Session 2: Corpus, Thesaurus

It is an eye opening experience for me to get to know many different useful learning tools introduced by Paul, which are helpful to my own learning and teaching. It is wonderful tonight as I know where to go to when I encounter some problems such as word meanings, word choices and pronunciation. It is great to know the websites which show real life examples and others with interactive learning resources. Time is precious! We can create slides in less than one minute by using http://classtool.net/qwikslides, which encourages me to make use of online resources more often even if the preparation time is limited. That's amazing!!

I love using corpus as well, which is a must-have tool for teachers, since it provides tons of authentic examples from all over the world. You must check it out. Here is it! http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/

I having been striving to make English learning fun in the lessons with the hope of rekindling students' interest and motivating them to learn . Most of my students, aged around 16 to 20, have rather low motivation in learning English but they are highly motivated when it comes to playing games with their mobile phones. It is probably the common phenomenon among teenagers nowadays. Therefore, it would be a good idea to take advantage of the technology and introduce thesaurus to them. Since my students usually have limited vocabulary in writing and reading English book is probably not their pastime, I am going to ask my student to use thesaurus to revise their first draft of writing during lesson. Also, I am going to ask them to modify a short passage with thesaurus at home so that it might help them develop the habit of self-learning and motivate them to explore the power of the wide variety of words themselves.

Here is the website you may try! http://thesaurus.reference.com/