Find Out More About Texts

Reading is a great way to improve your vocabulary and the more variety of topics and types of text you read the better your vocabulary will become.



Today's activity uses a tool called WordSift that can help you learn more about the vocabulary you find in the texts you read online.

Task:

• Select a text that you have read recently. You could try reading then taking a text from the magazine section of the British Council's LearnEnglish website.
• You could try this text about Surfing or search the archives.
• Once you have read go to http://www.wordsift.com/ and copy the text into the field. Then click on 'Sift'.

• This will sort the vocabulary from the text and show you the 50 most common words in the text.

• You can then click on any new words and then move down the page to see more information about each word.

• You will find images, a word web with definitions and if you go further down the page you can find example sentences from the text that use the word.

• This can make it much easier for you to understand new words and make notes of them. You can get help with this if you check out the activity on How to Remember More Vocabulary

Use this tool regularly after reading a text and you will soon see your vocabulary beginning to improve. Here you can find more Daily Activities to help build you vocabulary

Related links for teachers:

• A Tool for Comparing Words
• Flickr and Wiktionary Based Image Dictionary
• Creating Word Lists
• List Your Favourite Words
• Learn Some Cliches
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Video Dictionary 2.0
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Picture phrases
• Create Image Books
• Create a Flickr Montage

Best

Nik Peachey

Learn Your Text Speak Acronyms

Over the years text messaging has developed its own system of spelling using acronyms, which can save time and make writing messages shorter.

Sms and different forms of text messaging have become more common in everyday English communication, so it is very important that you learn some of these acronyms and understand English text messages.

Today's task is a test of you texting vocabulary and it comes from the Sporcle website. Once you try the test you can see the answers, but first you might like to look back at this activity which shows you a poster written using English texting language

Task:

• Go to: http://www.sporcle.com/games/chatacronyms.php You will see a grid with some texting acronyms.
• When you are ready to start the test click on 'Ready? Click to Start'

• You will then be able to type in your answers. If they are correct they will appear in the grid next to the acronym. If they are wrong you will have to delete them and try again.

• You have 6 minutes to do the test. At the end of six minutes you will see the answers. If you find it too difficult, click on 'Give up and you will see the answers. You can then try again or come back and try it another day.

• Be sure to make a note of any of the acronyms you didn't know. You could also try making sentences using these acronyms. Remember these are used when you are text messaging with someone. They aren't used in formal essays or letters to people.

Hope you enjoyed this activity and you find these common expressions useful.

Related links for teachers:

• Cloze Test Creation Tool
• Listening Dictation Puzzles for EFL ESL
• Creating an interactive cloze text
• MS Word tutorial 1: Adding ‘comments’
• Dictation goes Web 2.0
• Subtitling your video clips
• Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL
  
• Soundscapes from SoundTransit
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk

Best

Nik Peachey

How Words are Used Together

Reading regularly is not only a great way to improve your vocabulary and learn new things, but also a good opportunity to develop your understanding of how words work together and which words are commonly used together.

Today's activity is aimed at helping you raise your awareness of this and should help you to create simple 'Cloze' activities that you can use to quickly revise texts and get a deeper knowledge of the lexical relationships in them. The activity uses a tool called a Cloze test creator.


Task:

• You can either use a text that you have studied before or you can find something that interests you on a website like BBC news or the British Council's LearnEnglish site.
• This article on Surfing might be appropriate or you could search for something more suitable in the magazine archive
• Open the Cloze test creator and copy and paste the text that you have read into the text field. You don't need to use the whole text, just a couple of paragraphs should be enough.

• Select 'Interactive' and 'No clues', then select which features of the text you would like to test yourself on.

• You could just make it random and click on 'Submit Query'

The website will now produce an interactive activity for you. You can then type the missing words into the text. If you get the words right you will score points, if they are the wrong word they will be red.

You can use this tool to convert any text into a cloze test activity like this. This is an excellent way to test and improve your English. I hope you enjoy it. To do find more reading activities just click this link: Reading activities

Related links for teachers:

• Create EFL / ESL Lesson Plans in Mins
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
• Using Word Clouds in EFL ESL
• Prompting reading speeds

Best

Nik Peachey

Have a Chat with Santa

As today is the first of December and Christmas is approaching, I thought today's activity could be a seasonal one, so today you can have a chat with Father Christmas, or Santa if you prefer and find out a bit more about him. The aim of this task is for you to practice your personal information questions. These are important as they help you to find out more about people?


You are going to use the 'This is Santa' website to have a text chat with Santa. You'll have to be very careful about your spelling and punctuation though as Santa can only understand grammatically correct sentences.

Task:

• Before you interview Santa, perhaps you could think of 8 - 10 questions that you would like to ask him.
• When you are ready, go to: http://www.thisissanta.com/ you'll see a picture of Santa and two text fields. Type your questions into the bottom field and then wait for the answers. They should appear in the top field.

I hope you enjoy chatting with Santa and come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

Related links for teachers:

• Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL
• AI and Chat Bots for EFL ESL
• Video conferencing for EFL
• A Virtual World for Facebook Users
• Make your own chat room

Best

Nik Peachey

Obama: A Moment in History

In today's activity I'd like to celebrate a moment in history and help you to understand Barack Obama's great acceptance speech at this year's Democratic Convention. This is a listening and text reconstruction activity which has kindly been donated by VOICEbook.com

For this activity you will need to download a small software program (14Mb) and install it on your computer. You can download the activity from here: VOICEbook.exe

The file is a .exe program, so you may get a warning when trying to install it.

Task:

• Download and install the program from http://www.voicebook.com/download/vbplayer/obama_setup.exe
• Click on 'File' and then 'Open' and the exercise should appear. Click on the small folder icon to get started.

• You will see an introduction and then a text. Click the play button on the side of the screen and you will start to hear the speech.
• Type any word that you recognise into the area with the title 'Scratch pad'. If the words are part of the speech they will appear in the area 'So far so good'.
  

• You can listen and re-listen as many times as you need to. Once you have finished this part of the text move on to the next by clicking the numbers at the bottom of the screen.

I hope you enjoy this activity. If you would like to watch this speech you can see the first part here on YouTube.


If you would like to find out more about other Voicebooks that you can listen to using this software, have a look at the VOICEbook.com website.

I hope you enjoy this activity and I'd like to thanks everyone at Voicebooks for donating this free activity to the site.

Related links for teachers:

• Dictation goes Web 2.0
• Artificial Intelligence Chat bots and EFL ESL
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Listening Dictation Puzzles for EFL ESL

Best

Nik Peachey

English Texting Language

SMS and other forms of texting are changing the spelling of some words in English. Many people in the UK don't like this kind of spelling, but many younger people do.

Here's a quick activity to help you learn about internet safety and English spellings for texting.

Task:

• This is a safety advertisement that was designed to inform young people in the UK about internet safety.

Click the image to make it bigger

• Look at the tips and try to write them with 'proper' English spellings.

• Once you have done this you can post your answers in the comments to this page and we'll see who is the first to get them all right.

Remember that this kind of 'text' spelling is not acceptable in formal or academic writing in English and many older people are annoyed by it (and don't understand it).

• If you want to read a newspaper article about this from the British Newspapers click here: The £3,000 'txt-spk' poster that 'undermines English teaching'
  

Do people in your country change the spelling of words when they send SMS text messages?
Please leave us a comment and tell us all about text messaging in your country.

Come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

Related links for teachers:

• Listening Dictation Puzzles fo EFL ESL
• Interactive multiple choice activities
• Microblogging for EFL with Plurk

Best

Nik Peachey