4th Grade - 27.3. - Using online resources (digital literacy) in foreign language acquisition3/26/2020 Ladies and gents, in today's lesson we'll be focusing on your autonomy as a language learner. I'll provide you with a couple of resources and methods that you can use to enhance your language proficiency. I advise you to go through them and select those that you might find useful. 1. I've recently discovered this lyricstraining website that focuses mostly on music but you also have ted talks on various topics. You can also use it to practice other languages. I've been using it to study French. You can choose from 2 types of exercises and 4 different levels. There is an Android and IOS app. 2. Not all learners realize how important the good old Google search can also be in checking grammar, idioms or common word combinations (collocation). In fact, Google is by far the largest existing corpus of online text and can, with experienced use*, provide answers to virtually every question about the English language. Imagine, for example, that you want to know whether you should write: a) "at the beginning of the book" or b) "in the beginning of the book". In google search, you will get 331,00 hits for the first and 121,00 for the second. You can thus deduce that both expressions are possible but that "at the beginning of the book" is the safer choice. (don't forget to put the phrase in quotation marks). As you can see below, google translate is not the best tool to use when trying to figure out which preposition to use. However, what you should do is put the part of the sentence that you are sure is correct within quotation marks (" ") and replace the part of that you are not sure of with a so-called wildcard * placeholder. ![]() 3. Google can also be consulted if you want to figure out which collocation is the stronger one in the following word pairings:
You enter the words or phrases in the input box and click Search lots of books. Google returns your search as a graph, showing the relative popularity (or use) of the words in the books that Google has digitized. Watch the video below to find out more about how to use the Ngram Viewer. It can and is used for so much more than figuring out which collocation is stronger. 4. After experimenting with the Ngram viewer - please complete this Collocations quiz. http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/choose/colloc1.htm
The reason why I'm pestering you with these collocations is because there are no collocation rules that can be learned. The native English speaker intuitively makes the correct collocation, based on a lifetime’s experience of hearing and reading the words in set combinations. The non-native speaker has a more limited experience and may frequently collocate words in a way that sounds odd to the native speaker.
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