News in Levels

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News in Levels has very short news stories in three levels of English. Students can read and listen to the texts.

For example, Young Whale Helps Its Mum – level 1:

A whale goes into shallow waters. She is with her calf. She cannot move. This happens in Australia. The calf tries to help her. It pushes her. After 40 minutes, the whale is free. She swims away with her calf.

Difficult words: whale (a big animal which lives in the sea), shallow (not deep; there is not enough water for the whale), calf (the child of an animal such as a whale).

Compare with Young Whale Helps Its Mum – level 3:

A humpback whale with her calf was filmed east of Brisbane where the mother was stranded in shallow waters. The calf appeared to nudge its mother to help dislodge her to safety.

Fortunately, the whale became free after 40 minutes and could be seen swimming off with her calf.

Difficult words: calf (the baby of an animal such as a whale), stranded (unable to leave), nudge (push, bump against), dislodge (move).

A similar site is Breaking News English.

Digital Tools for Teachers

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Digital Tools for Teachers is an ebook by Nik Peachey. Aimed at English language teachers, it includes over 70 tools – divided into reading tools, writing tools, presentation tools, etc.

For example, under Reading Tools there is a review of Rewordify and under Listening Tools you can find LyricsTraining.

The book is in PDF format, I couldn’t get the internal links (to the various chapters) to work, but the links to the tools were fine.

You can read more about the book. It costs $4.99, but there is a code you can use to download it for free.

ConceptNet

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ConceptNet is “a freely-available semantic network, designed to help computers understand the meanings of words that people use.”

Enter the word dog, for example, and the results include:

  • Related terms (e.g. pet, animal, chinese zodiac)
  • dog is capable of… (e.g. bark, guide a blind person, corner a cat)
  • Types of dog (e.g. poodle, corgi, puppy)
  • Location of dog (e.g. a kennel, a park)
  • dog has… (e.g. four legs, fleas, paws)
  • dog doesn’t want… (e.g. a bath, go to the vet, be left home alone).

For more information on ConceptNet, read the FAQ.

Spot the mistake

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“Labour is likely to table a vote of no confidence in the government, though it is unclear whether it would do so immediately – and even less unclear whether it could win it.”

less unclear should be less clear or more unclear – an example of what Language Log calls misnegation

Yes, even the political editor of The Guardian makes mistakes in English!

Source: The Guardian via Language Log