Posted by admin on
July 2, 2008
Many clever students need loads of easy English input, not hard science and math. Plenty of research internationally shows that hard content subjects taught in English are NOT the best avenue for most pupils, and can even be counter-productive – best to learn these in your first home language. That ensures best cognitive development.
Too many learners here are being pushed too quickly up the “Everest” of complex academic English without really mastering the most common 1,500 words and the basic structures of English “plain talk”. Malaysians learning English, especially outside the largest urban areas, need to have loads more easy “comprehensible input” – mainly through lots and lots of voluntary lighter reading and extensive listening for fun, largely outside the classroom. This can also improve writing and speaking. There’s a lot of research to support this (see www.ijflt.com ).
“Easy” means you already know about 98% of all the words you’re reading or listening to.
One great resource for all learners is Voice of America Special English, on shortwave and now online (www.voaspecialenglish.com ), cost-free. Every day, there is 10 minutes of world news, Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by admin on
May 5, 2008
When you learn English abroad and have no chance to take classes with native speakers or communicate with then in everyday life it is very difficult to learn new English words which are used nowadays. That’s why sometimes our English is more like Hindi as we use old words and expressions which are nit used by native speakers or have another connotation at present. As for me I found a great way out. You know that Google is the biggest search engine in the world and this company has other services which can be useful for those who learn English. So let’s start:
• Talk (Windows 2000/Windows XP/Server 2003/Vista)
Chat with native speakers (the same as ICQ)
• Reader
Read different blogs for English students
• FeedBurner
Find feeds to add them to your Reader.
• Gmail (Also known as Google Mail)
Write emails to your panfriends to master your language.
• YouTube
Watch different videos to learn spoken language
• Book Search (Previously Google Print)
Find educational books to learn English
• Language Tools
Collection of linguistic applications, including one that allows users to translate text or web pages from one language to another, and another that allows searching in web pages located in a specific country or written in a specific language.
• News
News in English – the best way to learn new words.
• Scholar
Search engine for the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and scholarly fields. Today, the index includes virtually all peer-reviewed journals available online.
• Answers
Question and answer service, allowing users to pay researchers to answer questions.
