Welcome to my blog! I'm an ESOL teacher and teacher trainer in the UK, and you'll find some of the websites I know about in this blog, and some suggestions on how to use them. Hope it's helpful.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Learning Chocolate.

Great name for a site - not so sure that I love it as much as the other kind...
This site opens with the introduction:

Welcome to Learning Chocolate! This web site aims to help students to memorize vocabulary in an easy and efficient way, by using pictures, sounds and games. Try our games and enjoy learning, like eating chocolate.

.. and that's what it does - it's essentially a picture dictionary -
The great thing about this site is the range of activities that you can do with each picture – it gives you the pronunciation, the spelling and the meaning, and you can do different games to help you to remember.  These include listening to the words and matching them to the picture, a dictation exercise, and other matching exercises.  Here's a sample page:


This site will probably appeal to younger learners at lower levels, but here’s the rub – a lot of the vocabulary is REALLY obscure – I didn’t know a lot of the ‘cuts of meat’ words, and I’m an adult, educated native speaker of English!  The options don’t seem to have much focus – so we have (at one end of the spectrum) feelings – sad, surprised, happy – elementary level words –and then, at the other end, we’ve got the life cycle of an insect with words like ‘pupate, emerge and cocoon.’  There’s no indication of the frequency or usefulness of these words, (although I guess that some common sense in translation would tell most people that cuts of meat aren’t common conversation starters unless you’re a butcher!)  The other problem is that the vocabulary is obviously decontextualised, although, as a lot of it is concrete nouns or action verbs, perhaps this isn't so important.  It might be a nice site for younger learners to do  -maybe learn one selected section as a homework task. It could be useful for spelling.  Try it out.

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