.google.co.uk at the time when I angrily typed in ‘lazy student.’  That’s when I discovered http://www.lazystudent.co.uk/.

It’s divided into 48 categories, each of which has done of listings and links to websites that open in new windows.  In ‘Hot Listings,’ you’ll find the most popular links.  In ‘Editor’s Pick’ you’ll find lots of interesting things to read about.

Their mission statement is “to make it easy for students and educators to integrate the Internet into the classroom. The need for a complete online educational guide is evident. Lazy student is designed to be that resource for students and educators.”  Despite its name the site does just that.  I highly recommend it.

See you next week,

Grammar Girl

Are you interested in journalism? Would you like the chance to ask a BBC journalist from the UK questions about his job? What is it like to travel around the world and write exciting stories?

Come and join us at 7:30pm UK time (11:30am PDT) at the Theatre in English City.

It will be a fun evening and a chance to practice your English with other students and teachers.

See you there,

Jessie Teacher !

This Tuesday at 5pm PDT (1am UK time) Shiv Rajendran our co-founder at Languagelab will be presenting to an audience of educators at ISTE Island.

ISTE is the International Society for Technology in Education and is a collaboration of educators from all over the world interested in advancing
the use of technology in education.

This presentation is to give an insight on what works and what doesn´t when thinking about virtual worlds and education.  The presentation will focus on what Languagelab has learned in 4 years of teaching in Second Life.

The presentation will be at http://slurl.com/secondlife/ISTE%20Island/204/46/23.

Enjoy the presentation!

Have you ever wondered if learning on-line is good for you?

Do you think that learning on-line is as good as or better than learning in a classroom?

What about ‘blended learning’ where you learn on-line and face to face?

A recent 12 year study by the Department of Education in the USA has shown that learning on-line is not only effective but also better than traditional face to face teaching.

Barbara Means, the study’s lead author says:

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that on-line learning today is not just better than nothing- it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction”

The study showed that only learning on-line only was better than only having face to face classes , but the best way to learn was a combination of face to face and on-line,  a blended learning  approach.

There were some very interesting key points like:
·  Students who took all or part of their class on-line performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

· Instruction combining on-line and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely on-line instruction.

· On-line learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.

· Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for on-line learning

Click here to read the full report.

In other words if a student is studying at a local ESL school and comes to practice in English City every week they will perform better than students who online learn online or only learn face to face.

Two weeks ago, I discussed the meaning of ‘the.’   For this week, I wanted to show you an excellent exercise I’d found on http://www.usingenglish.com.

Please do the exercise on http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/84.html because it highlights the fact that geographical nouns may use ‘the,’ depending on what they are.

After you’ve done that try the following:

Read this letter. Look at the ‘x’ and decide whether to use the definte article ‘the’ or not.

Hi Grammar Girl,

I arrived in x USA last Monday. We left x Rome, flew over x Alps and made a quick stop in x London. There we went shopping in x Harrods, visited x Tower of London and enjoyed a sunny afternoon in x Hyde Park. On the following day we left for x New York. x time on board wasn’t boring as there were two films to watch on x monitor. x people on plane were all Italian. Before we landed at x JFK airport, we saw x Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Empire State Building. hotel I stayed in was on x corner of x 42nd Street and x 5th Avenue. I don’t like hotels very much, but I didn’t have time to rent an apartment. Please say hello to Jessie and Chris.

Yours,

Shiv.

Answers will be next week.

See you soon,

Grammar Girl !

What do you think of art and techology? Do you think that it will change art forever?

I have found a great video from TED and it shows you how art can be be physically created by your body and displayed using technology.

The shapes the people create in the video are great fun. The voice recoginition is very accurate and fascinating and makes me think of what we will be able to do in Virtual Worlds in the future.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to speak in a virtual world and the text just appear like a subtitle underneath your avatar !

Well I hope you enjoy the video and it inspires you to make some art of your own !

It’s summer here in London.  When the sun shines it shines brightly.  Oxford street is heaving with tourists, which means it’s rising up, as if pushed.  There are tourists from almost everywhere in the world here.  London is particularly popular with Japanese and Korean tourists.  A lot of single, young students come to London to shop, to have fun and to study English.  They come to the UK for the summer because they believe in a concept called ‘language immersion.’

In language immersion, you don’t follow a traditional language course to learn.  You do every-day activities in the target language.  You live, breathe and eat in that language.  In other words, you go to where it is spoken.  This is why students come to the UK.

What do you do if you can’t afford to take time off work or your studies, or if your Daddy can’t send you to Oxford Street?  The answer is that you download Second Life software for free, and you visit English cities in Seccond Life.  It’s so much cheaper.  And you can speak to real people in English.  Go to Languagelab and ask for Grammar Girl.  I’m there at least three days’ a week at 4am PDT.

I was working away on my island in Second Life and doing my best to make it easy for visitors to find their way round without getting lost. To do this I went to every location and ‘installed’ teleporter pads. If you are from my generation you’ll remember the old Star Trek episodes on the television, where Captain Kirk said ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ Those beams looked and sounded like my teleporter.

So I ‘installed’ teleporter ‘pads,’ which means I placed objects round the island. These objects would ’send’ people from one object to another, without the person having to move on their own. All they would have to do would be to ‘right-click’ on the object and select ‘teleport. Thus, ‘teleport’ is a verb and ‘teleporter’ is a noun.

Once you have chosen a location (or as we might say ’selected a location from the menu’ or selected a location from the ‘list’) you click on the word that says ‘energise.’ This squeezes you into a little ball and sends you to another location.

These space age words have become common vocabulary in virtual words. Here they are again:
install
teleporter
pad
teleport
menu
energise.

If you haven’t been to Second Life before, you might want to visit this virtual world so that you can experience what these words mean. You can to do that by going to http://www.secondlife.com. But Captain Kirk would probably say that he’s been using these words for years.

Hi Languagelab students,

My friend sent me a funny clip yesterday…. Take a look:

I thought that Mary Poppins was kind and friendly? Hmmm….

What adjectives could you use to describe this clip?
Do you remember anything about the original Mary Poppins film?

See you soon and don’t be scared !

Jessie Teacher

The past simple describes a complete event that took place in the past. If a verb is irregular, the past simple is a different word with different spelling. Some examples of this include run (run becomes ran) and get (get becomes got).  If a verb ends in ‘ed’ in the past simple then it is a regular verb.

Sometimes it may be a little difficult to pronounce regular, past simple verbs, which is quite understandable when you realise that there are three ways of pronouncing the ‘ed.’  You can pronounce it with ‘t,’ ‘d’ or ‘id.’

Here is a rule to help you along the way:

The only time you add a syllable is when the base form of the verb ends with a -t or -d:
start à started [star tid]     fold à folded [fol did]

The final sound is changed to t      Final sound is changed to d
when the last sound of verb is:     when the last sound of verb is:
k, ck, ch, sh, s, x, p, f              m, n, l, z, b, g, r, v
talk à talked [talkt]                     blame à blamed [blamd]
check à checked [chekt]               plan à planned [pland]
search à searched [searcht]                 pull à pulled [puld]

Next week, we’ll be making our way back to vocabulary.