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.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Phras.In

This is an interesting little site for learners particularly at higher levels, who are interested in collocations, etc.  It's very simple.  You need to have two possibilities of words/ collocations/ sentences that you want to test, you type them in and the site will tell you how many hits there are for each (ie which one is in more common useage) and also show you the contexts that they appear in. 
Here's an example I tried with the rather loaded word 'spinster' vs 'single woman'


You can see which is more common!
This can also be used to good effect for comparative grammar.  I put in 'I went to China' and 'I have been to China' and it was interesting to see that the simple past is 4 times more common than the present perfect, but also to have lots of authentic examples of the (problematic) latter tense.  It's concordance for the common man!

I think that this will appeal to a certain type of learner, who is very interested in the language itself, but you could give them pairs of possibles to try out for a homework task.  It's also nice to ask them to put in phrases you have taught to give them a wider context for using that language. 

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